Mass Culture as Social Decay?

Ø Le Bon: The Crowd

s Anonymity

s Imitation and contagion

s Emotional unity: Conscious personality vanishes

Ø C. Wright Mills: The public versus the mass

s The Public: opposition and rational discourse

- Confronted by an issue,

- Divided in their ideas about the issue,

- Engage in discussion over the issue.

The public has autonomy; it thinks independently and engages in civic discussion to solve common problems

s The Mass

- Characteristics

» Anonymous individuals

» Little interaction

» Heterogeneous

» Widely dispersed geographically

» More loosely organized than the crowd or the public

- Causes

» Increased mobility (economic, social, geographic)

» The mass media

» Mass education

- Problems with “the mass”

» One-way communication

» Slow feedback, if any

» Mass media are structurally “authoritarian”

» Lack of autonomous opinion formation

The mass is dependent; in its media use, it is defined as markets for the consumption of industrially produced cultural and political commodities

Ø Popular culture

s Assumptions

Music, drama, and other entertainment content of mass communication that is simple, makes few intellectual demands, is not creative, and is largely repetitive in form (DeFleur/Dennis). This assumes that:

- “creativity” is not found in popular culture

- audience is unintelligent

- popular culture reflects/generates low taste

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kitsch n [G, kitsch, trash] (1925): something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality—kitsch adj—kitschy adj (Webster’s)

s Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture (1975)

- High culture

- Upper middle culture

- Lower middle culture

- Low culture

- Quasi-folk

- “Special cultures”

» Youth

» Black

» Ethnic

Main point from Gans: Complexity decreases from high to low culture.

Ø Is this new? "Bread and Circuses" perspective

s View of the elite: Keep people fed, entertained and pacified (and they won't make trouble)

s Historical comparison (and fear): Modern social and cultural decadence resembles Rome in decline

In other words: "Barbarism" (from within) through mediocrity.