Social Science - Sociology unit 3 assignment
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4-TheProductionDistributionandReceptionofCulturecreatedSp22.pptxThe Production, Distribution, and Reception of Culture
Jennifer L. Adams, M.A.
Introduction
The sociological approach to culture maintains that practices or objects that seem natural, even inevitable, are not.
They have a history and a meaning that is embedded in social relations.
Ex: Eskimo Soapstone Carvings (see pgs. 71-72 for details)
Local crafts deemed “authentic” can often find global markets.
Other examples?
Cultural objects are not simply the “natural” products of some social context but are produced, distributed, marketed, received, and interpreted.
This applies to both tangible and intangible cultural objects.
Ex: Mexican Blankets
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The Production of Culture
The Production of Culture
We need to understand just how culture – and the cultural objects that are part of it – is produced and learn what impacts the means and processes of production have on cultural objects.
The production-of-culture approach looks at the “complex apparatus which is interposed between cultural creators and consumers (Peterson 1978).
This includes:
Facilities for production and distribution.
Marketing techniques (e.g. advertising, co-opting mass media, targeting).
Creation of situations that bring potential consumers in contact with cultural objects.
The Culture Industry System
Culture Industry System - the orgs that turn out mass culture products like records, books, and low-budget films
These items share features:
Demand is uncertain
Relatively cheap technology
Oversupply of would-be cultural creators
This system works to regulate and package innovation to transform creativity into predictable, marketable packages.
Model was designed with tangible mass culture products in mind, but with minimal modification it can be applied to high culture, ideas, or any other cultural object.
See pages 76-77 for details.
The Culture Industry System
The creators/artists – who are overly abundant - provide a cultural object.
They must get their creation past Filter #1 and get it in front of the producing organizations.
Producing orgs must get the creation past Filter #2 and reach the gatekeepers of mass media (such as DJs, talk show hosts, reviewers, etc.).
The mass media must then pass the creation through Filter #3 and get it to consumers.
During this process feedback comes from both the mass media and consumers.
Producing orgs use this feedback to assess their success and guide future decisions.
Cultural Markets
Market changes can reverberate throughout a culture industry system.
New markets can diminish artistic distinctiveness (Ex: Peterson’s 1978 study of Elvis’s impact on country music – p. 78) OR lead to cultural differentiation (Ex: Griswold’s 1981 study of 19th century American novels – p. 79).
Bottom Line: no matter how stable a system may be (or at least seem), cultural markets respond to social change.
Ex: Butterfly Fiction (p. 80)
The Production of Ideas
The Production of Ideas
Tangible (objects) vs. Intangible (ideas)
Both types of cultural objects require creators and recipients and have some relationship to the social world that produces and/or receives them.
Cultural objects compete for public attention, whether it comes in the form of:
Belief (e.g. an ideology or theology)
Institutional Development (e.g. publication, staging, filming, etc.)
Canonization (e.g. awards, institutional approval, etc.)
Sales (e.g. mass culture)
Hits, Views, or Followers (e.g. websites, social media, etc.)
Ex: “All Hits are Flukes” (Bielby 1994) – p. 82
The Production of Ideas
Recall that some times and places are richer in ideological production than others.
Wuthnow (1987): When the old ways of doing things and/or the old understandings of things no longer seem to work, people cast around for new ideas and it is a fertile time for ideological production.
When ideological oversupply takes place, the ideas must compete for resources.
Wuthnow describes this competition for resources as selection.
Ideas gain stability through institutionalization in which the state or some other powerful institution embeds the ideology into its practices.
Ex: Afrocentrism vs. Creationism in Schools (p. 83)
Reception
Reception
Despite core firms in the culture industry system attempting to limit and defend against uncertainty, it remains a reality.
The ultimate success of a cultural objects depends on the cultural recipients (e.g. listeners, viewers, audiences, consumers, etc.) who make their own meanings from it and who will either accept or reject it.
The meaning of cultural objects is certainly suggested by the creators, but the recipients have the last word when it comes to meaning.
So how, and with what degree of freedom, do receivers make cultural objects meaningful?
Reception
Zerubavel’s Social Mind (1997)
Social Mind – between the conception of the mind as just a brain (neuroscience) or just an individual experience (psychoanalysis) lies a perspective of the mind as formed by interpersonal communication
Should be the province of a cognitive sociology that would “highlight our cognitive diversity as members of different thought communities.”
Our social minds – as members of particular groups and categories - shape what we pay attention to, what we get emotional about, and what meanings we draw from environmental signals.
Ex: Oppressed groups being sensitive to any reference to their oppression being perceived as “touchy” or “oversensitive” by outsiders.
There are many ways in which different types of people view the same thing very differently and this is attributable to their social minds. Examples?
Ultimately, the reception of cultural objects and the meaning drawn from them is not embedded in the object itself or subject entirely to individual quirks, but is a result of people’s attributes, positions, and values. In other words, it is social!
Audiences and Taste Cultures
People watch, buy, value, enjoy, use, read, and believe different cultural objects meaning there is a very real cultural stratification.
Some cultural objects cut across social boundaries, but many do not.
Ex: Detective Novels and Popular Mainstream TV Shows
Middle class people have more breadth of knowledge than those in lower classes and are referred to as cultural omnivores.
This allows them to operate in a variety of social settings because they switch their presentation of cultural knowledge to suit the occasion.
In other words, they have what Bordieu (1984) would call cultural capital.
CC can be accumulated and invested.
CC can be converted into economic capital.
See pages 85-86 for details.
Audiences and Taste Cultures
Because people understand that cultural capital matters, groups naturally tend to inflate the value of what they already possess and try to prevent other groups from getting it.
Levine (1988) documented how upper-class white Americans, feeling threated by new immigrant groups, segregated their cultural institutions and deemed them “high culture.”
This high culture is supported and honored by everyone but not readily available to the masses.
Ex: Early museums not being open on nights and weekends.
They also sometimes problematize or get in the way of popular culture.
Ex: Using laws to make popular culture (like burlesque) illegal.
Audiences and Taste Cultures
In sum, it is clear that:
1. The reception of various types of cultural objects is often stratified by social class (and other factors).
2. People may consciously or unconsciously use culture to support their social advantages or overcome their disadvantages.
3. The variety or breadth of someone’s cultural repertoire is more socially useful than depth in some specific area.
Horizons of Expectations
Jauss (1982) Studied Readers
He pointed out that when a reader comes to a book, she does not come to it as an empty vessel waiting for its contents to be filled but locates it against a “horizon of expectations” shaped by her previous literary, cultural, and social experience.
A reader interprets and finds meaning in the text on the basis of how it fits or challenges her expectations, and this interpretation then impacts her horizon of expectations moving forward.
This notion is useful well beyond literature, offering us a way to understand how any cultural object may be interpreted by people with specific types of social and cultural knowledge and experience.
And looking at the different interpretations of the same object by different groups may reveal deeply held social assumptions.
Ex: Dallas Interpretations (p. 88)
And it suggests how any event may be transformed into a cultural object by being made meaningful.
Ex: Death of a Child (pgs. 87-88)
Horizons of Expectations
Our understanding of how producers of cultural objects attempt to engage a receiving group’s horizon of expectations utilizes the framing model.
If cultural creators can frame their product or message so it resonates with a frame that the audience already possesses, they are more likely to persuade the audience to “buy” or accept (an idea, a product, or a taste).
Ex: Propaganda (p. 88)
But sometimes creators have no idea how an object will be received.
Ex: Tech Innovation (pages 88-89)
This leaves us with questions.
If every group has its own distinctive horizon of expectations, can such groups of people construct any meanings they please?
Can cultural objects be interpreted in any way whatsoever or to the form and content of cultural objects constrain the meanings?
Freedom of Interpretation
Two Views
Freedom of Interpretation
When we encounter a cultural object, we react, construct interpretations, and make meanings.
But how much freedom do we have in making these meanings? Is it constrained?
Two Possible Answers:
1. People must submit to whatever meanings are inherently contained in the cultural object.
receivers weak, cultural objects strong [mass culture theory]
2. People can make any meanings whatsoever.
receivers strong, cultural objects weak [popular culture theory]
Both extremes have weaknesses. (See pages 89-90 for details.)
1: The “proper meaning superstition” which implies that people ignorant to the conventions of a particular cultural object may not understand it.
2: Denies cultures role as a collective representation and undermines culture’s capacity to serve as a means whereby people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitude toward life.
Seduction by Mass Culture
Mass Culture Theory
Culture industry is problematized and seen as producing mass entertainment aiming at a low common denominator of taste and emphasizing the lurid over the moral or intellectual.
The products they produce render their recipients numb and apathetic which leaves them passive and ripe for political tyranny and demanding ever-more-sensational materials as they become more and more jaded.
All audiences are innocent so all of them can be seduced by the mass cultural objects produced by the culture industry.
Resistance Through Popular Culture
Popular Culture Theory
Popular culture means the culture of the common people, the non-elite majority.
Includes mass cultural products like TV shows, popular magazines, and off-the-rack fashion.
It emphasizes the wisdom, common sense, values, and way of life of “the people,” especially the nonpowerful and nonwealthy (who lack both economic and cultural capital).
It is the system of meanings available to ordinary people.
The sociological approach to PC began to change in the 1960s as marginalized groups (like women and POC) began to demand respect.
We began to see the complexities and beauties of popular culture as well as the hegemony, patriarchy, and racism inherent in some high culture.
Ex: Changing view of black English
Ex: Structure of the leadership of Catholocism
Resistance Through Popular Culture
This reevaluation of popular culture unfolded in two ways.
1. Looking for hidden meanings in popular culture that had been accessible to its recipients but missed by academics and disdainful elites.
Ex: romance novels (p. 93)
2. Understanding how recipients construct subversive meanings within popular culture.
Analogy: Mass Culture as Supermarket
People pick up mass-produced items from the cultural supermarket, but when they cook (make meanings), they mix these supermarket goods with whatever they have in the pantry at home, thereby individualizing and transforming the final product – sometimes with surprising results.
Ex: Reactions to The Newlywed Game (pgs. 93-94)
Summary
Having already examined cultural objects and social meanings and the collective creation of these objects, we turned to the production of culture.
Including linkages between creators, objects, and recipients.
Recipients bear socially shaped horizons of expectations and are engaged – either actively or passively – with the culture they experience and interpret.
Passively: Numbed out acceptance of the intended meaning.
Actively: Grassroots power to reinterpret and make meaning.
Next, we will apply what we have learned to social problems and the real world.
Any questions?
