Mass Culture

 

Mass Culture was another term that was an outcome of the industrial Revolution. During this era, newspapers, Radio and gradually the Television began to have a widespread impact on people and their life styles. While Culture encompasses the values, attitudes, practices and traditions one endears to during one’s upbringing as member of a particular Society, Mass Culture was considered to be a cultural nuance that developed due to the influence of Mass Media, which influenced human attitudes, their behavioural patterns and their consumption habits. Mass Media was thus criticised as a tool of the Corporates that had “affected individuals and communities from the health to leisure, from the consumption to religion and family by accelerating a social change in an unpredictable manner” (Köroğlu M and Köroğlu C, 2018).

Mambrol (2020) highlights that scholars supporting the traditional cultural practices believed that an artistic work was “distinctive in the subtlety, complexity and adequacy of its formal expression of content”. These artistic works required an experience, a qualification and skills which could not be just attained by Masses at large. Basically these traditional Cultural elements were considered to be the outcome of an educated, qualified, aristocratic and noble minority and not for mere consumption of ordinary people. Mass Culture was therefore considered as superficial and an outcome of Capitalist Corporations “to maximize their profits by selling to the lowest common denominator”. Thus, in the words of Mambrol (2020), “mass culture was held to be inauthentic because it is not produced by the people, manipulative because its primary purpose is to be purchased and unsatisfying because it requires little work to consume and thus fails to enrich its consumers”.

Sociologists like Adorno, Horkheimer and others of the Frankfurt School with their Marxist endearing, highlighted how this commercialisation was basically a capitalist ideology that only perpetrated the capitalist control over the masses through commodification and a standardisation (Oxford Reference).  

However, over the period of years, the term has been re-defined at various junctures, leading to a vast debate on this topic. For the purpose of this study, we look at the definitions provided by various scholars over the period of time to define Mass Culture- 

 

Definitions 

 

Nazll Rengim Sine (2020): “Mass culture emerged in the years following the industrial revolution. The concept of mass culture defines all the power, behaviours, mythos, and phenomena which are difficult to resist and which are produced by industrial techniques and spread to large masses. Mass culture products are standard cultural products produced and transmitted by mass media only for the mass market.”

Marmura Stephen (2013): “Generally refers to media-driven cultural practices within modern “mass societies” which arose in tandem with techniques of mass production and commercial advertising. Culture is understood to be “manufactured” according to market imperatives rather than arising spontaneously from within the localized community.”

Jochen Hung (2020): “Mass culture is understood as popular commercialized cultures. One of the most important characteristics of Weimar-era mass cultures was the central role of the modern mass media in their dissemination: the 1920s saw the development of a tightly integrated media ensemble comprising sound film, radio, popular recorded music, the mass press, and book clubs, which remained stable until the proliferation of television in the 1960s. Many observers interpreted this as the growth of a homogeneous ‘mass culture’, produced on an industrial scale and sold like a common commodity, evoking fears of cultural erosion and mind control.”

Nasrullah Mambrol (2018): “Mass culture is a pejorative term developed by both conservative literary critics and Marxist theorists from the 1930s onwards to suggest the inferiority of commodity-based capitalist culture as being inauthentic, manipulative and unsatisfying. Further, both the authentic culture of the people and the minority culture of the educated elite are said to have been lost to the standardization processes of industrialized ‘mass culture’.”

Oxford Reference: Mass Culture consists of “Cultural products that are both mass-produced and for mass audiences. Examples include mass-media entertainments—films, television programmes, popular books, newspapers, magazines, popular music, leisure goods, household items, clothing, and mechanically-reproduced art. In the affirmative sense, synonymous with popular culture (the preferred term in cultural studies and where the focus is on uses rather than production), although some theorists distinguish it from traditional folk culture because it is oriented toward profit and is organized according to the laws governing commodity exchange.” 

 

 

References 

 

Jochen Hung, Mass Culture, The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic, Edited by Nadine Rossol and Benjamin Ziemann, Online Publication Date: Nov 2020, DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198845775.013.25

Köroğlu, Muhammet Ali and Cemile Zehra Köroğlu, 2018, Information Technologies and Social Change,  Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition, edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A., IGI Global, pp. 4715-4722. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-2255-3.ch409

Marmura Stephen, 2013, The Mediation of Identity: Key Issues in Historic Perspective. In R. Luppicini (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Technoself: Identity in a Technological Society (pp. 137-156). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-2211-1.ch008

Mass Culture. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 21 Jun. 2021, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100138730.

Nasrullah Mambrol, August 18, 2018, Mass Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism, https://literariness.org/2018/08/18/mass-culture/

Nazll Rengim Sine, 2020, A Rebellion Against the Metallization of the Female Body: “Dove Beyond Figures”. In G. Sarı (Eds.), Gender and Diversity Representation in Mass Media (pp. 121-139). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-0128-3.ch007