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Introduction to Popular Culture: Opposing Viewpoints Editors: David Haugen and Susan Musser Date: 2011 From: Popular Culture Publisher: Greenhaven Press Series: Opposing Viewpoints Document Type: Topic overview Length: 1,488 words Content Level: (Level 5) Lexile Measure: 1370L

Full Text:

[Since the mid-1800s], America's prime cultural tradition has been to entertain and thereby to cultivate popularity. It never had to fight to establish its legitimacy against an established high culture.... Ours is a popular culture of comfort and convenience. If it has any other mission than to amuse, that is to offer a populist morality—a celebration of common decencies against wicked authority. —Todd Gitlin, Sources, Spring 1999

Like it or not, pop culture and technology are among our most valuable exports and most identifiable brand. —Hoyt Hilsman, Huffington Post, December 4, 2008

To some analysts, pop culture can include any moment of collective interest in one of these elements; to others, pop culture is that that defies the fleeting fad and remains in the mass psyche for a long time. Whether pop culture requires endurance, an interest in its study has endured since the 1950s in America when the term first gained critical appreciation. Various universities now offer courses and programs in popular culture, and Washington State University, the University of Idaho, and other scholarly institutions host Web sites dedicated to analyzing and preserving pop culture. With this high regard for what social critics once regarded (and some still regard) as low culture, it is clear that pop culture has acquired prominence and even respect in recent years.

Despite the influence and reach of popular culture, many critics still deplore its leveling effect and the way it detracts from the appreciation of what they consider high art. Playwright Stephen Sewell, writing in a February 2010 edition of the Australian Sunday Morning Herald, argues, "While art is the province of the unexpected and the challenging, and likely to provoke incredulity and even rage, popular culture is the domain of the familiar, the mawkish, the sentimental and the trite and bears the same relationship to culture in general as a McDonald's hamburger does to food." After dismissing all low art as "rubbish," Sewell goes on to assert, "People read less, understand less and retain less than they did even 20 years ago. The mindless pap of undemanding popular culture is as responsible for this as the fast food industry is for the obesity epidemic." In Sewell's opinion—an opinion shared by many critics of pop culture—mass entertainment and faddish novelties make consumers lazy, undemanding and easily led by those who market pop culture products.

Sewell's contempt for the popular, however, is balanced by culture critics who believe that mass culture has much to recommend its consumption. Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, caused a furor among pop culture naysayers when he advocated that many aspects of pop culture—including television shows, movies, and video games—actually aid the development of advanced cognitive skills. "For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want," Johnson writes, "but in fact, the exact opposite is happening: The culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less." In his book, Johnson explains his theory that many popular video games require players to master skills, follow open-ended storylines, and develop patience to be ultimately rewarded. He contends that good movies and television shows also demand attention to details, ask viewers to juggle several narratives and characters, and involve other high-end cognitive processes from audiences. As Johnson argues, these mental challenges are today more of a fixture of pop culture than they were fifty years ago.

American pop culture—for good or bad—is not only impacting national tastes but is spreading throughout the world thanks to the Internet and broadcast media. Since the end of World War II, the United States has focused on exporting much of its pop culture abroad with the express purpose of enticing an international audience to take an interest in and even desire American fashions, movies, television shows, music, and other arts. In this respect, American pop culture is part of the nation's "soft power" influence on

the rest of the world. Soft power is a term used to encompass the lure of a national identity as expressed by its culture, values, and government; hard power, its antithesis, refers to the employment of militaries, political pressure, and aggressive policy making to manipulate foreign entities. The United States began emphasizing soft power influence during the Cold War when the American government found it easier and cheaper to make allies by sending movies, music, consumer goods, and other cultural artifacts overseas rather than sending tanks and battleships.

Political theorist Joseph S. Nye Jr. is credited with creating the term soft power to define these exports and influences, and he contends they are as important to American security today as they were during the Cold War. Nye asserts that in the age of Islamic terrorism, the United States should use its valuable pop culture exports to promote common understanding with those who are most vulnerable to the anti-American messages spread by terrorists. Transmitting television shows that show ethnic diversity and tolerance and using the media to highlight celebrities who work with global charities, in Nye's view, appeals to shared values among the world's citizens and does much to promote the notion that America supports a global vision of peace and social welfare. "Seduction is always more effective than coercion," Nye writes, "and many values like democracy and human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive." Although American foreign policy has been widely criticized since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Nye notes that U.S. popular culture is still consumed and even admired in most parts of the world.

Despite the pervasiveness of American cultural products around the world, some critics charge that the image of America presented by these products is not as attractive as Nye would hope. In the mid-1990s, New York Times European culture correspondent John Rockwell wrote, "In decades past, America's chief cultural exports were debonair crooners and stalwart upholders of truth, justice and the American way. Today, a different America exports products that reflect a chilling propensity for cartoon-like, bone-crunching, eyeball-popping violence." Rockwell noted that much of what the United States was exporting in terms of movies, television shows, and music seemed to project a different kind of value system—promoting greed, violence, and sex—that did not reflect well on the nation. According to a 2007 Pew survey, this new image was not finding favor in several nations, including Russia, India, and many Islamic countries. Reporting on the survey, Diane Garrett of Variety stated, "In predominantly Muslim countries, it's not just that they don't approve of American culture; most plain don't like it. More than two-thirds of Bangladeshis (81%), Pakistanis (80%), Turks (68%), Palestinians (68%) and Indians (68%) said they do not like American music, movies and television." Critics worry that tarnishing the nation's image through insensitive or even offensive pop culture products may serve to heighten tensions between the United States and other nations or at best reduce global sympathy for Americans in general.

In Opposing Viewpoints: Popular Culture, numerous critics, analysts, and promoters of American pop culture debate these national and global issues. In chapters titled Does Popular Culture Have Value?, How Has the Internet Impacted Popular Culture?, How Does Popular Culture Influence Society?, and How Is U.S. Popular Culture Received Around the World?, these experts address various aspects of popular culture and their influence on American society and the world at large. Some bemoan the fall of high culture, while others believe the spread of pop culture on a national or global scale brings people together by giving them shared points of reference. Despite the debate over the value of pop culture, it is evident that America's pop culture has a great deal of influence at home and abroad, impacting not only discussions about the supposed distinctions between low and high art but also affecting the ways in which culture is transmitted and consumed across the planet.

Books

John Alberti Text Messaging: Reading and Writing About Popular Culture. Florence, KY: Wadsworth, 2008. LeRoy Ashby With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Ben H. Bagdikian The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Ray B. Browne Profiles of Popular Culture: A Reader. Madison, WI: Popular, 2005. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Lane Crothers Globalization and American Popular Culture. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Shirley Fedorak Pop Culture: The Culture of Everyday Life. Toronto: UTP Higher Education, 2009. Nathan W. Fisk Understanding Online Piracy: The Truth About Illegal File Sharing. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Jib Fowles The Case for Television Violence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1999. Matthew Fraser Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2005. Joshua Gamson Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. James Paul Gee What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dave Grossman and Gloria Degaetano Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence. New York: Crown, 1999. Keith Gumery International Views: America and the Rest of the World. New York: Longman, 2006. James T. Hamilton Channeling Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Andrew Hammond Popular Culture in the Arab World. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, 2007. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, eds. Understanding Reality Television. New York: Routledge, 2004. Peter Howe Paparazzi: And Our Obsession with Celebrity. New York: Artisan, 2005. Mizuko Ito et al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Henry Jenkins Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Roland Kelts Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Lawrence Kutner Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Cooper Lawrence The Cult of Celebrity: What Our Fascination with the Stars Reveals About Us. Guilford, CT: Skirt!, 2009. Antony Loewenstein The Blogging Revolution. Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008.

Amanda Lotz The Television Will Be Revolutionized. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. 20th anniversary ed. New York: Penguin, 2005. Marc Prensky Don't Bother Me, Mom—I'm Learning! St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2006. Scott Rosenberg Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. New York: Crown, 2009. Jonathan Silverman and Dean Rader The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading and Thinking About Visual and Popular Culture. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2008. C. John Sommerville How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Karen Sternheimer It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Children. New York: Basic Books, 2003. John Storey Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 4th ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Wallace Wang Steal This File Sharing Book. San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2004.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2011 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Introduction to Popular Culture: Opposing Viewpoints." Popular Culture, edited by David Haugen and Susan Musser, Greenhaven

Press, 2011. Opposing Viewpoints. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010377136/OVIC?u=txshracd2512&sid=OVIC&xid=12399902. Accessed 4 May 2021.

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