Mass Culture

Author(s):  
Jochen Hung

‘Mass culture’, understood as popular commercialized cultures, existed in Germany from the late nineteenth century as part of its modern, industrialized society. After 1918, the expansion of leisure time, technological innovations, the growth of new and existing audiences, and new regulatory frameworks led to an expansion and diversification of these 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. This chapter uses this term in the plural to avoid such generalizations, putting a focus on the importance of gender, class, ethnicity, and location in the production and consumption of mass cultures.

2020 ◽  
pp. 204-215
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

This chapter shows how many existentialists conceived the individual in the modern world and the challenges of modern life to individual authenticity. It takes up Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rilke, and the existential social theorist Georg Simmel, identifying their shared skepticism of modern mass culture and fear that it endangered human individuality. These existential thinkers could not have anticipated globalization, the breadth of mass production and consumption in the current century, or its data-driven anonymization of human culture. Yet this chapter argues that their insights are especially relevant for life in the contemporary world. It considers how the human individual may be existentially sustained despite these challenges.


2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov

›Ikonen‹ sind heute nicht mehr nur die Ikonen der christlichen Kirche, sondern vor allem die Ikonen der modernen Massenkultur. Beide Arten von Ikonen werden in der neueren Kunstreflexion aufgegriffen: Kunst gilt entweder, verstanden als Erbin der religiösen Ikone, als Phänomen, das Absolutes in singulärer Weise anschaulich er- fahrbar macht. Oder aber die Kunst gilt umgekehrt lediglich als Klasse in der Welt der säkularen Ikonen. Demgegenüber wird im Beitrag erstens die These vertretenwerden, daß die neuere Kunst sowohl Aspekte transzendenter als auch immanenter Ikonen umfaßt. Zugleich ist es aber, so die zweite These, für unser Kunstverständnis charakteristisch, ein theoretisches Kontrastverhältnis zwischen Kunst und Ikone an- zunehmen. Dieses gründet auf einer spezifischen Reflexivität der Kunst, durch die sie sich von der Ikone beiderlei Art kategorial unterscheidet. Today, the word ›icon‹ usually no longer refers to the icons of the Christian church, but to the icons of the modern mass-culture. Both sorts of icons play a key-role in the recent discussion about art: Either art is supposed to be a descendant of the religious icon, a phenomenon that gives us a singular visual experience of the Absolute. On the other hand, art is supposed to be just one class among others in the wide world of the secular icons. In contrast to these two positions this essay contends that modern art comprehends aspects of transcendent as well as of immanent icons. Furthermore, it argues that at the same time it is characteristic for our notion of art to suppose a contrast between art and icon. This contrast is based on a specific reflectivity of art, which marks a categorical difference between art and both sorts of icons.


This collection examines the phenomenon of the operatic canon: its formation, history, current ontology and practical influence, and future. It does so by taking an international and interdisciplinary view: the workshops from which it was derived included the participation of critics, producers, artistic directors, stage directors, opera company CEOs, and even economists, from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Canada. The volume is structured as a series of dialogues: each subtopic is addressed by two essays, introduced jointly by the authors, and followed by a jointly compiled list of further reading. These paired essays complement each other in different ways, for example by treating the same geographical location in different periods, by providing different national or regional perspectives on the same period, or by thinking through similar conceptual issues in contrasting milieus. Part I consists of a selection of surveys of operatic production and consumption contexts in France, Italy, Germany, England, Russia, and the Americas, arranged in rough order from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Part II is a (necessarily) limited sample of subjects that illuminate the operatic canon from different—sometimes intentionally oblique—angles, ranging from the influence of singers to the contiguous genres of operetta and musical theater, and the effects of recording and broadcast over almost 150 years. The volume concludes with two essays written by prominent figures from the opera industry who give their sense of the operatic canon’s evolution and prospects.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaobin Wen ◽  
Aoqi Zhang ◽  
Xiaoyan Zhu ◽  
Lin Liang ◽  
Yan Huo ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Predatory flagellates and ciliates are two common bio-contaminants which frequently cause biomass losses in Chlorella mass culture. Efficient and targeted ways are required to control these contaminations in Chlorella mass cultivation aiming for biofuel production especially. Results Five surfactants were tested for its ability to control bio-contaminations in Chlorella culture. All five surfactants were able to eliminate the contaminants at a proper concentration. Particularly the minimal effective concentrations of sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (SDBS) to completely eliminate Poterioochromonas sp. and Hemiurosomoida sp. were 8 and 10 mg L−1, respectively, yet the photosynthesis and viability of Chlorella was not significantly affected. These results were further validated in Chlorella mass cultures in 5, 20, and 200 m2 raceway ponds. Conclusions A chemical method using 10 mg L−1 SDBS as pesticide to control predatory flagellate or ciliate contamination in Chlorella mass culture was proposed. The method helps for a sustained microalgae biomass production and utilization, especially for biofuel production.


Modern Italy ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gundle

SummaryThe problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.


Author(s):  
Greg Marquis

This article examines part of the reaction to the 1969 cancellation of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (cbc) television’s Don Messer’s Jubilee, one of the most popular Canadian-produced programs of the era. In addition to an exploration of television history and popular culture, it is also a look at the neglected topic of “square” Canada in the 1960s. Messer began fiddling at dances in rural New Brunswick in the 1920s and moved to radio and recording prior to becoming an unlikely national television star by 1961. After exploring possible classifications of the show’s music, the article explores themes in protest letters and petitions sent to the cbc. These included Canadian nationalism in opposition to American mass culture, Canadian folk culture, cbc elitism, Maritime regionalism, nostalgia, and the related themes of the generation gap and permissive society. The article concludes that fans viewed Messer as a custodian of Canadian folk culture that was being erased by the national broadcaster at a time of heightened nationalism.


Author(s):  
Maria Sibirnaya

Nowadays the influence comprehension of the mass media as one of the most significant factors affecting contemporary culture, acquires the special significance. All kinds of new information receiving by media channels obtain the stereotyped, frequently repeatedly cultural and axiological orientations, which become fixed in people's consciousness. Skillful manipulation of information makes the power of suggestion from mass media practically unlimited. Therefore, the public opinion is created by the mass media. Being so closely intertwined with the mass media, the modern mass culture is coming through all elements of people's lives. Moreover, it appears in the literary works, which reflect the influence of the mass media on the consciousness, mentality, point of view and decisions of the literature characters, using their set example in the literature. Odessian playwright Aleksander Mardan presents his characters in the context of the events, which entails new circumstances both due to the characters decisions and out of more extensive economic and political changes. One may notice the presence of mass media in the form of music, information broadcasts and press almost in all Mardan's play. One may track out the influence on the character’s consciousness and reveal the difference between the official version and what happened in the real life. Using the performance tool, there is the action in the play showing the influence of the stereotypes implicated by the mass media. The performance reveals not only the stereotypes affection influencing the mentality of the characters, but also the viewers whose interpretation of the play’s direction is not always critical enough. Therefore, the question about the relationship between the society and mass media, about the level of freedom in mass media from the society and concerning the influence exerted by mass media on the modern culture and the human's consciousness is repeatedly presented in Alexander Mardаn’s plays.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Urban

In 2000, the Crown Street redevelopment in Glasgow's New Gorbals area was completed following a masterplan by Piers Gough and building designs by Page and Park, Elder and Cannon, Hypostyle Architects and others. Built on symbolically contested ground previously occupied by the Gorbals tenements (1870s–1960s) and the high-rise Hutchesontown flats (1960s–1990s), the new development is a textbook example of neotraditional design. The project features ornamented facades, bay windows, courtyards and corridor streets along with local references to the heyday of Glasgow tenements during the late nineteenth century.This paper shows that the new tenements on Crown Street contributed to Glasgow's economic revival strategies by reconfiguring the site and supporting a positive view of Glasgow's Victorian era. In this sense, the architects adapted design preferences – which at the time were evident all over Europe and North America – to a local agenda.The new tenements reconcile conflicting perspectives: on the one hand a break almost as comprehensive as the urban renewal of the 1960s, and on the other hand an idea of historical continuity and long-lasting community life, which rested on a revised conception of the city's industrial past. Conveying a historical image cleared of imperfections they communicate a message of permanence that stands in stark contrast to the area's historic upheavals, but nonetheless contributed to the viability of the new neighbourhood.


2021 ◽  
pp. 533-550
Author(s):  
Martin Baumann

This chapter begins with the Orientalist constructions of Eastern religions from the mid-sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Subsequently, in Colonial Times, Asian reformers campaigned for Hinduism and Buddhism in the West leading to the establishing of the first institutions in Europe around 1900. From the 1960s onward, Europe saw the arrival of Hindu gurus and Buddhist teachers, later followed by the immigration of Asian workers and refugees. The conclusion highlights key constructions and images of Eastern religions and points to the ongoing processes of secularizationand commercialization which have repackaged practices and artefacts of Eastern religions for European preferences. The chapter argues that since the earliest encounters, Eastern religions represent both hope and promise for European philosophers, scholars, and practitioners. An awareness of the varied European imaginings enables a better understanding of the continuing fascination of Eastern religions on the part of sympathizers, practitioners, and the population in general.


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