A Power Theory of Mass Culture

2022 ◽  
pp. 72-110
Author(s):  
James McMahon
Keyword(s):  
1972 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 406-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDWARD E. JONES
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-29
Author(s):  
Н. В. Фрадкіна

The purpose and tasks of the work are to analyze the contemporary Ukrainian mass culture in terms of its value and humanistic components, as well as the importance of cultural studies and Ukrainian studies in educational disciplines for the formation of a holistic worldview of modern youth.Analysis of research and publications. Scientists repeatedly turned to the problems of the role of spirituality in the formation of society and its culture. This problem is highlighted in the publications by O. Losev, V. Lytvyn, D. Likhachev, S. Avierintsev, M. Zakovych, I. Stepanenko and E. Kostyshyn.Experts see the main negative impact of mass culture on the quality approach, which determines mass culture through the market, because mass culture, from our point of view, is everything that is sold and used in mass demand.One of the most interesting studies on this issue was the work by the representatives of Frankfurt School M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno «Dialectics of Enlightenment» (1947), devoted to a detailed analysis of mass culture. Propaganda at all socio-cultural levels in the form is similar in both totalitarian and democratic countries. It is connected, according to the authors, with the direction of European enlightenment. The tendency to unify people is a manifestation of the influence of mass culture, from cinema to pop. Mass culture is a phenomenon whose existence is associated with commerce (accumulation in any form – this is the main feature of education), in general, the fact that it exists in this form is related to the direction of the history of civilization.Modern mass culture, with its externally attractive and easily assimilated ideas and symbols, appealing to the trends of modern fashion, becomes a standard of prestigious consumption, does not require intense reflection, allows you to relax, distract, not teach, but entertains, preaches hedonism as the main spiritual value. And as a consequence, there are socio-cultural risks: an active rejection of other people, which leads to the formation of indifference; cruelty as a character trait; increase of violent and mercenary crime; increase in the number of alcohol and drug addicts; anti-patriotism; indifference to the values of the family and as a result of social orphanhood and prostitution.Conclusions, perspectives of research. Thus, we can conclude that modern Ukrainian education is predominantly formed by the values of mass culture. Namely, according to the «Dialectic» by Horkheimer and Adorno, «semi-enlightenment becomes an objective spirit» of our modern society.It is concluded that only high-quality education can create the opposite of the onset of mass culture and the destruction of spirituality in our society. It is proved that only by realizing the importance of cultivating disciplines in the educational process and the spiritual upbringing of the nation, through educational reforms, humanitarian knowledge will gradually return to student audiences.Formation of youth occurs under the influence of social environment, culture, education and self-education. The optimal combination of these factors determines both the process of socialization itself and how successful it will be. In this context, one can see the leading role of education and upbringing. It turns out that the main task of modern education is to spread its influence on the development of spiritual culture of the individual, which eventually becomes a solid foundation for the formation of the individual. Such a subject requires both philosophical and humanitarian approaches in further integrated interdisciplinary research, since the availability of such research will provide the theoretical foundation for truly modern educational and personal development.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Blake

By examining folk music activities connecting students and local musicians during the early 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this article demonstrates how university geographies and musical landscapes influence musical activities in college towns. The geography of the University of Illinois, a rural Midwestern location with a mostly urban, middle-class student population, created an unusual combination of privileged students in a primarily working-class area. This combination of geography and landscape framed interactions between students and local musicians in Urbana-Champaign, stimulating and complicating the traversal of sociocultural differences through traditional music. Members of the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club considered traditional music as a high cultural form distinct from mass-culture artists, aligning their interests with then-dominant scholarly approaches in folklore and film studies departments. Yet students also interrogated the impropriety of folksong presentation on campus, and community folksingers projected their own discomfort with students’ liberal politics. In hosting concerts by rural musicians such as Frank Proffitt and producing a record of local Urbana-Champaign folksingers called Green Fields of Illinois (1963), the folksong club attempted to suture these differences by highlighting the aesthetic, domestic, historical, and educational aspects of local folk music, while avoiding contemporary socioeconomic, commercial, and political concerns. This depoliticized conception of folk music bridged students and local folksingers, but also represented local music via a nineteenth-century rural landscape that converted contemporaneous lived practice into a temporally distant object of aesthetic study. Students’ study of folk music thus reinforced the power structures of university culture—but engaging local folksinging as an educational subject remained for them the most ethical solution for questioning, and potentially traversing, larger problems of inequality and difference.


Author(s):  
Jeff Chang ◽  
Daniel Martinez HoSang ◽  
Soya Jung ◽  
Chandan Reddy ◽  
Alex Tom

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.


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.


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