Through unusual circumstances, I found myself sitting in a multiplex in South Central Los Angeles on the
Sunday before the second Rodney King verdict was to be announced. As I looked around, I wondered whether coming
here was such a smart idea.  I was the only white person in the whole establishment. The news media was working hard
to pump up racial tension and anxiety, not only in the heart of the ghetto but nation-wide.  Throughout my life and work,
I have struggled to understand and promote dialogue across different cultural communities, but media coverage was
starting to have a polarizing effect on all of us. I wasn't sure how safe it was for a white man to be in this neighborhood
anymore.
     Most Americans had seen the grainy amateur camcorder footage showing Rodney King, a young black man,
stopped for speeding, being beaten unconscious by four Los Angeles police officers. After decades of rumors about the
LAPD's corruption and racially-motivated police brutality, someone had finally caught them on tape. Many had believed
this footage would demonstrate the power of  citizens, armed with new technologies, to intervene against abuses of
power. However, the jury had failed to convict the police officers; their decision sparked a wave of urban destruction
that had come close to burning this whole neighborhood to the ground.  Months later, the center of attention had shifted
to the civil courts where King sought damages for the abuse of his civil liberties. Once again, the nation was holding its
collective breath and wondering what this case would show us about the state of American justice. In the end, there
would be no second LA Riot, but I had no way of knowing this as I settled uncomfortably in my seat.
      On this particular Sunday afternoon, the multiplex was full of children -- Black children, Asian children,
Chicano children, still wearing their church clothes. They had come to see Walt Disney's Aladdin.  As I watched their
parents lead them down the aisles, I recalled that the LA Riots were not only about conflicts between angry blacks and
the LAPD but had also revealed other conflicts within and between the multiracial groups inhabiting South Central.  For
example, there was growing resentment in the Black community against the Koreans, Vietnamese, and other Asian
immigrants who had bought local businesses that some thought should be under African-American ownership.  If riots
broke out again, the shared excitement that I saw reflected on the faces of the various children in the room might give
way to direct confrontations between their parents.
     The lights dimmed.  The music began. The children roared with laughter as Aladdin, the street urchin, tried to
stay "one step ahead" of the Sultan's guards, surviving by his own pluck and cunning.   As I looked around me, I saw the
children's eyes glisten with emotion as Aladdin sang of his desire to break out of poverty and find his way into a "whole
new world" of enchantment, wealth, and romance. Most of these children had grown up in an asphalt wasteland just a
few blocks from the lush green campus of the University of Southern California. The pristine buildings and landscapes
of USC stood out from South Central like a Sultan's Palace. Watched in this context, Aladdin seemed like a statement
about race, poverty, and the desire for liberation from one's prescribed conditions. Where would these children find a
magic lamp or a genie who might allow them to break out of the cycle of poverty or transcend the racial tension which
periodically ran riot through their neighborhood? The film expressed potent desires, but its fantastic solutions seemed
empty, offering no real answers that these children could take home with them.
      Of course, many would argue, Aladdin is a fantasy and nobody expects it to answer serious social problems.
The children went to see such films to enjoy an escape into a colorful realm of exotic adventures. But, if we escape into
popular culture, we are escaping from something specific; entertainment often directly responds  to real-world problems.
 Popular culture offers us a utopian realm.  Film scholar Richard Dyer has noted that unlike earlier forms of utopian
fiction that sought to give precise maps of what a more perfect society would look like, the utopianism of popular
entertainment is more interested in sharing with us what utopia might feel like, offering us glamour, power and
exhilaration as a substitute for our daily experiences of dreariness, vulnerability, and exhaustion. Aladdin's magical
transformations of his impoverished condition, his ability to gain enormous fortunes, to overcome sinister villains, and to
win the love of a beautiful woman, responded perfectly to the frustrations of growing up in the ghetto. The word,
utopianism, may be slightly misleading in two senses.  First, the word, utopianism, implies that the realm represented by
entertainment is a better world than the one of our everyday lives. But, we wouldn't necessarily want to live in the places
our fantasies take us.  Sometimes we go to the movies to experience things we would find profoundly undesirable and
even frightening in real life.  What we are seeking in such cases is often simply a break with our everyday routine or an
intensification of sensation, something that makes us feel that mad adrenaline rush which surrounds a good horror or
action film.  Second, the word, utopia, literally means "no place," an impossible realm which lies beyond our reach,
while Hollywood movies makes our fantasies -- both individual and collective -- more tangible, more real, more vivid,
and more intense.  One of the defining characteristics of popular culture is its emotional immediacy. Entertainment
provokes strong feelings. Those emotions come from some place and in fact, what makes them so potent is that popular
culture builds on things we are already feeling  and feeds them back to us in a more intense fashion.
     Popular culture gives meaningful and expressive form to the emotional experience  of the culture which
produces it. Popular culture both articulates and masks social, economic, and political concerns, offering us visions of
new possibilities, a "whole new world," transcending real world constraints and limitations.  However, even "timeless
tales" like Aladdin can not escape from the powerful pull of the here and now. Aladdin may be an ancient story but
Disney has adopted it for a modern audience; the producers chose it from the full repertoire of classic adventure stories
because it had something to say in the late 20th century and the Disney animators reshaped the story's details  to enhance
its "fit" with contemporary tastes and interests. Aladdin hit the theaters after more than a decade of national concern
about America's relations in the Middle East, which started with threat of oil shortages and culminated in the Gulf War
and America's bombing of Baghdad. Disney offered us a more pleasing vision of the region, its culture, and its colorful
past.
      We always consume popular culture in a context which shapes how we make sense of its contents. In the
Rodney King trial, attorneys on both sides of the case sought to "contextualize" the video footage of the beating, to shape
the framework for its interpretations. Attorneys for the LAPD reinterpreted the video, suggesting that it demonstrated
that King posed a threat to them and that they had used an appropriate level of force to subdue him. When the jury
reached an unanticipated verdict,  journalists struggled to explain to an angry and skeptical audience that we could not
understand how the jury reached this decision because we did not see and hear everything they saw and heard.
Throughout the various discussions surrounding the Rodney King video, we were asked to consciously debate the
different ways various groups were interpreting the footage. By contrast, a film like Aladdin does not seem open to the
same debate and scrutiny. We absorb its meanings as if they were simply a natural or logical outgrowth of the story. It
may never occur to us that other people will interpret the film in the context of their own lives and may understand it in
very different terms. The parallels between the Sultan's Palace and the U.S.C. campus would not have occurred to me if
I were not sitting in a multiracial audience watching the film in South Central LA.   For other viewers, what was
important about the film was its representation of the Arab world.  Arab-American organizations protested the lyrics of
one song which described Agribah as a "barbaric" cut-throat society, fearing it would continue prejudices still
simmering in the wake of the Gulf War. We bring some of the meanings with us when we enter the theater and others
become apparent to us only when we try to reintegrate film content into our larger understanding of the world. To
understand this phenomenon, we need to investigate what makes particular works of popular culture meaningful and
appealing to the diverse audiences who invest so much time and money in consuming them.
     What do we mean by popular culture? This term is notoriously slippery and we will develop a progressively
more complex understanding of this concept as we move through this introduction. We may start, however, by
understanding popular culture in relation to several other terms. Folk culture refers to those often collective and
participatory forms of culture that reflect the long standing traditions and shared values of a specific community.  Classic
examples of folk culture would include work songs, folk tales, or quilts. High culture refers to those forms of culture
that reward the intellectual competencies of  an educated elite. Characteristic examples of high culture would include
those works most closely associated with art museums, opera houses, and symphony halls.  Mass culture refers to those
forms of culture that are mass produced and mass consumed.  Examples would include Hollywood movies, network
television, and best-selling novels. Popular culture falls somewhere between these three terms, referring to a broad
range of materials that are commercial in origins but that have been integrated into the daily life experiences of their
consumers.  Here, the term, popular, serves multiple functions, referring to (a) the creator's goal of achieving
commercial popularity (as opposed to the cultural respectability sought by high culture), (b) the "lower" status of these
works (as opposed to the elevated cultural status of high culture), and (c) the social function of these works (as part of
everyday life). This definition raises as many questions as it answers and we will be working through those questions in
the pages that follow.
     The goal of this collection is to help you develop better skills for thinking  and writing about your own
relationship to popular culture. In this introduction, I will outline some basic principles that underlie the most interesting
recent writing about popular culture. Reading these essays may introduce you to new ways of thinking about forms of
culture (ranging from comic books to televised wrestling) you may have taken for granted or even held in contempt.
They will also offer you models for writing about your own perceptions and memories of growing up within a culture
shaped by a broad range of different media. They will teach you how to draw on what you already know, as consumers
and fans of popular culture, to inform your personal, argumentative, and analytic writing.

DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF CULTURE
TO CULTIVATE...
Our modern conception of culture has agricultural roots, evoking images of the "cultivation" of plants or soil.  We
often speak of an opposition between nature and culture, so it may seem odd to think of an agricultural metaphor
underlying our modern concept of culture. But consider the difference between cultivated land (a farm, a garden) and
land in a state of nature (a forest, a grasslands). Cultivated land has been subjected to human agency. It has been
transformed from its natural condition. Human activity has "improved" upon its original state. We might also see
cultivating the mind as a process of enlightenment and improvement. The process of cultural transmission involves,
according to this model, a direct reshaping of human thought,  a careful tending to  intellectual, social and moral
development with a goal of refinement or enrichment. The goal was to cultivate the mind with the same nurturing care as
farmers cultivate their land. Initially, there was something profoundly democratizing about this concept of culture, since
it implied that our tastes and sensitivities were not simply part of our core nature, were not a birthright, and that
refinement could be achieved by all segments of the society.  Previously, aristocrats were assumed to naturally possess a
more potent sense of beauty, a higher aesthetic appreciation, more refinement of taste than the great mass of people. The
aristocrats were regarded as the cultured classes and other groups sought to mimic their manners and values in order to
gain greater access to the court.  Such assumptions about cultural hierarchy and class distinctions underlay the actual
social, economic, and political hierarchy of the feudal era. With the emergence of a more powerful middle class and new
ideas about democracy and marketplace competition, newer conceptions of culture emerged.  Intellectuals sought to
more directly shape the contents of their culture and ascribed to themselves the right to decide what constituted a
desirable culture.   Then, as now, active debates surrounded what constituted good or desirable culture, but the power to
decide such questions was shifting decisively towards the middle class intellectuals at the expense of aristocratic court
society on the one hand and folk or peasant culture on the other.
      Writing in 19th century, British poet and essayist Matthew Arnold argued that the rise of democracy in the west
required a new conception of culture, one which was defined through meritocracy rather than aristocracy.  Arnold wrote,
"this new conception of culture seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the
world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of Sweetness and Light...The men of culture are the
true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for
carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the ideas of their time, who have labored to divest
knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient
outside the clique of the cultivated and learned." In Arnold's conception of culture, there are still those -- the "great men
of culture" -- who were best positioned to determine what constituted good or desirable elements of culture and to
decree what fell outside culture, what was "vulgar" and "uncouth."  Arnold reserved for his class, the middle class
intellectuals, and for his gender, men, the right to decide what forms of culture are most desirable for all citizens. The
pursuit of the "best that man has created" was understood as a search for spiritual enlightenment and self-perfection, as a
process essential for the survival and  integrity of a society, and as the essential focus of a liberal arts education. Arnold's
definition helps to set the terms for the distinction between high culture (which reflects refined tastes and educated
sensibilities) and folk culture (which reflects more earthy origins in the culture of the peasant or working classes).
Arnold assumed that most of what humans do falls outside the category of culture and is not worthy of being transmitted
from one generation to the next.  However, Arnold's conception of culture stresses accessibility and concreteness.  He
would have been astonished that high culture in the 20th century is so often characterized by abstraction and perceived as
difficult to comprehend without specialized training.  In modern terminology, Arnold was embracing a "middlebrow"
culture, one where "sweetness and light" are still regarded as of a higher order than grappling with the complexities of
human psychology or the sordid realities of everyday life.
     Many of Arnold's assumptions about cultural hierarchy still shape the arguments most commonly made about
popular culture, both arguments made by those who would rescue certain works of "popular art" from the bulk of mass
culture and arguments made by those who want to protect the integrity of high culture from the vulgarity of popular
culture. Academics especially find it difficult to resist the temptation to rank cultural works or to speak of them in a
vocabulary of superlatives ("the best," "the most beautiful," "The greatest of its kind," "The most important") Academics
refer to the ranked selection of works that are considered worthy of serious study as forming a canon. Consider, for
example, the ways that the American film critic Andrew Sarris defended certain Hollywood movies (such as the suspense
films of Alfred Hitchcock, the westerns of John Ford, the slapstick comedies of Charles Chaplin) as reflecting the work of
"exceptional artists" while presenting the Hollywood system itself as fundamentally antagonistic to the creation of screen
art. Sarris writes, "The Auteur theory values the personality of the director precisely because of the barriers to its
expression.  It is as if a few brave souls had managed to overcome the gravitational pull of the mass of movies""
Similarly, the contemporary organization Viewers for Quality Television attempts to identify a canon of "exceptional"
television programs such as E.R., Homicide, Ally McBeal or The Practice, series that reflect the cultural sensibilities of
an upper class audience. Viewers for Quality Television defend these programs as "novelistic" or as appealing to the
"intelligent" and "discriminating" viewers, while dismissing the bulk of television as a "vast wasteland."  The group
lobbies for these works to be exempted from the Nielsen Ratings System, which determines the fate of programs not only
their quality but on the size of their audience.  Television producers, they argue, should maintain some commitment to
public service and to maintaining the quality of the culture, rather than making all production decisions purely according
to the bottom line. In both cases, the contents of the canon are shifted from what Arnold might have proposed, while the
underlying logic of constructing cultural hierarchies remains.

CULTURAL LITERACY
     In The Closing of the American Mind, literary critic Alan Bloom evokes many aspects of this Arnoldian
tradition when he protests the "barbaric appeal" of rock music with its focus on "sexual desire, undeveloped and
untutored." Bloom feels that rock intensifies the desires of the body rather than cultivating the mind. Rock music
becomes, for Bloom, the music of the "unwashed"  segments of the society, and as such, its popularity stands as an
obstacle for the "refinement" of tastes and the teaching of intellectual "discrimination."  Within this argument, it is not
hard to locate hints of racism (because of the way that the word, "primitive," has historically been used to link jazz, rock
and rap back to their origins in African-American culture) as well as elitism (because of its assumption that what is best
for one class will necessarily be essential for the education of all). We might consider by way of comparison comments
made about "the Jazz problem" by Dr. Frank Damrosch, the director of what would become the Julliard School of Music,
in a 1924 issue of the arts journal, Etude: "If jazz originated in the dance rhythms of the Negro, it was at least interesting
as the self expression of a primitive race. When jazz is adopted by the  highly civilized' white race, it tended to denigrate
it toward primitivity. When a savage distorts his features and paints his face so as to produce starting effects, we smile at
his childishness; but when a civilized man imitates him, not as a joke but in all seriousness, we turn away in disgust....We
can only hope that sanity and the love of the beautiful will help to set the world right again and that music will resume its
proper mission of beautifying life instead of burlesquing it."  One can also see in both Bloom and Damrosch an
underlying fear of the body and of emotion as factors that potentially disrupt or topple the rightful rule of the intellect.
This fear of emotion has been central to attacks on popular culture, while defenders of popular culture have tended to
value what Robert Warshot called "the immediate experience" over the intellectually-processed response.  In a world
where intellectuals are paid to work with their minds and the working classes are paid to work with  their bodies, such
distinctions carry obvious class connotations.
     Bloom's core argument is that America, as a culture of immigrants, no longer has the kind of shared framework
that Arnold saw as the key function of culture. We can no longer speak to each other across our differences, Bloom
contends, because we no longer share a common cultural literacy. Bloom's underlying assumption is that traditional
high culture provides the only viable framework for mutual respect and communication. Bloom argues that the collective
mastery of a preselected set of approved literary, musical, and artistic works can "cement" together the American nation
despite its multicultural roots. However, he would not be happy to discover that Americans already have a shared culture,
that of popular culture. What links us together may be our shared knowledge of popular television characters, top 40 hits,
super hero comic books, advertising jingles, or blockbuster Hollywood films.  For Bloom, however, popular culture can
not satisfy his demands for "cultural literacy" because of its transience; he trusts only those forms of culture that maintain
stability across generations. The danger in doing so, however, is that one's own culture becomes stagnant or irrelevant in
the process. Bloom makes the odd assumption that we should be more invested in the residue of ancient civilizations than
in our own living culture.  What would have happened if the classical Greeks, whom Bloom admires, had seen themselves
primarily as custodians of ancient Phoenician and Babylonian cultures rather than as creators of a culture more responsive
to their own contemporary concerns and sensibilities?
     Bloom argues that popular culture has dulled our taste for more refined expression. One can just as readily
argue, however, that the attitudes of high modernism have removed art from any active engagement with the realm of
everyday life. Modernist artists have sought to define themselves against vulgar or popular tastes, have insisted on the
distance between the art world and the realm of commerce. They are often proud if their works are not widely understood
or appreciated. Artists who seek to extend their reach to include broader segments of the population are accused of
"selling out." Art museums are criticized for hosting so-called "blockbuster shows" that draw in the general public to see
the works of better-known artists, such as Picasso, Van Gogh or Monet and for exhibiting the work of contemporary
photographers, such as Richard Avedon, Annie Liebovitz or Helmut Newton, who move fluidly between fashion spreads
in mass market magazines and art gallery installations.
     According to the Arnoldian tradition, high culture defines itself not through what it includes but rather through
what it excludes. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued that all tastes really mask distastes; we defend tastes
not by justifying our preferences for one work over another but rather by condemning works that fall outside our own
tastes. Often, such assumptions about cultural worth are so knee-jerk that they go unexamined altogether and are treated
as commonsense. Consider, for example, a question that appeared on a recent SAT examination. "Her fine reputation as a
celebrated actress was _____ by her appearance in a TV soap opera. (A) enhanced (B)blemished (C)appreciated (D)
concluded (E) intensified." The alleged purpose of this question was to test vocabulary, yet several of the options here
would be correct from a purely grammatical point of view. What the question really tests is taste. Taste, Bourdieu argues,
often functions as the implicit criteria for determining whether students are suitable for admission into an institution of
higher learning. Students are being tested on their ability to predict how the people at the College Board are likely to feel
about soap operas. After all, a "celebrated" actress who went into soap opera work might well "enhance" her career by
increasing her visibility and earning power. She might have "concluded" her career in such a role and then retired.
However, from the perspective of a certain taste culture, the movement from legitimate stage to television soap opera
necessarily "blemished"  her talents, resulting in  a loss of cultural status and B is, in fact, the "correct" answer.

SHAKESPEARE, DICKENS AND OTHER POPULAR ARTISTS
     The lines between high culture and popular culture are constantly being renegotiated. However revered today,
the works of William Shakespeare had strong roots in the popular culture of his age.  Shakespeare also wrote epic poems
that he hoped would become enduring works of art but they are only read today by graduate students specializing in
Renaissance Literature. What have survived are his bawdy comedies and griping tragedies, works he intended to appeal
to the passing fancy of popular audiences. Shakespeare often drew his plots from plays being performed in cheap and
often disreputable theaters or from the tales told in taverns and in marketplaces. His bawdy language, his play with gender
reversals and mistaken identities, drew freely on the imagery associated with carnivals, festivals and masquerades. His
plays combined lofty language aimed to court the favor of Queen Elizabeth with broad farce and clowning aimed at
maintaining the loyalty of the common folks in the "pit."  At the time Shakespeare wrote, theater was still being attacked
by many church authorities and moral reformers because of its roots in deception and impersonation. Theater was
perceived as fundamentally incapable of communicating the truth about human motives and actions.
       Shakespeare continued to be closely associated with popular culture well into the 19th century, when his plays
were quoted as part of vaudeville routines or on the decks of showboats and performed in black face as part of the
minstrel shows. The emphasis was on the broad humor and the raw emotional power of Shakespeare's stories, not
necessarily the lyricism of his language.  Americans of all classes had  a fascination with the vibrant, larger-than-life
personalities of the great Shakespearian performers, whose images were marketed on cheap postcards that people
collected much as we collect baseball cards today.  There is a beautiful sequence in John Ford's classic western, My
Darling Clementine, in which a somewhat over-the-hill Shakespearian actor is forced to perform Hamlet's "To Be or Not
To Be" soliloquy in a tavern. As his performance continues, the various ruffians and drunkards fall into silence before the
sheer beauty of his words.  Ford shows us the culturally fallen "Doc" Holiday reciting the lines along with the actor,
suggesting that they are very much part of his active cultural vocabulary. The late part of the 19th century, however, saw
the gradual separation of Shakespeare from popular culture according to the belief that the true understanding and
appreciation of the "immortal bard" required specialized training and cultivated tastes. Educators argued that one needed
to be taught to comprehend works that only a few decades earlier had been assumed to be immediately available to the
bulk of the population. Yet, despite the widening gap between high and popular culture, it still remains possible for
Shakespeare's works to re-enter the realm of the popular, as occurred when a recent film cast teen stars Claire Daines and
Leonardo DeCaprio in a production of Romeo and Juliet that was executed in MTV style and accompanied by the music
of such contemporary performers as Prince and Butthole Surfers. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was even
converted into a computer game that allowed players to explore more fully the lush environments and vivid iconography
of this particular film production. Not all English teachers would approve, but teenagers were going back again and again
to re-experience Shakespearian tragedy by their own free choice.
     Many of the works now regarded as central to the high cultural canon had disreputable origins as part of mass or
popular culture. The novels of Charles Dickens, for example, were criticized by the literary establishment of his day
because they were published serially -- a chapter a month -- in mass market magazines. Critics worried that serialization
would leave people in a state of "distraction" and emotional upheaval as they awaited the next installment of David
Copperfield or Our Mutual Friend. And others expressed concern that popular viewers would have difficulty separating
fiction from reality given Dickens''s tendency to use real world settings or to reference aspects of contemporary life.
Dickens was thought to pander to commercial interests because he often reshaped his unfolding narratives in response to
feedback he received from his readers. In short, Dickens was subjected to the same kinds of criticism that currently greet
producers of soap operas.  Defenders of the literary canon often embrace their own version of cultural democracy,
suggesting that their focus is on "works which have withstood the test of time." However, there are many works that are
still broadly read a century or so after their publication but have never been granted the status of high culture. One might
point towards Treasure Island, Anne of Green Gables, Dracula, or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as examples of
books whose status within the university remains tenuous despite widespread enjoyment over time.

WAYS OF SEEING
     The more one looks at the contents of high culture, the more it becomes clear that they are defined not through
any intrinsic properties but rather through the ways we respond to them.  High culture demands of us a certain awe and
respect; it asks us to set art apart from the other materials and experiences of our daily life; we hold high culture at a
certain contemplative distance that allows us to more fully appreciate its formal complexity or thematic richness.  By
contrast, we claim an ownership over popular culture; we identify with popular heroes and feel strong emotions over their
successes and defeats. Or conversely, we domesticate popular culture, taking its contents for granted, treating them as
utterly banal and all but invisible.  Pop artist Andy Warhol exploited differences in the ways we respond to high art and
popular culture when he did lithographic images of such commercial iconography as Campbell Soup labels or Brillo
boxes and placed them in art museums. There, we looked upon these familiar patterns in new ways; they became aesthetic
objects.  The pop art movement inspired heated debates about the nature of art within a commercial and mediated culture.
     Similarly, when the elements of high culture are pulled back into the context of our everyday life, they become
part of popular culture again, as occurs when we buy refrigerator magnets that allow us to dress up Michelangelo's David
in contemporary sports fashions or when we buy Halloween masks derived from Edward Munch's The Scream. The
David magnets and Scream masks are fun because of their irreverent approach to canonical artworks; they allow us to
play with materials that are all but sacred in our culture.  Just as Warhol helped us to see the Campbell Soup cans in a
new way when they were brought into the museum space, these trinkets help us to experience classic artworks in a new
way when we bring them into our homes. These works have lost what cultural critic Walter Benjamin would call their
"aura," the mystique that surrounds their unique and distant status in our society. The process of mechanical
reproduction has made these images a more active part of our daily experience. We see them in magazine ads; we buy
them in picture postcards; we can cut them out and hang them on the walls of our dorm rooms. Benjamin was concerned
that this process of broad circulation would potentially  strip these images of their cultural value. Many defenders of
traditional high culture fret that this process of mass circulation and playful appropriation ultimately "trivializes" these
remarkable works. We come, for example, to associate "Fanfare for the Common Man" more closely with the virtues of
Beef (through the "Beef, It's What's For Dinner" commercials) than with the attempts of Aaron Copeland to construct a
distinctly American and democratic style of classical music.  Yet, the case could be made that these works  also gain
resonance,  acquire new meanings and associations, as they are drawn back into the ebb and flow of popular culture. The
associations we ascribe to an artwork thumb tacked on our bulletin board may be more personal than the categories of
analysis we are taught in art history textbooks. The images may inspire us, may remind us of  home, may add a spark of
color to an otherwise drab environment. We live with art rather than worship it. Too often, the protectors of high culture
have killed it, stuffed it, and shoved it into museum cases rather than trying to facilitate its broader circulation and active
consumption.

CULTURE AS A WAY OF LIFE
     Underlying this critique of the relations between high and popular culture has been a somewhat different model
of culture, one derived from the anthropological study of "folk cultures" and most closely associated with the work of
British sociologist Raymond Williams. According to this newer model, culture is understood as "the integrated pattern of
human knowledge, belief and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to
succeeding generations; the customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious or social group." If the
Arnoldian model of culture assumed that only a few of us are capable of creating works of cultural worth and that most of
what we do is "non-culture," this new definition sees all of us  as participating in the creation, circulation, consumption,
and preservation of our culture. This model places culture at the very center of our everyday life.   Culture is expressed
not only through impressionist paintings or haiku poetry but by the ways we stroke a loved one's hand, by the shrug of our
shoulders, by the gestures we use when we talk, by the clothes we wear when we are working out at the gym, and by the
little songs we sing to ourselves in the shower. This conception of culture is defined less through a limited set of special
works of art and more through the process by which we make various artifacts and practices a vital part of our everyday
lives. Williams described culture as a "structure of feeling," suggesting that cultural artifacts give form and expression
to the ways we think about ourselves and the ways we feel about the world around us.
      Williams and his followers sought to explore as many different aspects of contemporary culture as possible,
subjecting commercial products and routine practices to textual analysis.  They sought to identify the values and
assumptions (the "common sense") underlying the songs we sing, the magazines we read, the advertisements that get us
to buy products, the clothes we wear, and the places where we "hang out" with our friends. Williams conceded that much
of what he studied would not seem like culture within the old Arnoldian definition.  However, he felt that such mundane
and banal materials might tell us a great deal more about the implicit assumptions that underlie our patterns of living than
did works that were more consciously considered and crafted.
     The construction of a cultural canon often depends on the isolation of exceptional works from their larger
historical contexts; this new conception of culture, however, focuses attention on the interconnectedness between all of
the forms of cultural expression which co-exist at the same moment. Our tastes, according to this model, are not random
or arbitrary. Our cultural choices are part of a larger system of thought. By looking at one cultural artifact in relation to
another, we can start to tease out the underlying cultural logic, the shared patterns of thought, which define us as part of
one cultural community and not another. Paul Willis, for example, has explored the way that the musical preferences of
the members of a 1970s British motorcycle gang reflected their collective desire for speed and mobility. They expressed a
preference not for contemporary popular music but rather for the rock and roll that had been popular in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, music closely associated with drag-races and beaches parties. Willis writes, "It is music for dancing to,
moving to, and clearly has the ability to reflect, resonate and develop a particular lifestyle based on confidence and
movement....This preferred music, therefore, was clearly answerable to the restless movement of the bike boys'
lives...The musical quality they universally disliked was slowness and dreariness. The quality they prized was fastness and
clarity of beat." Willis argues that this subculture valued the music less for its thematic content than for its rhythm, beat,
and pace.
     This new approach to the analysis of culture, thus, allows us to examine formal properties of artworks and
artifacts just as powerfully as the old vocabulary of art criticism that emerged in the framework of cultural hierarchy.
However, form was now understood as giving expression not simply to the personal feelings and thoughts of the artist but
also to the shared beliefs, values, and attitudes of the larger society. And, moreover, the relationship between a cultural
form and a social community is not fixed, but remains open to constant change. Music written in the 1950s can gain new
meanings or associations as it is fit into the lives of British motorbike boys in the late 1970s. Meanings can originate at
the site of consumption just as readily as at the site of production and culture is never dead as long as it remains in
circulation.

RESIDUAL, DOMINANT, AND EMERGENT CULTURES
     Willis's analysis of the "bike boys" also reminds us that there is no singular or unified culture but rather a range
of different cultures that interact in complex ways. Raymond Williams identified three distinctive kinds of culture at work:

(1) Residual culture includes forms, practices, beliefs, that were once central to a past society but  seem increasingly
anachronistic and have thus shifted towards the margins. For example, square dancing or barbershop quartets were
central cultural practices in 19th century and early 20th century America but are now a fringe taste, mostly associated with
an aging population.

(2)Dominant culture refers to those forms of culture that hold a central place in contemporary culture, influencing most,
if not all, members of a particular society.  Some forms that this dominant culture takes might include network television
programs such as Seinfeld, Hollywood blockbusters such as Titanic, or best-selling novels such as the works of Stephen
King.

(3) Emergent culture represents the force for change and innovation within a society, often reflecting the tastes and
political views of the younger segments of the population or of those subcultures that have not yet been assimilated into
the cultural mainstream. Hip hop or cyberculture might be understood as forms of emergent culture. Hip hop music (and
its associated styles of speech, movement, and dress) reflects the sensibility of urban minorities (though it is spreading
rapidly among the white suburban and rural youths). Cyberculture represents the culture of a still relatively small
subsection of the population that has access to the on-line world, though this subsection includes a growing percentage of
America's teens and young adults.

Through the interactions of residual, dominant, and emergent culture, Williams offers us a more dynamic account of how
our culture operates. Williams perceived culture as constantly in flux as old forms decline, new forms emerge, and the
dominant center is continually being redefined. A cultural form could lie relatively dormant for centuries only to spring to
life, as occurred when recordings of medieval chants became top 40 hits a few years ago.
     Such a model is particularly appropriate for thinking about how culture operates within a country like the United
States, Canada, or Australia, which is constantly getting redefined through subsequent waves of immigration. The
common metaphors of "the melting pot" or the "patchwork quilt" imply an ongoing process by which aspects of foreign
cultures get absorbed and transformed, as they are spread throughout a more diverse cross-section of American culture.
Some years ago, one of my students wrote a paper discussing the importance of tacos to the cultural status of Mexican-Americans. When she was very young, she wrote, the tacos she brought to school in her lunch bag seemed totally alien to
her classmates who had never seen such food before. As tacos became more widespread, as they were advertised on
television and served at fast food chains, she came to feel less exotic or alienated from the community around her. She
perceived her own acceptance as tied in some way to the growing acceptance of the taco. The taco was no longer an
ethnic food was now a basic element of American cuisine. At the same time, the popularity of the taco signaled some loss
of political and cultural solidarity within the Chicano community. She noted that  local Mexican restaurants and their
owners had been the center of her community's social, cultural, and political life. The taco was a symbol of the continuity
of cultural traditions from the mother country.  Mexican-Americans could go to the eateries to find a world largely
populated by other countryfolk and thus enjoy a refuge from the tensions they were experiencing with Anglos in the
border towns of the American southwest. But, as the taco became more widely accepted, the Mexican-American
community lost its political center and found it harder to separate its identity from the surrounding society. The movement
from the cultural margins, thus, represented a series of gains and losses for a group which both suffered and gained
political power from its earlier marginality.
     This section has offered two fundamentally different models of culture: one model, closely associated with
Matthew Arnold, defines culture through principles of hierarchy and exclusions as the "best that man has produced"; the
other, based on concepts derived from anthropology and most closely associated with Raymond Williams, defines culture
in a broad-based and inclusive fashion as the shared beliefs and practices of a whole society. Williams and others in his
tradition suggest that culture is a complex phenomenon always in the process of changing. If the Arnold tradition sought
to construct a canon of exceptional works worthy of serious study, this alternative model of culture defies any permanent
inventory. New cultural form are constantly emerging. Old cultural forms are fading away. The status ascribed to any
given work shifts according to the complex interplay between dominant, residual, and emergent cultures. Different social
groups possess their own cultures which may be in conflict or may negotiate an unstable truce. It is through our debates
about culture in general and popular culture in particular that we define what matters to us, what our values are, and what
relationships exist between the various groups which constitute our society.  This account of culture underlies many of the
essays included in this book. In the next section, we will explore how this model of culture results in a more sophisticated
understanding of popularity.
 
 

CRITICAL READING
.
1) Throughout this essay, key terms and concepts associated with popular culture are printed in bold letters. As you read
write down a definition of each term.  In some cases, you may want to write another alternate definition.  Then write a
short a explanation for each term of why it is
relevant to the study of popular culture.

2) In this section, Jenkins identifies two different traditions for thinking about the concept of culture -- one associated with
Matthew Arnold, one associated with Raymond Williams. Outline the key characteristics of these two different models
and be prepared to explain how they differ from each other. Which model does this introduction prefer? Why?

3) What does Alan Bloom mean by the term, "cultural literacy?" To what degree does his definition assume we are
speaking within a high culture framework? How might Bloom respond to Jenkins's suggestion that popular culture
constitutes the contemporary form of "cultural literacy"? Why is it important for a society to share certain forms of culture
in common? How might we reconcile this desire for cultural cohesion with our growing recognition and respect for
cultural diversity?

4) What do you think separates a work of high culture from a work of popular culture? What examples does the essay
give of works that have moved from one category to the other? What factors account for these shifts in their cultural
status? Can a work move from high culture back to popular culture? If so, under what circumstances?

5) Raymond Williams makes a distinction between residual, dominant, and emergent culture.  List  as many examples of
each as  you can identify. What factors determine which forms of culture fall into each category?

LINKAGES
1)This essay opens with the author's description of watching Aladdin in South Central Los Angeles. Henry A. Giroux's
"Are Disney Movie Good For Your Kids?" offers another perspective on the racial politics of this film. On what points
would the two authors agree? Where would they disagree? Why might both authors want to talk about the representations
of race in the film? If you have seen this film, how central was the issue of race to your experience of it? Why might we be
less likely to think critically about Disney films than about many other forms of popular culture?

2) The author offers some criticism of the assumptions about "cultural hierarchies" which underlie Alan Bloom's
"Music." Read the essay yourself and see if you agree with the Jenkins's arguments. Where do you see signs of that
Bloom understands culture in hierarchical terms? Look for specific passages in Bloom which reference the differences
between classical and rock music. What words does he use to describe each? What does he see as the benefits of classical
music? What does he see as the dangers of consuming rock? Jenkins argues that Bloom values intellect over emotion, that
he sides with the past over the present, and that his criticisms of rock music make implicit (and perhaps unconscious)
racist assumptions. What evidence do you find in this essay to support such criticism? Based on what you read of Bloom,
how might he respond to these criticisms?

3) Charles McGrath's "The Triumph of the Prime-time Novel" identifies what McGrath sees as "best" about
contemporary American television.  Review what Jenkins writes above about different concepts of culture. What model of
cultural value underlies McGrath's argument? To what degree is his use of the term, "prime-time novel," an attempt to
claim for television some of the same cultural prestige that traditionally has surrounded serious works of literature? How
might this analogy emerge from the audience whom McGrath seeks to address? In what ways are television series
"novelistic"? What forms of television does he exclude as not worthy of serious consideration and on what basis does he
reach this judgement?

4) This essay suggests that works of high culture may sometimes become works of popular culture. Read Annalee
Newitz's "Jane Austen: The Movie, or Why We Watch Great Books." To what degree does she treat the film versions of
Jane Austen novels as if they were forms of popular culture? How does Newitz question the rhetoric which surrounds
literary adaptations? How does the cultural status of Austen's novels exempt them from criticisms that might otherwise be
directed against their appeals to our prurient interests in sex and money?

5)Michael Eric Dyson's "We Never Were What We Used to Be" discusses how different generations of African-Americans respond to Hip Hop culture. Why would music become a vehicle for generational conflict? What is at stake for
these two groups in their attempts to define what contemporary black culture should look like? How does Dyson feel
these debates fit within the larger history of cultural politics in the African-American community? How might we
understand these debates in relation to Raymond William's categories of residual, dominant, and emergent culture?
 
 

PREPARING TO WRITE
1) Watch Shakespeare in Love. How does the film represent Shakespeare's relationship to popular culture? What
commercial factors shaped the production of Shakespeare's plays? What conceptions of authorship shape the film's
representation of Shakespeare? Are there moments when he seems to draw inspiration from other plays and from
theatrical tradition? Are there moments when he seeks to express his own experiences or his original vision?  Drawing on
the ideas in Jenkins's essay, write a critical analysis of the representation of popular culture in the film.

2) Describe an incident when a school, teachers, parents, or other individuals in authority sought to shape your tastes and
preferences toward a specific form of culture and you resisted?  What were the sources of the disagreement?  Were they
over specific facts or effects? definitions?
values? or over who should be making the decision?  How did you respond at the time?  Would you respond differently
now?

3)Look for examples in advertisements or other popular media which  reference works of high art. What original
meanings were associated with these images? How are they re-invented or reshaped by this new context? Do you think
advertisers should draw on such respected images as raw materials for their commercial pitches? Why or why not?

4)Scan the newspapers for coverage of a contemporary controversy involving popular culture.
What were the core issues at the center of the controversy? What assumptions do both sides in the controversy make
about the place of popular culture in modern life? What do they think would constitute good culture and why has one side
seen the current example as inappropriate or harmful? How should such cultural conflicts be resolved?

5)Jenkins offers the example of a SAT question that was biased against popular culture. Find other examples of
standardized test questions that contain implicit or explicit assumptions about specific forms of popular culture.  (You
may remember questions specific questions you encountered taking a test or you can look at some of the widely available
collections of
sample SAT questions.)   Describe the question and its assumptions about the cultural form.  What answer was the author
of the question looking for? What other answers could be valid? How are these assumptions biased?  How are they
accurate?  Considering the various of definitions of culture presented in this essay, is it possible to completely abolish
cultural bias
in testing?

6) Jenkins describes how the shifting status of the taco had an impact on how one Chicana student thought about herself
and her cultural community. What artifacts or traditions summarize your feelings towards your own cultural community?
Select one artifact or tradition that is important to your community and explain its meanings and uses.  How is it
perceived by
people outside your community?  Have these outside perceptions changed over time?  Are they been inaccurate or
incomplete?  Have these external perceptions changed the attitudes of you and others in your community toward this
artifact or tradition?

THE CONCEPT OF POPULARITY

FEARING MASS CULTURE

For most of the 20th century, our conception of popular culture has been held hostage to our anxieties about mass society.
We often refer contemptuously to popular culture as appealing to the "lowest common denominator." The assumption
here is that popular culture is one-size-fits-all and as a consequence, can only appeal to the most base-level human
instincts (prurient interests in sex, greed, violence, and pleasure). What makes high culture high is precisely the fact that
its appeals are perceived as more cerebral, as "acquired tastes" that can be embraced only by those who are sufficiently
educated to appreciate them.
     Let's put this debate in some historical context. The turn of the century saw a dramatic increase in the scale of
our social interactions, as the United States moved from a country of rural farms and small communities to one
increasingly defined around large urban areas. As the century continued, more and more people either lived in cities or on
their suburban outskirts. At the same time, the rise of massive corporations resulted in a decline in the 19th century ideal
of rugged individualism. Waves of immigration forced contact between cultural groups that once widely separated. And
the technological revolutions (shifts in communication, transportation, and manufacturing primarily) resulted in a shift in
the scale of production and distribution of goods. The new assembly line process denied individuals a sense of pride in
their own craftsmanship as they  performed a highly specialized task in a more complex division of labor.   All of this
shifts led to widespread concern about the emergence of a mass society, one characterized by conformity and
consumerism.
     The rise of modern popular culture was closely associated with these same trends. The cities provided the
essential base audience for Hollywood cinema and later for radio and television broadcasting. Popular music became
closely associated with urban lifestyles and values, a trend that runs from ragtime to rap.  Rural audiences turned to mass
media to become better connected with the new urban lifestyle. Popular culture was an increasingly commercialized
culture compared with the community-based folk culture of the 19th century. The rise of the phonograph, many correctly
predicted, would result in the decline of parlor performances of live music by trained amateurs and thus a shift from a
participatory towards a spectatorial culture. Similarly, the processes of immigration had an enormous impact on the
development of American popular culture. Most of the major film studios were owned by Jewish immigrants from
Eastern Europe. American comedy has similarly been powerfully shaped by African-American traditions that can be
traced back to the slavery era, by traditions of ethnic humor brought by immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe.
Many Anglo-Saxon Americans found these new styles of popular culture threatening to them because of their unfamiliar
character and content. And, perhaps, most importantly, popular culture was mass-produced, mass-marketed, as part of the
new consumer economy enabled by the rapid technologization.  The engines of mass production depended on a steady
flow of products in and out of the marketplace. Cultural goods were bought and sold like any other consumer product.
The large scale systems of cultural production, many feared, allowed little or no space for individual creativity or personal
expression. Mass culture followed prescripted formulas and was  primarily motivated by the desire for commercial
success.
     The wide-circulation of mass-produced culture, they argued, resulted in a further homogenization of American
society, a loss of distinctive individual differences. And, it also resulted in the breakdown of traditional community-based
social activities associated with the face-to-face culture of the farms and villages. Instead, they complained, mass media
resulted in a more alienated lifestyle where we each retreat to our own homes at the end of the day to watch television.
Some argued that mass culture was the modern day equivalent of "bread and circuses" providing us with entertainment to
distract us from a full recognition of the injustices of the contemporary era and to defuse impulses for political change into
desires to buy more consumer goods. Mass culture was understood as a form of recreation, that is, as allow us to re-create ourselves during our leisure hours so that we might more fully fulfill the expectations of large-scale industry during
our working hours.  Reflecting on the use of mass media in support of fascist regimes in Germany and Communist
Regimes in the Soviet Union, some feared that the centralized power of the mass media made it a "technology for tyrants"
who would use it as a vehicle for social and political control and that it would result in a slavish conformity to fashion and
government ideologies. This last critique was most powerfully expressed by the Frankfort School, a group of emigre
intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who wrote extensively and passionately about American
popular culture, though, coming to this culture from the outside, they often did not fully understand the particular details.

A MORE DEMOCRATIC CULTURE?

     These various critiques of mass culture carry enormous emotional and political power, since they give shape to
our vague sense of dissatisfaction with modern life. Thinkers as diverse in their political orientation as Republican
ideologue George Gilder and Marxist theorist Adorno have all embraced various flavors of this criticism of mass culture
and mass society. However, one needs to be careful about fully embracing such a critique. For one thing,  this particular
analysis of mass culture emerged from the discomfort of the intellectual classes over the loss of their traditional authority
to define cultural hierarchies. The emergence of mass culture might just as readily be described as reflecting the growing
force of democracy in 20th century American life.  In the 20th century, America has witnessed the enfranchisement of
significant segments of the population who were unable to vote in the previous century. These groups have also carried
greater economic power and as a result, much more respect has been paid to those segments of the population and their
cultural tastes and interests. The dismissal of mass culture became a way of displaying a thinly veiled contempt for
democracy.  Many attacks on mass culture reflected the belief that most Americans didn't know what was good for them
and that they would be better served by allowing intellectuals to filter their cultural choices and to tell them what kinds of
artworks might most fully contribute to their social betterment. These intellectuals might differ among themselves about
what forms of culture would be a better alternative to mass culture, with their proposals ranging from folk culture to
classical music to the avant garde and high modernist, but they always had some form of culture they thought was more
enriching and rewarding than what the masses tended to choose for themselves.
      Consider, for example, our now familiar reference to television as a "vast wasteland." The phrase originated
from a speech in 1961 by Newton Minow, who was the head of the Federal Communications Commission under John F.
Kennedy. Minow was chastising the National Association of Broadcasters for their failure to "serve the public interest"
which he defined in terms of providing educational and cultural programming rather than popular entertainment. If one
reads his speech closely, Minow appears to be nostalgic for an era in early television associated with the televising of
original dramas written and performed by artists closely associated with New York and the Broadway stage. He reserved
his sharpest criticisms for episodic series, especially sitcoms, westerns, detective shows, and soap operas which reflected
the influence on Hollywood on the emerging media. Broadcast historian Vance Kepley has argued that the development of
the American television industry. During the first phase, broadcast materials were divided between special high-profile
events (which were designed to spark conversation about television's potential as a new media, especially among the
intellectual and economic elites) and filler programs (intended to fill out the Broadcast schedule and keep the networks on
the air).  The Playhouse 90 presentations that Minow admired represented the peak accomplishments of this phase of
television.  One network executive used the phrase, "Operation Frontal Lobe" to describe this program strategy, phrase
that evokes its appeal to intellectual enrichment and personal betterment rather than entertainment.  Such programs could
survive despite relatively low ratings because the goal was to create public interest in television as a medium and ratings
were a less powerful force in shaping programming decisions. As television spread more widely to the entire population,
the focus of the industry shifted towards providing episodic series that would insure week to week viewer loyalties. The
sitcoms and genre programs that Minow disdained reflected this shift in focus from elite towards mass tastes as the central
focus of television production.  Minow's charge that television had become a "vast wasteland," thus, occurred in the
context of this shift in whose tastes determined what would appear on television. His attacks were, of course, laced with a
heavy dose of nostalgia since he was comparing the worst of 1960s television to what he thought had been best in 1950s
television and in so doing, he ignored the "filler" programs which had rounded out the broadcast schedule and were more
likely to include televised wrestling or broad farce than serious drama. Here, it is very hard to separate disputes about
cultural tastes (the relative value of anthology drama vs. episodic series) from disputes about cultural power (the shift of
focus from the urban upper-middle-class towards a mass audience).

THE ECONOMICS OF POPULAR ART
     As this example suggests, criticisms of the commercialization of mass culture are often red herrings.  All
culture exists in an economic context. 1950s television was as much governed by its market as 1960s television was.
Only the nature of the market had changed.  Even the most revered works of high art emerged in a context where
economic factors had a significant impact. Art historians, for example, have studied the contracts signed between
Renaissance painters and their wealthy patrons. In these contracts, patrons specified not only the size of the canvas to be
filled but also the proportion of different kinds of pigments to be used. The patrons wanted to insure that the money they
spent on the paintings was visible to their friends and as such, they wanted to insure the prominent display of more
expensive pigments at key places in the image. Much of what we take for granted about Christian iconography, thus,
emerged as much for commercial as for spiritual reasons. Mary's dress, for example, was most often painted a particular
shade of blue that was especially costly, so that the center of interest in the painting would also be where one could most
fully appreciate the amount of money spent on the image.
     What is at stake when we discuss commercialization, then, is not the issue of whether money influences the
shape and character of art -- it always does -- but rather which groups yield the economic power. Mass culture tries to
anticipate and respond to mass taste and must appeal to a large segment of the population  in order to recoup the
investment made in its production. Mass media (such as network television or Hollywood films)  requires a different
economy of scale than did many of the individualized works associated with high culture and as such, these industries
direct their appeal not towards an educational or economic elite but towards the mainstream.
      Having said this, one must note that there are many legitimate reasons to be concerned about the economics that
are shaping the contemporary entertainment industry.  Over the last decade, there has been an extraordinary concentration
of political, economic, and cultural power in the hands of a handful of multinational corporations.  At the time I am
writing this introduction, five entertainment conglomerates (Fox, Time Warner, Viacom, Disney/ABC, and TCI) each
have annual incomes of between 10-25 billion dollars.  This income exceeds the gross national product of a number of
smaller nation-states. Luxembourg, for example, has a GNP of 8.5 Billion dollars.  These companies are described as
horizontally integrated, because they hold controlling interests in many different sectors of the entertainment industry.
The same companies may own film studios and distribution companies, broadcast and cable networks, recording studios,
software publishers, toy manufacturers, comic book and book publishers, newspapers and magazines, and so forth.  These
companies produce 80 percent of the world's films and 70 percent of its television content. The ownership and power of
any given corporation is constantly shifting, but the current trend is towards more and more mergers that are dramatically
reducing the number of players in the news and information business. This horizontally integrated system differs
dramatically from the vertical integration of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s when the same five
companies held controlling interest over film production, distribution, and exhibition but tended not to invest in other
sectors of the entertainment industry. Warner Brother in the 1930s was focused almost exclusively on cinema. Today,
Warner Communications Inc. sees cinema as simply one part of a much larger investment package, and as a consequence
of this diversification, has become an even more powerful cultural force.
      This trend towards media concentration potentially narrows the range of cultural choices available to us. The
claim that mass culture reflects mass taste assumes that we as a society have made choices based on the options that are
available to us. If certain options are never offered, they can not become popular. The media conglomerates have an
enormous
cultural authority, shaping what kinds of cultural goods can and can not circulate broadly within our culture. This
authority is not absolute. Smaller companies can produce alternative products, but they lack the power to insure their
widespread distribution.  The media conglomerates see themselves as measuring audience interest and providing to it, but
the fewer powerful cultural industries we have, the less likely they will be successful in satisfying the needs and interests
of a diverse culture. What is alarming is how little debate has surrounded this growing concentration of media ownership,
which has occurred in the midst of enormous excitement of the potentials of the web and the net as participatory media,
media without "gatekeepers." For the moment, the cultural power of the major networks and the major studios far
outstrips any kind of media access available to individuals putting up their own websites. There is a reason why, for
example, web-based businesses, such as the on-line book dealer Amazon.com, still choose to advertise on television,
especially during high profile events. Such advertising reaches a broad-based viewership which would be impossible to
attract through web browsers. The issue, then, of who owns our culture should be a central concern to all of us, but it is a
very different issue than dismissing popular culture because it follows a commercial logic or because it appeals to popular
tastes. Good art can be generated and circulated for the worst possible motives and bad art often arises from the best of
intentions.
     One important consequence of this concentration of media ownership has been an increase in the flow of images
and narratives from one media to another. Consider, for example, Warner Communications Inc.'s successful exploitation
of its Batman "franchise" in the 1990s. Warners had watched its Superman film series receive dwindling box office
returns and began to search for another series of sequels that might appeal to the same market. DC comics, at the same
time, was enjoying renewed success with various rewritings of the Batman mythology, including such ground breaking
graphic novels as Alan Moore's The Killing Joke and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Since DC comics was
part of the Warner Communications conglomerate, the film studio immediately responded to this earlier sign of market
growth by producing a Batman feature film. The film combined the talents of director Tim Burton and stars Jack
Nicholson and Michael Keaton, all of whom had been associated with previous successes for the studio. Batman's
soundtrack was provided by composer Danny Elfman and musical star Prince, both of whom were under contract with
Warner's record division, and two distinctive soundtrack albums were released.  The Batman material was also
incorporated into a music video that was aired on MTV and VH-1, both Warners subsidiaries. The novelizations and
making-of books were published by the company's book divisions. The campy 1960s television series which the
company owned was put back into syndication. The studio released the video tapes and aired it on the pay-per-view and
premium cable outlets (such as The Movie Channel) which they owned. Merchandise was released through
Knickerbocker Toys, another Warners-owned company. So, the success of the Batman "franchise" was fueled by the
careful exploitation of this property across the various divisions of the same entertainment conglomerate, insuring that
almost all of the profits made off the success of the films would remain in-house. We need to recognize that as artful as
the studios have become at moving intellectual property across media, this strategy does not insure success. The following
year, the Disney corporation sought to do the same thing with Dick Tracy, which proved to be a spectacular failure.
Disney had forgotten an important stage in the process, asking whether contemporary audiences were familiar with or
interested in the adventures of a square-jawed 1940s comic strip character.
     Of course, much of what we might describe as popular culture does not appeal to a broad commercial
marketplace. For one thing, the culture industries consistently make mistakes. The bulk of television programs are
canceled after only a handful of episodes. Most records fail to produce profits and thus, most of the commercial artists
signed to major record contracts are dumped after only one or two releases. Many more Hollywood films fail to recoup
their basic costs than become blockbuster successes.
     More importantly, the economic logic of contemporary popular cultures favors fragmentation rather than
homogenization. If the last decades have seen a growing concentration of media ownership, it has also seen the rise of
niche marketing practices. These practices are most visible in magazine publishing, where the space devoted to
publications in drug stores or super markets has dramatically grown due to the expansion of narrow-focused and
specialized publications aimed at every conceivable demographic subgroup or lifestyle preference. Similarly, we are
witnessing the increase diversification of our musical tastes with record stores subdivided according to ever more
specialized genre preferences (house, jungle, acid jazz, techno, new age, acoustic, global fusion, etc., etc.) The rise of the
American independent cinema movement has enabled minority filmmakers of all kinds to produce works that get broader
circulation than would have been imagined a decade ago. However, this distribution normally occurs through "designer
label" subsidiaries of the major media conglomerates.  Something similar occurs in the recording industry where much
alternative music is actually produced and distributed by the major labels. The major media conglomerates, thus, help to
shape both the commercial mainstream and many of the alternatives to it.  Such niche products fall into the category of
popular culture because they are shaped by commercial logic and embrace entertainment values, not because they are
aimed at achieving broad-based commercial popularity.

MASS CULTURE V.S. POPULAR CULTURE
      For those reasons, among many others, it becomes important to draw a distinction between mass culture and
popular culture. The concept of mass culture originates in the context of the critiques of mass society we outlined above.
Mass culture refers to all cultural goods that are mass produced and mass distributed within a consumer-oriented
capitalist economy. Popular culture, on the other hand, refers to those forms of culture that are most fully integrated into
our everyday lives. It is a sociological rather than an economic or aesthetic category. Popular culture describes the ways
we live in relation to the materials and artifacts of our culture. Put another way, popular culture is what happens when the
materials of mass culture are treated as if they were part of contemporary folk culture. Mass culture is a category of
production, having to do with the conditions under which cultural materials are produced. Popular culture is a category of
consumption, having to do with the conditions under which we integrate commercially produced materials into the
practices of our everyday life. Mass culture becomes popular culture, then, when, for example, we take a catch phrase
from South Park and drop it into our conversation with our friends, when we choose a "favorite song" off the radio to
encapsulate our feelings towards our lovers, or when we hang a poster of a favorite media celebrity on the wall of our
room as an expression of our own tastes and preferences.
     This more sociological conception of popular culture forces us to reconsider the commonsensical assumption
that mass culture appeals to the lowest common denominator. If mass culture can only be meaningfully described as
popular culture at the moment it is inserted into the lives of specific consumers, then we must assume that different people
respond to mass culture differently depending upon other differences in their social and cultural experiences. Research
suggests, for example, than men and women tend to relate to television in rather different ways because of the different
expectations about gender roles within the domestic space. British sociologist David Morley has observed that men tend
to control the channel switcher and women are more likely to watch programs chosen by male members of the household,
at least during the prime time hours. The advertising in the evening hours tends to focus on high-priced items such as cars
and computers, consumer choices which are still more often made by men than by women. Research has found that men
prefer to watch the program with minimum conversation or interruption, as a reward for their hard work at the office. At
least within traditional households, husbands typically see the domestic space as a site of leisure and recreation while the
women's experience of the home is tied to domestic labor. The women, even working women, often face expectations
that they will attend to the needs of other family members, including helping children with homework or preparing
supper.  Thus, their television viewing involves a succession of interruptions as they are drawn in and out of the room to
deal with other crisis. For the majority of women, the domestic space remains a work space, even in the evening hours.
Daytime programing, such as soap operas and talk shows, are also connected broadly with female viewership.
Historically, women were more likely than men to be home during these daytime hours.  These programs tend to be
composed of short segments or they repeat main ides in order to keep the viewing audiences abreast of what is going on
because of the various competing demands on their attention. Products advertised during such programs tend to include
smaller consumer goods, medicines, food products, and cleaning products, purchase decisions most often made by
women in our culture.

THE CASE OF STAR TREK
      Rather than thinking of television as appealing to the lowest common denominator, the success of a highly
popular television program or film might be better understood if we  think of it as mobilizing a coalition of different
cultural groups and successfully negotiating between their various tastes and interests. This probably sounds a little
abstract, so let's pull it down to a specific example. According to a Louis Harris poll conducted several years ago, more
than 50 percent of Americans classify themselves as Star Trek Fans. Star Trek fandom is a majority culture in the United
States! Of course, you may have noticed that 50 Percent of Americans don't wear rubber Spock ears, stretch velour
uniforms over their bulging stomachs, or go around giving each other Vulcan salutes all the time. So, our more exotic
stereotypes of what it means to be a "Trekkie" are inadequate to this phenomenon. For this poll to make any sense, we
have to concede that the respondents used the term, "fan," to refer to a whole range of different relationships to Star Trek
ranging from watching and enjoying the occasional episode to owning the whole series on tape, from chatting about it
around the water cooler with friends to flying across the country (or the world) to attend a fan convention. In a media
culture where all intellectual property flows fluidly across the various branches of the entertainment industry (one
important byproduct of the concentration of ownership), the term, Star Trek, doesn't refer to a single entity but can
reference five different television series, a succession of Hollywood theatrical films, multiple series of original paperback
novels (which routinely make the New York Times bestseller list), multiple comic book series, computer and role playing
games, among many other manifestations. Star Trek on television alone has now reached a length of more than 2000
hours.
     For many of these fans, the term, "Trekkie,"still used with some frequency in journalistic accounts of this
phenomenon, would be regarded as inaccurate and insulting. The term originated in a context of gender conflict within the
science fiction fan community. Science fiction fandom in the United States can trace its origins back to the 1920s when
Hugo Gernsbeck helped to facilitate contact between the readers of his pulp science fiction magazines. The exchange of
letters led to a desire to meet face to face and gradually towards the emergence of a national and international network of
fan clubs and conventions that forms the infrastructure of contemporary fandom.  For much of its history, though, science
fiction fandom was predominantly, if never exclusively, a male domain. Fandom attracted those most actively interested in
the scientific and technological issues posed by literary science fiction stories and novels. By the 1960s, however, an
increasing number of female writers and fans were entering the field. This was the period when feminist science fiction
writers like Ursula LaGuin and Joanna Russ were first appearing in print. As these writers and their fans first started
attending conventions, they often received a chilly or hostile reception from the "good old boy" network of literary science
fiction fandom. When Star Trek first appeared on television, however, many of these new female fans were drawn
towards it as a program that at least acknowledged the potential for women's contributions to the future and as a result,
they created Star Trek fandom as a place more friendly and open to women. Many of the most active early Star Trek fans
were female and this trend has continued. Literary science fiction fans coined the disdainful term, "Trekkie," to refer to
these women as "groupies" who wanted to rip the clothes off William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. As such, they fit Star
Trek fandom into a longer history of misogynistic stereotypes about female fans that goes back at least to the late 19th
century when women theater-goers were chastised for being more interested in the players than in the play. The female
fans rejected this term, "Trekkie," from the start because it implied a passive relationship to the program, while they were
actively engaged in the creation of their own culture on the basis of the raw materials provided by Star Trek. They were
writing their own original fiction, publishing their own zines, creating their own videos, making their own costumes,
producing their own artworks, and composing and performing their own music drawing on themes and imagery from the
original series. They were, in fact, much more interested in the Star Trek characters and their relationships than in the
performers (who had sometimes antagonized the fan community by their own boorish and misogynistic posturing). As a
result, these women preferred the more active term, Trekker. As their community grew to encompass a broader range of
programs, films, and books, many preferred to call themselves simply "fans", abandoning altogether labels that  attached
them to firmly to any one work of popular culture.
     As this account of the term, "Trekkie," suggests, there are profound differences in interests, goals, desires, and
fantasies even among the ranks of the most active Star Trek fans. There are many different ways to break down fandom.
One set of groupings might focus on the historic gender conflicts that shaped the early history of Star Trek fandom. One
might focus on other kinds of social identities, such as those surrounding sexuality, class or race, or cultural preferences,
such as the emergence of an elaborate fan culture around the mythology, culture, and language of the Klingons.  Any
individual fan might cut across these various categories in their tastes and interests.  These categories of analysis
necessarily focus greater attention on the more active fans who belong to some larger social group rather than more
isolated or casual fans. But such categories allow us to make some meaningful generalizations about the different
fascinations drawing these fans to the series.
     The original predominantly male science fiction fan community embraced Star Trek as a continuation of their
long-standing fascination with stories of exploration, conquest, adventure, and scientific speculation. From the start, they
were encouraged by Gernsbeck and other early science fiction editors to "police" the science in science fiction, to check it
for inaccuracies or distortions of what was understood to be true about the empirical universe. These fans were invested
in demarking  the genre boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and horror. They are often themselves scientifically
or technologically-oriented and their greatest concentration can be found at the major technological institutions, such as
MIT or Stanford. In many cases, science fiction plays a central role in inspiring students at such schools to enter into their
chosen professions and provides the fantasies that will guide their subsequent research. In more recent years, the Internet
has become increasingly central to these fan's relationship to the series and their intellectual interests dominate net
discussion groups.
      The predominantly female Star Trek fandom, on the other hand, was drawn much more towards exploration of
character issues or to the various alien races populating the Star Trek universe. They write and publish original stories
which explore such themes as the "great friendship" between Kirk and Spock, the cultural politics of the Vulcans, Data's
struggles to become "more human," and the challenges female officers, such as Uhura, face in getting promotion and
recognition as professionals. In one study, male and female Star Trek fans were asked to free associate about the various
characters. The male fans tended to discuss each character separately, describing their problem-solving and combat
capacities. The female fans, on the other hand, tended to fit each character into a grid of relationships with other
characters in the series, identifying mentorship, friendship, or romantic relationships between them.
     Yet another relationship to the series can be observed in the members of the Gaylaxians, a gay, lesbian, and
bisexual fan organization that is drawn predominantly to the utopian politics of the series. This group notes Star Trek's
long history of support for the acceptance and even celebration of cultural diversity, including its representation of the
first interracial kiss on American television, its depiction of an inter-racial crew at a time when the civil rights movement
was still controversial, and its inclusion of a Russian character aboard the Enterprise in the midst of the Cold War. This
group has actively lobbied, without much success, to get a "queer" character included in the series, recognizing that such
a character would become a role model for gay, lesbian, and bisexual teens. They are concerned that such teens are much
more likely to commit suicide than their straight counterparts and that our popular culture (not to mention our families,
churches, and schools) provided them only limited support.
     Each of these fan groups, then, are drawn towards Star Trek for different reasons, with different fantasies,
expectations, and evaluative criteria. There is no "common denominator" at work here at all! They disagree about what
makes Star Trek a good series or about which episodes are good or bad. They are sometimes openly hostile to each other
when these expectations run into conflict.  You put these various groups of fans onto the same electronic discussion list
and a flame war is all but certain to erupt. The producers have come to recognize the different interests that draw viewers
to the series and build them directly into the series. Most episodes include an A-plot which may center around exploration
or scientific issues (or more rarely political and diplomatic issues) and a B-plot which may center around the characters
and their relationship. Such a structure allows the program to maintain the support of multiple fan communities.
     One may well argue that Star Trek is an extreme example of this concept of popularity because its various fan
groups are so active, organized and visible. In fact, many many television series attract similar kinds of fan followings,
though often their memberships are smaller and less diverse than the case of Star Trek might suggest. The web and the
Internet are providing resources to allow fans to identify fellow fans and to build ongoing social interactions, resulting in a
much more active and visible fan culture than ever before. But, even if we move from fans to more casual consumers of
popular culture, the same patterns hold. The most commercially successful entertainment forms are those that facilitate
multiple sets of interests and thus open themselves up to being appropriated by diverse cultural communities. Consider,
for example, the success of the film, Titanic.  James Cameron's blockbuster hit carefully balances its romantic plot
(which dominates the first half of the film) with its more action and special effects oriented second half and combines a
nostalgic evocation of earlier times and traditional Hollywood-style storytelling  (Elements which might attract older
viewers) with cutting edge stars such as Kate Winslet and Leonard DeCaprio (who have strong youth followings). The
result was the most commercially successful film in history.

THE LIMITS OF POPULAR CULTURE
     This audience coalition model does not, however, imply a totally pluralistic culture.  We are not all being served
equally well by commercial culture. Some media are more flexible in accommodating multiple viewer interests than
others. Despite the increased "interactivity" promised by digital media, Star Trek computer games allow a much narrower
range of interactions with the program material than do the various television series or feature films. Because the video
game industry has historically focused its marketing almost exclusively at young males, Star Trek video games tend to
foreground issues of technology, exploration, and combat, while downplaying other elements, such as character
relationships, that might be more appealing to other consumers. As this example suggests, some viewer groups are more
desired or more easy to accommodate than others. Star Trek has no difficulty balancing the competing interests of male
and female fans, but it has been unwilling to fully embrace the concerns of the Gaylaxians for the inclusion of a gay,
lesbian, or bisexual character, fearing reactions from the religious right. In general, the gay and lesbian community has
found itself better served by magazines and periodicals, a field that depends on niche marketing, or on the Internet, which
supports many different kinds of communities, than on broadcast television, which depends on a more broadly composed
audience and is thus more vulnerable to opposition from other interest groups. Marketers find gays, lesbians, and
bisexuals a highly desirable consumer group since as an aggregate, they are assumed to have more disposable income, but
Madison Avenue has been reluctant to court them directly for fear of offending other potential consumers.
      The entertainment industry's responses to racial minorities have proven equally complex. Surveys consistently
find little or no overlap between the highest rated shows among African-Americans and the highest rated shows among
white Americans, though there is some evidence that this racial divide is blurring among younger consumers. Advertisers
have tended to see white viewers as a more desirable demographic; emerging networks, such as Fox, WB, or UPN, have
tended to perceive racial minorities as an underserved niche market and thus to provide more black-oriented programing.
Similarly, films with predominantly black casts have historically performed less successfully at the box office than films
with predominantly white casts, and as a result, even when Hollywood tells a story about the historic civil rights
movement, it tends to tell it from the perspective of liberal concerned whites rather than from the vantage point of the
African-American community. The entertainment industry is only starting to recognize the potential value of Hispanic
consumers, though the increased visibility of such stars as Antonio Banderas, Jennifer Lopez, Edward James Olmos, and
Rosie Perez, suggests a growing strategy of marketing to the growing number of Spanish speaking people in the United
States.
     Minority groups often become adept "poachers" of mainstream media content. Groups such as gays, lesbians,
and bisexuals are adept at picking up on inside jokes or suggestive subtexts in mainstream works; they read them against
gossip about the off-screen identities of the performers and recognize the paradoxes surrounding the casting of gay and
lesbian stars in heterosexual romantic situations. Sports programing and muscle-building magazines were popular among
gay consumers for many years because they were one of the few places in American culture that allowed an open and
frank pleasure in looking at male bodies, often in various states of undress. Mattel inadvertently created a cult object
among certain segments of the gay community when they released the Magic Earing Ken doll. Mattel had dressed Ken in
a lavender vest and gave him an earing, thus evoking certain subcultural codes of fashion that allowed fans to identify him
as a new queer icon. Subsequently, independent companies in San Francisco have begun to produce more explicitly gay
dolls of a similar size and proportion intended to be used as "boyfriends" for the Magic Earing Ken. When the general
public became aware of this particular market for the new product, Magic Earing Ken was quickly taken out of
circulation. For groups who have been marginalized in American culture, such appropriations and transformations of
mass culture materials are a core survival skill. Appropriation allows you to maintain a sense of pride and pleasure and to
preserve a sense of community in a mediated culture that often allows minority groups little or no direct representations of
their concerns. However, subcultural appropriation is not a desirable alternative to having the means of producing and
circulating your own stories and sharing your own concerns through the dominant channels of communication.
     Too often, when these subcultural meanings are pulled back into the mainstream, such as when they are reported
by newspapers or television news programs, they are distorted and exoticized, made to fit pre-existing stereotypes about
these groups, rather than being presented in a fashion that might challenge our sense of the way the world operates. For
example, a group known as the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) were concerned that Mattel's talking dolls fostered
gender stereotypes. They adopted a novel strategy for responding to this problem, buying talking Barbie and G.I. Joe
dolls, switching their voice boxes, and then smuggling them back into stores.  The reprogrammed Barbie would threaten
to eradicate the enemy hordes, while G.I. Joe planed shopping trips or complained about his hard math class. When the
news media reported this incident, however, they focused not on the group's criticism of gender stereotyping in the toy
industry but rather characterized the BLO's  actions as "terrorism" conducted "against children."
     Excluded groups are often more successful in gaining access to mainstream media when they mimic the familiar
forms of popular culture. For example, in Australia, members of the aboriginal communities have gained access to the
marketplace by framing their protests against racial injustice in the form of country-western songs.  Indigenous
performers use country-western's core themes, such as homeland and family, to express their own anger over historic
practices, such as the active separation of aboriginal children from their parents by government decree. The state-sanctioned kidnaping of aboriginal children continued into the 1950s and effected many people still alive in that country.
Archie Roach's song, "When the Children Went Away," was aired on mainstream radio and television in Australia,
helping many to better understand the problem of the "missing generation" and indigenous community struggles to rejoin
families.
     Various segments of the population constantly struggle over the question of what gets included or excluded in
the dominant culture as it is defined by the commercial imperatives of the entertainment industry. Some groups are
fighting for inclusion and representation within the mainstream channels of communication, other groups have contested
the broadening of the American "consensus" values to include the experiences, values, and stories of these once excluded
groups.  One such debate surrounded the decision of Ellen Degeneris to "come out" as a lesbian on her prime time
sitcom. Public acceptance of this action would signal a real victory for the Gay rights movement since its positions would
have been more widely accepted within the dominant culture. At the same time, the network, uncertain of public response
to this move, signaled the potential controversial character of this program by airing viewer advisories suggesting that
Ellen might not be appropriate for all viewers. The star protested that such advisories did not appear on much more
explicit but heterosexually-oriented sitcoms which aired before and after her program. Even Vice President Al Gore
offered his opinions criticizing ABC's handling of this situation. Often, debates about the media's representations of sex
and violence mask more fundamental disputes about tastes and values, irreconcilable differences between competing
populations that constitute the desired markets for commercial culture. When presidential candidate Bob Dole attacks the
lyrics of rap songs while praising the action films of Arnold Schwartzenegger, he is more likely expressing his discomfort
with the style and politics of urban black youths and his friendship for a star who has been a longtime backer of the
Republican party than making an informed distinction between different kinds of violent entertainment. Dissecting such
controversies will shed enormous insights into the state of the union and the shifting fault lines between the various
groups which constitute our multicultural society.

GLOBAL CULTURE
      These issues only become more complicated when American cultural goods are exported for international
consumption. Industry spokesmen often refer to Hollywood films as our national "ambassadors" to the international
marketplace of ideas. In practice, the success of Hollywood films in foreign countries often strips away financial support
for the production of original television programs or films that might be more indicative of and reflective about a
country's own particular cultural traditions and moral values. Many national leaders  are concerned that the young in
these countries especially gravitate towards American popular culture which they perceive as more "modern,"
"glamorous," or "hip" than their own indigenous cultural styles and traditions. This consumption of American popular
culture may accelerate the rate of change and the breakdown of traditional lifestyles and values within those countries.
Many have described this process as "cultural imperialism," suggesting that American influence is felt around the world
less through military dominance or economic control than through the transmission of cultural goods that are highly
attractive expressions of our cultural values. This process has continued with little change throughout the 20th century. For
example, the big thick glasses worn by stereotypical "japs" in American World War II films and cartoons were, in fact,
traces of the popularity of American film in Japan during the 1920s. Japanese "Mogos" and "Mobos" (Modern girls and
Modern boys) imitated lifestyles and fashions derived from Hollywood entertainment. In this case, they adopted the
glasses worn by slapstick comedy star Harold Lloyd as emblematic of the fast-paced and upwardly-mobile culture of Jazz
Age America. What seems frighteningly alien in our wartime propaganda was actually the reflection of America' own
influence on Asia in the prewar period.
     However, as this example suggests, the actual impact of these cultural goods upon any given culture can not be
simply predicted by looking only at the exported materials. Just as in the American context, a work becomes part of
popular culture when it is fit into the context of their daily lives. The consumption of American mass culture in Japan or
other foreign culture gets negotiated around existing values and traditions in those countries. So, the "Mobo" and "Mogo"
subculture, while modeled after elements appropriated from American entertainment, still seemed distinctly Japanese to
American visitors. This subculture was, in practice, a hybrid between American and Asian traditions. As we live in an
increasingly global culture, one marked by constant movements not only within but between different countries, our
popular culture has become increasingly "hybridized." Consider, for example, the case of the French film, La Femme
Nikita, which was strongly influenced by both the American film noir and action film traditions. La Femme Nikita has
subsequently been remade as an American film and as a television series for the USA Network, both requiring some
basic rethinking of it original European style and cultural politics. At the same time, the American remake, Point of No
Return, influenced the Hong Kong cinema where it was remade several times and fit into the style and genre traditions of
Asian popular cinema. In The Black Cat 2, the female assassin who is the protagonist of La Femme Nikita has become a
cyborg whose machinery keeps malfunctioning resulting in her shooting people at random. She has to be brought under
control so that she can more perfectly perform the duties expected of her. Here, the story has been reworked to reflect the
strong science fiction traditions of Asian popular culture (though in the process, it also draws on imagery from Blade
Runner).
     Some popular artists, especially those in the global fusion movement, have actively sought to combine different
cultural traditions to create strikingly new musical sounds or visual styles. Sheila Chankar, for example, a singer who has
mixed Celtic and Indian roots, put together an album called Weaving My Ancestors' Voices which fuses together the
radically different musical traditions of those two cultures: singing Celtic lyrics to traditionally Indian rhythms and vice-versa. Many of her lyrics, however, speak to the experience of trying to reconcile these different cultural identities. A
model of "cultural imperialism" may not be adequate to this more complex phenomenon of transnational circulation and
appropriation of popular culture. While American entertainment often still plays a dominant role in this process, the
themes and images of U.S. popular culture are transformed as they are consumed in these different national contexts and
in turn, American popular culture is increasingly being shaped by these international influences.
     Popular culture from other parts of the world is becoming more accessible to American consumers, as can be
witnessed by the growing popularity of various forms of "world music" or the cult followings surrounding Japanese
animation or Hong Kong action film on American college campus. However, Raymond William's distinctions between
residual, dominant, and emergent cultural traditions are helpful here in understanding some basic imbalances in the
circulation of these materials. American films dominate the screens, American television programs dominate the
networks, and American popular music dominates the record stores in many foreign cultures. However, international
popular culture remains on the fringes in the United States, reflecting at best an emergent cultural tradition, but only
rarely entering into the dominant culture. Australian critic Adrian Martin describes the experience of growing up in a
world where British television was associated with "quality" and "high culture," American television was associated with
"entertainment" and "vulgarity," and Australian television producers had to negotiate a space for themselves between the
two. British television imports in  the United States, however, appear only on public television or cable and therefore it is
relatively easy simply to ignore them rather than having their presence shaping how we perceive our own culture.
International popular culture is most likely to be accepted into the dominant mainstream when its foreign roots are
thoroughly disguised, as occurs when Asian-produced children's programs such as Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers are
dubbed into English and recut for American broadcast. The children who regularly watch such series probably have no
idea of their origins. What would be interesting to consider, however, is whether these children never-the-less do absorb
some aspects of Asian culture (such as martial arts styles or philosophical principles) as they consume these popular
programs.
     Popularity turns out to be another complex concept, one that requires us to be attentive to the economics of
cultural production, the sociology of media consumption, and the geography of cultural distribution. The mass culture
critique of popular culture fails to acknowledge the investments consumers make in the goods they buy and the ways
those cultural products are integrated into their everyday life. It often reduces popular culture to a "one size fits all"
phenomenon when in practice, the most popular texts are those that offer diverse pleasures to multiple audience
segments. Popular culture matters so much because it is integrated into our most banal social interactions.  We also
considered the struggle of other national cultures to protect their own traditions and to give expression to their own
experiences in light of American dominance over the cultural marketplace. We resisted a simplistic understanding of
cultural imperialism in favor of one that acknowledges the inherent impurity of culture and the multidirectional influences
that national cultures have on each other in a global economy. Still, we must concede that the stakes in those interactions
are uneven and America claims a bigger share of the world's attentions than most other cultural traditions while locking
its borders to or marginalizing imports from other countries. The struggle over the import and export of culture is,
ultimately, a struggle over the power to assert meanings and values. In the next section, we will explore why popular
culture is so meaningful to us.

CRITICAL READING

1) What connection does Jenkins draw between anxieties about mass culture and broader social and cultural changes?
Why does he claim that attacks on popular culture are often profoundly anti-democratic? How might we distinguish
between mass culture and popular culture?

2)Throughout this essay, Jenkins tries to anticipate and respond to common criticisms of popular culture. Point to some
examples where he adopts this strategy. What are the risks and benefits of adopting this approach?

3)What are media conglomerates? What impact do they have upon our contemporary cultural environment? Why should
we be concerned by the concentration of cultural power in the hands of a small number of companies?

4) Jenkins rejects the idea that popular culture depends upon appeals to the lowest common denominator. What
alternative model does he offer to explain popularity? How does he use the various audiences surrounding Star Trek to
illustrate his understanding of what makes a television show popular?

5)The essay argues that the media industry is only minimally responsive to the cultural tastes of minority communities.
Why? What threats or dangers do they perceive in being overly responsive to minority communities? What strategies have
they adopted for responding to minority interests without alienating the majority? How might cultural appropriation
represent an alternative source of pleasure and meaning for these communities? Under what circumstances would cultural
appropriation be an inappropriate or undesirable response to marginalization?

6) What is "cultural imperialism"? What connections have critics drawn between economic and political imperialism and
the global circulation of cultural products? What aspects of contemporary popular culture would challenge the idea that
America dominates the world through its production and distribution of popular culture?

LINKAGES

1) This essay argues that all arts occur within economic contexts which have some consequences for the kinds of artworks
that are produced. Read Bill Watterson's "The Cheapening of the Comics" and consider his explanation for how
economic factors are restricting the kinds of artistic experimentations which can occur within comics. How has the
economic context of comic strips shifted over time? Why does Watterson feel the current comics market is so hostile to
innovation? What kinds of economic contexts might enable a greater degree of creative freedom for comic strip artists
like Watterson?

2) Jenkins contrasts the concept of mass marketing with niche marketing, seeing both as characteristic of contemporary
popular culture. Ellen Seiter's "Toys'R'Us:Marketing to Children and Adults" adopts a similar model to discuss different
marketing strategies within the toys industry. What are the characteristics of toys intended for a mass market? How are
toys which are intended for a niche market of college educated parents different? To what degree do these market
segmentation reflect existing tastes and preferences within these groups? To what degree do these marketing strategy
shape our tastes and help us to tell what toys are appropriate for us on the basis of such factors as gender or class? How
might we employ the key ideas in Jenkins's essay to explain the complex interplay between economic and cultural factors
which Seiter describes?

3) Jenkins defines popular culture in terms of the ways mass produced goods as used by individual consumers or within
subcultural communities. Read Brenda Peterson's "Life is a Musical" as an account of the way one woman consumes
popular music. How has Peterson constructed her own "tapes against terror" from pre-existing and precirculating
materials? Is this an example of "poaching"? Are Peterson's tapes purely a means of personal expression or do they allow
her to share what she is thinking with a larger community of other listeners? What contrast does Peterson draw between
her own tapes and the information and entertainment available in the mass media?

4)Susan Clerc's "Estrogen Brigades and  Big Tits' Threads: Media Fandom Online and Off" offers a more detailed
discussion of the subculture of media fans and the ways they are relating to each other through digital media. Compare
and contrast her discussion of this topic with Jenkins's account of Star Trek fandom. What conflicts arise on the net
between different fan communities who share interests in the same program but understand it in very different terms?
How have the groups dealt with these conflicts? How might the account of "popularity" offered here help to explain the
phenomenon which Clerc describes?

PREPARING TO WRITE

1. Select two favorite media products.  Using the Web, find out as much as you can about who makes each product.  What
other media products do they make?  Are they owned by a larger company?  If so, what other divisions does this company
include?  Do these divisions make other media products?  If not, what media, if any, do these divisions use most heavily to
advertize
their products.  For each original media product, make an outline of its connections to other companies and products.  In
what ways, if any, are the two outlines similar?  In what ways, if any, are they different?

2. Reflect on the ways you and your friends or family members consume media products. What kinds of media do you
most closely associate with each member of the family? When, where, and under what conditions do they consume these
media? When you are watching television as a group, for example, who makes the decisions about what shows to watch?
Are there conflicts about the use of shared equipment or about differing tastes and interests? How do these conflicts get
resolved? To what degree does media consumption in your family follow the same gender-based patterns Jenkins
describes?

3) Get each member of the class to list their favorite books, films, television shows, cds, etc. See if you can make a map
on the blackboard showing the tastes the class has in common and the ways that their taste differ. What factors account for
the similarities and differences in the class's tastes?  How might the life experiences of individual students shape whether
they do or do not like a particular product? If students share one preference with each other, are they more or less likely to
share other tastes? Take a media product that is widely enjoyed within the group and ask each student to explain why they
like it. Do the students like the works for the same or different reasons? Drawing on the discussions of taste and
popularity in the introduction, write an explanation for the patterns you observed.

4)Watch some animated films from Japan or some actions films from Hong Kong, preferably with a group of other
students. Talk about how the films did or did not resemble similar films made in the United States. What aspects of the
films surprised you? Why? Did these films conform to or break with your stereotypes about Asia? Jenkins argues that
American childhood and youth culture is increasingly shaped by Asian influences. Do you agree? How conscious were
you as a child of the fact that some of the entertainment you consumed originated in other countries?

5)If you have lived in another culture, reflect upon your experiences of popular culture there. How was the place of
popular culture in this country different from the American context? How much access did you have to American popular
culture when you lived there? Did you respond differently to American products than those which originated in the
country where you were living? What forms of popular culture did you encounter there which reflected the country's own
national traditions and values? What images about American life would you have formed looking at American popular
culture from the perspective of this other country? Based on these reflections, select one key aspect of the role of popular
culture in that country as a focus for your essay.

6)Research which countries have the greatest access to and participation on the internet. What factors might account for
the patterns you identify? Should we be concerned that some parts of the world seem to have little or no chance of
catching up with the changing technologies in the near future? What could be done to change this situation?  Why might
some countries prefer not to have their citizens access the net?  Based on this information, write an editorial calling for a
change in the international distribution of the internet.
 

THE MEANINGFULNESS OF POPULAR CULTURE

MAKING MEANING
Most of the time, we act as if our relationships to popular culture were essentially meaningless.  We speak of  "mindless
entertainment" or "eye candy."  We describe television as the "boob tube" or the "idiot box" and speak of ourselves as
"couch potatoes" when we spend time consuming it. We contemptuously tell those who seem overly invested in the
mythology of popular culture to "get a life." Yet, as this discussion has suggested, our relationship with popular culture is
deeply meaningful. That is, popular culture is very much bound up with the production, circulation, and critical
assessment of meanings.  We invest ourselves in its contents and we get something from our interactions with it. Starting
off from the assumption that people are cultural "dupes" closes off the serious examination of popular culture, which can
only start when we try to specify why popular culture matters to the people who consume it.
     The meaningfulness of popular culture becomes clear when we consider the ways that references to specific
brand names of consumer goods or specific popular artists can become a useful shorthand for communicating a much
broader array of information. Consider, for example, this passage from Allen Steele's science fiction short story, "Lost in
a Shopping Mall." Here, a detective has been hired to track down a teenager who has escaped into a virtual environment
designed to be the ultimate shopping mall. The detective makes assumptions about where he will find her based on what
he knows about adolescent tastes and interests. Steele writes: "The trick was in thinking like a teenager, so he ignored the
more upscale and conservative clothiers and the places that offered fine-art reproductions and household gadgets. He
passed the Museum Store and L.L. Bean and Bausch & Lomb, because there was little in them that would catch the fancy
of a fifteen-year-old girl. ... She knew computers and high-end electronics, so he visited Radio Shack and Babbages. She
was into photography, so he went to places that sold  cameras. So on through the mall, until he covered dozens of stores
that carried all those items, randomly hitting places like Walgreen's  and Spencer's Gifts on the odd chance that she might
wander into them....She liked to read, so he went into every bookstore he found Waldenbooks, B. Dalton's, Borders." As a
reader who has grown up in contemporary consumer culture, you probably have little or no difficulty following this
passage, even though the references to various stores would seem cryptic to someone from another time and place.
Imagine how many footnotes there would have to be to annotate this story for someone reading it a hundred years from
now. We may know more or less about the various chain stores referenced here. As people who have regularly gone to
the mall all of our lives, we understand that these different brands designate different consumer choices and different
lifestyles. We also understand and share the protagonist's core assumption that the girl is more likely to be found in some
stores rather than others, because these consumer choices reflect broader configurations of cultural tastes that help to
define one generation from another.
     Generational disputes about cultural values are often implicit within debates about popular culture. Consider, for
example, the concerns that members of the so-called Generation X are more likely to get basic information about current
events from entertainment sources (the comedy routines on late night television, the lyrics of rap songs, the jokes on
sitcoms, docudramas, soap operas, courtroom dramas, etc.) than from newspapers or newscasts.  Many adults were
horrified by this discovery because they assume that what these entertainment sources have to tell us about our daily
reality is less relevant, important, or meaningful than what we learn from CNN.
     However, let's consider more closely the kinds of information presented by both sources. News is driven by the
demand for topicality, for short self-contained stories of immediate importance, typically focused on unfolding events.
This pressure for topicality has led news increasingly to focus on stories dealing with crime, accidents, weather
catastrophes, and political conflicts. The structures of journalism, which requires attention to "both sides" of every issue,
assume the partisan structure of two-party politics and in turn, help to exaggerate the differences and conflicts between
the parties, turning every policy issue into a contest where one side will win and the other will lose. The focus of news
also tends to privilege scandals (that generate new revelations or heated reactions) over long-term policy debates that are
often difficult to fit within the rhetorical structure of the evening newscast. Watching the news, then, may tell us less than
we think about the long-term developments in our political and cultural landscape.  Many issues that will have lasting
impacts on our society -- race relations, environmental concerns, the state of social security, issues of privacy and
personal freedom -- are chronically under-reported by the American news media. Some studies, for example, have found
that most people have an exaggerated sense of the crime rate in their home towns because most of the crimes are reported
on the news and thus seem disproportionately central to the life of the community.
     Entertainment, on the other hand, typically focuses on longer term developments, especially those having to do
with lifestyle choices or identity politics. The lag time between the production and airing of entertainment television
means that it can not effectively respond to the "news of the day" kinds of topics. The world changes too rapidly for jokes
made about yesterday's headlines to still be relevant a month or two later when the episode actually airs.  Sitcoms, for
example, depend upon staging the conflicting values of different groups and as such, are especially effect for mapping
subtle shifts in our thinking about race, gender, sexuality, generational differences, and the like. Learning about the world
through popular culture is not an effective way to understand the specifics of an election campaign or the outcome of a
congressional vote. However, it may be a better way of monitoring long-term shifts in our culture than watching the
evening news.  Journalism historian Michael Schudson argues that what democracy requires is not an informed citizen,
who knows every detail of ongoing policy debates, but rather a monitoring citizen who follows and evaluates broader
trends effecting their society.
      The shift from news to entertainment as a means of monitoring democratic life also reflects a shift in our sense
of what counts as political. A major focus of the feminist movement has been the recognition that not all politics occurs
within the public sphere, that the "personal" is also political. Television entertainment, on the whole, is better at
representing personal rather than public sphere politics. When television  represents larger political debates, it does so
most effectively by pulling them down to a human scale, dealing with the consequences of those policies upon the lives of
everyday people, staging ideological debates through confrontations between familiar characters who take different sides
on the issues.
     One can understand why traditional journalists or politicians are frightened by this merging of the spheres of
entertainment and news, because it is linked directly to a shifting conception of what counts as political and who gets to
decide what kinds of political debates are worthy of our attention.  For example, the issue of sexual harassment had been
widely discussed on television talk shows (such as those hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, or Sally Jesse Raphael)
for many years before the issue entered the mainstream news media in the midst of congressional hearings surrounding
the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and the accusation that Thomas had harassed his former law
clerk, Anita Hill. The talk shows, whose audiences were predominantly composed of women, were quick to focus on
sexual harassment as an issue because it effected a large number of working women, while the news coverage tended to
focus its attention onto the specific claims made by Thomas and Hill.

CULTURAL COMPETENCIES
     Starting off with the assumption that popular culture is meaningless is too easy, allowing us to paint our
criticisms of television or other entertainment media with broad brushes rather than forcing us to deal with the
complexities within any particular example of popular culture. We should be suspicious of the kinds of sweeping
generalization that dominate much writing about television, video games, comic books, popular music, and the like.
When a critic feels compelled to dismiss out of hand  whole genres of entertainment or whole media of expression, we
should assume that the critic has, in fact, not looked  at them closely and can't meaningfully distinguish between different
works in these traditions. In short, we should conclude that such writers don't have a clue what they are talking about.
Suppose I went to the ballet  and grumbled loudly to the person sitting next to me, "This is lousy! I don't have a clue
what's going on! Are they trying to tell a story or what? What's with this tutu business, anyway?" I would be thought a
moron or at least someone who had inadequately prepared themselves to appreciate the aesthetic experience of the dance
performance. Suppose, on the other hand, that I were to turn on television knowing little or nothing of the specifics of
individual series or even the genre traditions within which specific series operated.  For his book, The Age of Missing
Information, cultural critic Bruce McKibbons taped and watched all of the programs aired on his local cable system in a
given 24 hour period and then concluded that television was empty of meaning and incapable of telling a complex story.
McKibbons is widely regarded as an intellectual, especially among those who like to boast that they don't own a
television set.
     Yet, in practice, consuming popular culture is as much a skill-based activity as appreciating high culture. The
skills involved are more widely available to a larger segment of the population. We absorb them informally rather than
through formal training.  A parent watching television or movies with their children often narrates the story, pointing to
those elements that seem most important, offering interpretations of the character's actions and motivations. This training
comes so early in our lives that we don't retain a lasting memory of it.  On the other hand, many of us require schooling in
order to more fully appreciate the ballet, the opera, modern art, classical music, or the legitimate theater.  We have been
taught to devalue our competencies as consumers of popular culture. Often, we don't even acknowledge that such
competencies exist. Watching television, we assume, takes no skill at all. Yet, the fact remains that people need to learn
how to watch television.
     Television, for example, is a long-form medium.  Television is capable of telling stories of much greater scope
than any other storytelling medium and can allow us to watch characterization unfold over time, in response to a broad
array of different situations. While any given episode of a series may tell a relatively self-contained story that can be
understood by a casual viewer, the real complexity of a series only becomes apparent when we have watched a significant
number of episodes. We need to know when an action breaks with the program's conventions. We need to know the
meaning of a particular look or facial expression a character displays in a given situation. We need to know how the
events in this episode relate to the larger program history, shed light on previous or subsequent interactions between the
characters. Even where programs remain relatively static, allowing little or no changes in the characters over time, we
still get more out of watching the episodes if we know the characters and their personalities than if we don't.
     None of this complexity is apparent to someone like McKibbons who watches program after program without
establishing their larger contexts and without grasping much about their generic traditions. McKibbons can find little or
no meaning there because he doesn't know how to locate meaning in this medium. However, rather than seeing this as
evidence of his own failure or inadequacies as a critic, he sees it as a failure of the medium or as evidence of  simple
minded audiences.   Such criticisms, as we have suggested, often mask powerfully anti-democratic impulses, a profound
distrust of our collective intelligence and our ability to make judgements.

INVENTION AND CONVENTION
     Such critics are also often dismissive of popular culture because its works lack "originality" and are highly
dependent upon formulas shared by many artists. Such criticisms reflect a particular understanding of artistic creation,
one that originated during the Romantic era and enshrined the individual expressivity of lone artists as the primary criteria
of artistic worth. This modern conception of originality stressed how these individuals broke with their artistic traditions
rather than examining how they built upon the repertoire of shared forms, themes, and stories of their cultural heritage. In
earlier ages, ownership over culture was assumed to be shared.  The ancient Greeks spoke of drawing inspiration from
their "muses." In practice, what this meant is that their storytellers pulled together materials they had learned from other
storytellers and reworked them to meet the needs of a particular occasion or to respond to the desires of a specific
audience.  Homer, an ancient bard, improvised his stories based on formula, expanding on incidents that provoked active
responses, moving more rapidly when the audience grew restless.  The bard played a special role in insuring the
continuity and circulation of cultural traditions.This is the way culture grew for thousands of years of human history,
through the transmission of familiar stories and conventions from storyteller to storyteller. A bard might earn praise for
being especially vivid at recounting the shared mythology of his or her society but they would probably not think of
themselves in terms of cultural innovation or invention. So pervasive was the assumption that culture built upon what
came before that one 14th century writer discussed four ways of making books, none of which involved the idea of totally
original creation: "A man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called
a  scribe' (scriptor). Another write the work of others with additions which are not his own, and he is called a  compiler'
(compilator). Another writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in the principal place, adding his own
for purposes of explanation, and he is called a  commentator' (commentator)....Another writes both his own work and
others' but with his own work in principal place adding others' for the purpose of confirmation; and such a man should be
called an  author.' (Auctor)." In the middle ages, authorship was assumed to be only another form of appropriation.
     The rise of the Romantic conception of the expressive individual, on the other hand, coincided with the
introduction of our modern legal understanding of culture as intellectual property. Our current intellectual property law
places a high emphasis upon invention as what generates economic value and thus stresses the ways that new works
break with others in the same aesthetic and cultural tradition. This model provides some limited protection for writers to
make money off the things they create -- and a great deal more protection for media conglomerates to maintain the
profitability of their cultural "franchises." But, it has had some negative consequences for our culture as a whole, making
it much more difficult for us to participate in the growth and development of our shared mythologies, making it harder for
us to circulate our own retellings of the adventures of heroes and villains who we feel particularly encapsulate our shared
beliefs and values. Robin Hood and King Arthur were part of a folk culture and as such, belonged to everyone in their
society. Their stories were elaborated over time as they were retold by many generations and in the process, their stories
gained greater cultural resonance, accrued more and more meaning and developed greater psychological depth.  Kirk and
Spock belong to Viacom and there may be legal consequences to posting unauthorized stories about them to the web, for
example. We cannot build upon the Star Trek universe as a shared mythology, although various artists may "rip it off,"
creating imitations of its characters that often water down their distinctive features rather than adding greater depth to our
understanding of them.  Valuing originality or individuality is not the same thing as valuing creativity, though our culture
often confuses the two concepts. Creativity may occur through collective elaboration of shared materials just as readily as
through individual innovation.  Creativity may involve a lone author or the collaboration of an entire production company,
as is often the case in modern mass media. The distinction has more to do with what values we place on collective versus
individual experience, to what degree we value artistic traditions as shared cultural resources or emphasize individual
rights to self expression.
     As a rule, our culture only gives respect to those artworks that can claim to be the work of an individual artist
and is deeply suspicious of works that originate in an industrial context. Hollywood film, for example, is a highly
collaborative artform, one that involves the efforts of hundreds of cast and crew members who each make distinctive
contributions to the work. Claims for the artistic value of films, however, are often made on the basis of claims about the
film's director, even though the director, historically, did not control many key parts of the production process (including
scripting, casting, scoring, and editing). As a form of popular culture makes a bid for artistic status, we are often asked to
identify a single creative intelligence behind it, whether or not these claims adequately describe the actual production
process.  For example, comic books were initially an anonymous art form; their publishers provided little or no
information about the people who wrote, drew, and colored them. As the audience for comics has become more mature
and more upscale, however, they have demanded more information about creative personnel and have begun to draw
distinctions between different inkers, colorists, and authors. In turn, this consumption context has encouraged the
development of more idiosyncratic visual styles or narrative structures since these distinctions from the larger tradition
increased the value of these works in the marketplace and increased the amount of money that comic book artists could
command for their labors. Some comic book publishers have created distinctive series or labels to designate a space for
individual experimentation and artistic innovation as opposed to the more familiar plots and situations of the superhero
genre. Yet, the basic superhero comics still provide the generic building blocks that enable the more "mature" or
"experimental" approaches taken by such comic book auteurs as Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Scott
McCloud, or Kurt Busiac.
     All meaningful cultural works are a mixture of invention and convention. If they were pure invention, they
would be totally unintelligible to anyone except the writers and their close circle of friends. Storytellers rely on
conventions to help orientate their audiences to the basic terrain of the story, to create identification with characters, and
to link the events of the story to the realm of everyday experience. If the artworks were pure convention, they would fail to
attract the attention and interests of the audience. Even if we like our stories to follow familiar structures, we don't really
want to hear the same story told over and over again without any variation. Invention becomes the way of adding
difference to our culture, of getting us to look at the world from a fresh perspective. The balance of invention and
convention varies from one cultural form and context to another. Modern art has encouraged a high degree of invention,
though the works of Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollack, or James Joyce, to choose artists known for their aesthetic
innovations, often make sense only when read against the context of various artistic conventions that are being
consciously rejected. These artists quickly developed their own formulas which allow us to readily recognize the
distinctive features of their work. Others imitated or drew inspiration from their distinctive styles, insuring that they have
a much broader cultural influence as these approaches became more conventional.  Popular culture, with its desire for
broader accessibility, has tended to depend much more heavily upon convention, though connoisseurs and fans of popular
culture value the pleasure of watching how any given genre work plays against and revises its larger tradition.  So, really,
what we are talking about is a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind. Modern art and popular culture occupy
different points on the continuum between pure invention and pure convention, but no work really occupies the extremes
of that continuum. Rather than dismissing popular culture as formulaic, it is better to ask how it makes use of formulas
and why certain formulas have found to be of recurring interest.

EVALUATING POPULAR CULTURE
     Most of the best contemporary writing about popular culture, on the other hand, starts with the assumption that
consumers are not stupid and that if any form of popular culture has enjoyed commercial success, it is probably because it
has meaningfully connected with one or another segment of the population. Not all forms of popular culture are equally
meaningful for all consumers. So, to understand what makes a form of popular culture meaningful, one needs to start by
identifying those audiences that  have embraced it and then to examine how it "fits" within their larger social and cultural
experiences. Many non-fans, for example, find country music's combination of sentimentality and macho posturing off-putting. However, these seemingly contradictory features of the musical genre can be understood when we place the
songs into the original context -- as the music of working men, especially in the southern and the southwestern United
States. The melodramatic lyrics express feelings of vulnerability and loss that are given few other outlets within
traditional masculinity. Country singers function as professional mourners who cry into their beer so that their working
class masculine listeners do not have to violate masculine norms of stoicism and rugged silence.  If you want to share your
feelings with a friend, simply plug a quarter in the jukebox and let Waylon Jennings do the hard part. At the same time,
the credibility of these expressions of loss and suffering depends upon the performer's ability to project a hypermasculine
image, to be a tough-fighting, rough-drinking, hard-working man who can easily attract the identification and allegiance
of his listeners. The movement of country singers from the fringes to the mainstream of contemporary popular culture has
resulted in a muting of both sides of this pattern -- the lyrics are no longer as heavily melodramatic while the performers
are given a greater latitude to break with the constraints of traditional masculinity.
     Any evaluation of the intellectual or aesthetic worth of a particular work of popular culture requires us to
understand the contexts in which it was produced and consumed and the generic tradition from which it originated. Our
standards for evaluating works of popular culture need to be flexible to account for the diverse cultural traditions it
encompasses and the diverse ways its artifacts get used. Such flexibility is implicit in the ways we talk about high culture.
We do not assess an African carving, a Greek statue, a Russian icon, a Renaissance portrait, an impressionist landscape,
and an abstract painting by the same standards and criteria. We are taught to appreciate them in relation to alternative
artistic movements with their own goals, their own characteristic subject matters,  and their own standards of
accomplishment. Why, then, should we evaluate popular culture against standards set by high culture or embrace one
overarching aesthetic criteria -- psychological realism, say -- as the baseline for evaluating all forms of cinema?  Should
we really assess rock or jazz against the background of classical music, when we don't judge symphonies by the same
standards by which we judge operas or medieval chants? The meaningfulness of popular culture only becomes apparent
when we learn an equally complex vocabulary for talking about popular aesthetics, for recognizing different forms of
aesthetic accomplishment in various media, and for recognizing the ways that their formal properties emerge from their
interactions with particular audiences who consume them in particular contexts.
     However, this call for flexible aesthetic standards that reflect both the audience context and the goals of the
culture producers  is not an argument against evaluation. We all evaluate artworks, when we decide what cd or comic
book to buy, what movie to go see, what television program to watch. Our debates about the relative merits of Sarah
Paretsky,  Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie are central to the pleasures of participating in popular culture.  One reason
we are drawn to common texts, after all, is that they provide a basis for discussions and conversations with other people;
popular culture fosters an easy sociability even with people who we have never met but who have grown up watching the
same television programs as we have. These conversations can take many different forms, but among the most common
are discussions about what we like and dislike among contemporary cultural offerings. As critics, we need to be more
self-conscious about articulating the standards by which we make our evaluations than we are in casual conversation or
individual decision-making. We need to share with others why we think one work is better than another. And, this means
that we need to be as explicit about the principles of popular aesthetics as we are about the standards by which we
evaluate works when we encounter them on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art. However, the best work on popular
culture adopts standards of evaluation that  are appropriate to the artworks being assessed.

CULTURAL "FIT"
     The claim that popular culture is meaningful may be misleading, however. Not all of our involvement with
popular culture has to do with the production and circulation of meanings. The process of consuming popular culture may
be meaningful in its own right. Reading a newspaper may signal our concern with contemporary events and our
awareness of the world around us. It may become a ritual that we perform everyday at a certain time, as we eat breakfast
or lunch, as we unwind at the end of the day. Often, at the end of this process, we do not remember anything we read, but
this does not mean the activity was meaningless to us. We come away from it with a sense of civic virtue that may be
more important, in the long run, than whether we remember the outcome of a particular congressional vote or the score of
a specific ball game.  In her book, Reading the Romance, Janice Radway argues that the reason housewives like to read
romance novels only partially has to do with the stories the novels tell. Reading a book for pleasure, for many of these
women, represents an attempt to claim a moment for themselves, their needs, and their desires in the midst of a day
otherwise dominated by the demands of others. The housewife defines herself most often in relation to her ability to take
care of her husband, her children, and their pets, not in terms of her social life or intellectual interests. Reading a book
becomes a way of seizing time for oneself and in that sense, it almost doesn't matter what book one reads, though the
romance genre also provides a reassuring fantasy images of romantic relationships where the man is attentive to and
responsive to his lover's emotional needs.
     Often, we turn to popular culture as a way of blocking other kinds of social interactions. Suppose an adolescent
storms into the house at the end of the school day, bounds up to his or her room, and jacks up the volume on the stereo.
The choice of music may be personally important. The student may listen to the same album every day and has probably
stopped really hearing the lyrics or even focusing consciously on the beat. What gets communicated most emphatically is
that this particular teen does not want to communicate with anyone, doesn't want to answer parents' questions about the
school day, and doesn't want younger siblings intruding on his or her privacy. The loud music works as a wall of sound to
blast away all intruders. This use of the cd-player is socially and culturally meaningful, but it is not centrally concerned
with the specific meanings of the lyrics.
     Critics of popular culture often point to the rapid embrace of new products or new personalities as evidence that
the public is easily swayed by marketing campaigns, that advertising creates false demands or fosters fads.  It is hard not
to think of consumerism in these terms when we see hordes of people lined up at Christmas time to buy a Tickle-Me
Elmo, a Beanie Baby, a Furbie, or some other scarcely produced but heavily marketed toy.  However, if one looks closely,
one will usually find that new products or personalities are widely accepted only if they "fit" the needs, values, and
lifestyles of their desired and desiring consumers. Where this is not the case, they are rejected. For example, the laserdisc
player was a technically superior technology to the video-cassette-player, but despite extensive marketing, it did not catch
on with the American public. The laser disc player reproduced both sound and image with greater accuracy and preserved
the original proportions of the film image. However, it did not allow users to record their own tapes. "Time shifting" was
a major advantage for the VCR because it was introduced at a moment when work schedules were undergoing profound
changes.  Many Americans were working significantly longer hours each week than they had the previous decade. The
nation had shifted gradually towards a 24-hour-a-day work schedule, with more and more people working night shifts.
The scheduling of prime time television, however, still reflected the assumption that most viewers had a 9-to-5 job, with
popular programing beginning at 8 pm eastern time (shortly after what used to be considered the dinner hours). At the
same time, more and more women had entered the workforce, but soap operas, talk shows, and other kinds of programs
which historically attracted large numbers of female viewers are still aired predominantly during the daytime hours. As a
consequence, the VCR was widely embraced as a technology that enabled people to record programs  they wanted to
watch whenever they aired and then to enjoy them as their own schedule allowed. This "time shifting" function allowed
people to maintain their ties to the dominant culture and to participate in social exchanges about network television
despite fundamental shifts in the ways Americans were structuring their time. Interestingly, the introduction and rapid
adoption of the VCR closely paralleled the embrace of the microwave oven, another technology that enabled adjustments
in the lifestyle expectations of working Americans. The marketing surrounding the VCR, then, did not so much create a
demand for an unfamiliar technology as help people identify how this technology might respond to problems and stresses
they were already experiencing.
      One can similarly understand the expanding public interest in the Internet as responsive to an equally profound
shift in the ways we relate to space. The past several decades have seen a dramatic increase in the geographic mobility of
Americans. Movements between jobs or even between positions within the same companies often involve movements
from city to city or even region to region. The average American moves once every five years. This mobility has broken
down traditional friendship networks and spread apart extended families, making it more desirable than before for people
to communicate across vast distances cheaply and efficiently. As early as the 1960s, sociologists such as Alvin Toffler
had predicted that our social relationships would become more superficial and disposable. We would invest less of
ourselves getting to know people who we would interact with only for a short period of time before moving to a radically
different social context. The Internet, on the other hand, has given rise to an alternative model for how we will live and
relate in a world of rapid mobility. At its best, the net culture is grassroots and participatory without being geographically
local.  We may well choose to invest more of ourselves into "virtual communities" that bring together like minded
individuals regardless of their physical locations. One can continue to participate in these new relationships despite
whether you ever come face to face with the people involved or whether you move your physical location many times in
the course of your interactions. E-mail also allows parents to remain in touch with their children or couples working in
separate cities to have more regular and consistent communication. Interestingly, the quickest embrace of the net has
come from those groups -- children on the one hand, the elderly on the other -- who have the least mobility. The net has
allowed children to escape their parents' tight control over their lives and enter into a play space much larger than the
restricted environment of their own apartments. The net has also allowed greater opportunities for social interactions for
homebound elderly, who previously had been forced to turn to television or the radio for "company."  At the same time,
geographically-isolated rural schools have tended to wire their classrooms at a much faster rate than urban or suburban
schools. The Internet has gained wider and wider public acceptance not because we are blindly following some cultural
trend but because the technology responds to larger social and economic shifts that shape all aspects of modern life.
      Having described this "fit" between consumer goods and larger social/cultural trends, I must again stress the
fact that consumer choices, while flexible, are not unlimited. As consumers, we do exercise a certain degree of power
over our culture. The commercial success of a television program, such as Friends, is likely to lead to a broad array of
knock off series that follow the same basic generic structure or try to appeal to the same audience. Yet, we are still
making our initial choices from a menu of what has been offered to us by the entertainment industry. Media
conglomerates are often slow to recognize the potential viability of forms of culture that fall outside their own
stereotypical conceptions of the marketplace and they have only limited means to identify consumer demands that are not
being satisfied by the range of television programs already on offer.
     The recent development of a girls market for computer games might be an interesting case in point. For many
years, boys were considered to be the dominant, if not the exclusive, market for video and computer games and the games
industry catered to their tastes. One male computer industry executive told Her Interactive's Sheri Granier: "I have more
left handed players than I have female players and I don't make games for left-handed people. Why should I make games
for you?"  At the time the girls game movement started, approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of the sales and revenues
generated by the $10 billion game industry were derived from male consumers. Boys were, on average, getting access to
computer games three or four years before their sisters and female classmates. In effect, these games functioned as a
technological head-start program that insured that boys had greater comfort with computers and greater confidence in
their ability to manipulate digital materials by the time they reached school age than girls did. When computers were put
in the classroom, boys often pushed girls out of the way and took control over the technology.  Long term, this trend had
serious potential consequences in terms of helping to determine whether women were likely to major in computer science
in college or enter into high technology related professions. The industry had generally concluded that girls had little
interest in games.
     The release of the Barbie Interactive products, however, dramatically changed this perception. The initial Barbie
software, Barbie Fashion Designer was the second highest selling game or toy for the 1997 Christmas season and helped
to pave the way for other computer software and games targeted at female consumers. Many of these games were created
by smaller female-run start-up companies who had explicit goals of empowering young girls, building up their self-confidence, and helping them to be better prepared to confront an increasingly technological world. Many of these
companies, however, developed games critics felt fostered traditional conceptions of femininity, followed closely on the
themes and iconography of magazines aimed at teen girls, or fostered "relationship" skills rather than allowing the
opportunities for competition that dominate the boys game market. The companies argued that they were creating a new
market and needed to be relatively conservative in their definitions of gender in order to reach the largest possible group
of consumers. More radical questioning of gender roles, they felt, would have to wait until they had established a stable
economic base for their products. The sharpest critics of the new "games for girls" were female fans of action-adventure
and fighting games, such as Quake or Doom. These women saw participating in combat games as a good way of playing
with power and thus becoming more comfortable with the competition they would encounter in the workplace. In the
words of one self-proclaimed game grrl, "maybe it's a problem that little girls don't like to play games that slaughter
entire planets. Maybe it's why we are still underpaid, still struggling, still fighting for our rights. Maybe if we had the
mettle to take on an entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller battles we face everyday." These players lobbied for
the manufactures of existing computer games to be more responsive to the tastes and sensibilities of their female players
rather than creating "separate but equal" products for girls.
     The games industry, thus, became a focal point for debates about our changing conceptions of gender. Precisely
because they saw computers as a simulation technology that prepared children for their future lives, there were enormous
stakes in deciding who would have access to those technologies and what kinds of images they would project. Such
questions could only be asked, however, once some games targeting girls were available. The absence of such games
helped to channel girls away from the technology and to decrease their opportunities for developing skills and knowledge
many feel are essential for future job prospects. Once the new market was identified, however, and companies arose to
satisfy its demands, then one could engage in a much fuller debate about the relative merits of different approaches to
drawing girls to computers and different models for what a game for girls should look like.
     The meaningfulness of popular culture may be measured in a variety of different ways: in terms of the ability to
popular culture to call attention to the processes of social and political change, in terms of the cultural competencies that
cultural forms demand of their consumers, in terms of the kinds of creativity fostered by different kinds of cultural
productions, in terms of how the process of cultural consumption influences other kinds of social relationships, and in
terms of the "fit" between a cultural product and the general way of life of a particular society. In each case, popular
culture is found to be deeply meaningful to the people who produce and consume it. Throughout this discussion, we have
been making the case that it is important to take popular culture seriously on its own terms rather than dismiss it as a
debasement of high culture traditions.  In the next section, we will offer you advice on how you may be a more effective
writer about popular culture.  You already possess some kinds of expertise about popular culture; we hope to help you
become more effective at communicating what you know to others.

CRITICAL READING

1)Jenkins suggests that entertainment programs often give a different picture of the world around us than can be found on
the news. His primary example here is the sitcom.  Can you point to examples of contemporary issues that have surfaced
on recent sitcoms? What other forms of entertainment reflect on contemporary issues and current events? What kinds of
representation of the world do they offer? What issues get foregrounded there and why? You might, for example, want to
consider the roles that "Politically Incorrect" or MTV's "Rock the Vote" campaign have played in making political and
social issues more visible to students.

2) Jenkins refers to "those who like to boast that they don't own a television set." What does he suggest by this phrase?
Why might someone boast about not owning a television? Would someone boast about not owning a book? How are these
two claims similar or different? How does the author feel about such boasts? What might be lost by not owning a
television set?

3) The process and context of consumption may be an important aspect of the meaningfulness of popular culture. Look
more closely at the examples Jenkins provides of the process of consumption. What makes process meaningful in each
case? Do these consumers also make investments in the meanings generated by the works they consume? Would the
teenager be equally happy with any kind of music or the housewife with any kind of novel?

4) Jenkins quotes a male game company executive who questioned why he should make games for women when he did
not make games for "left-handed people." Dissect this quote to see what assumptions this executive is making. What
analogy is he drawing between women and "left-handed" people? What might be the implications of such an analogy?
Why might he be reluctant to produce games targeting women? What arguments might you make in response to this
statement? Should game companies make software for women?

LINKS

1) Jenkins makes a comparison between the kinds of information we receive from entertainment programs and that we
receive from news, suggesting that it may not be irrational to use entertainment as one way to "monitor" American
politics. Read Bill Moyer's "New News and a War of Cultures" and Ted Koppel's "The Worst Is Yet To Come." What
position do they take on the relationship between news and entertainment? Jenkins argues that these shifts reflect a shift in
what counts as politics, away from the public sphere and towards a "personal is political" position. What assumptions do
Moyer and Koppel make about the nature of politics and what kinds of news stories are important to cover? What are
their stakes in this debate?

2) Jenkins points to the ways that "intellectual property laws" restrict our ability to participate in contemporary popular
culture. What do we mean by "intellectual property"? What assumptions does this metaphor make about the nature of
culture? Read Rosemary Coombe's "A Walk Down King Street." Here, she describes a range of cultural uses that she
witnessed on the way to a lecture to her law class. Which of these cultural uses are likely to be legally contested? Why?
Describe the interests of both parties in those disputes. Do you think, on the whole, our contemporary intellectual
property laws foster or restrict cultural development?

3)David Bordwell's "Aesthetics in Action" tries to identify some artistic principles that shape the contemporary action
film and to draw comparisons between Hollywood and Hong Kong action films. What aesthetic standards does he
propose? How does he justify those standards through reference to more culturally respected works or to older cultural
traditions? What comparisons does he make between Hong Kong and Hollywood films? Which kind of action film does
he tend to prefer? Do you think his standards are appropriate to the genre, their audience, and the contexts in which these
films are made? How does his approach to the evaluation of popular culture parallel or differ with that proposed here?

4)Simon Frith's "Genre Rules" outlines why genre distinctions are important to the production,
distribution, promotion, consumption, and evaluation of popular music. Map each stage of the process and the kinds of
evaluations that get made. How important are convention and invention to this process? Why is it desirable to be able to
fit popular music into recognizable classifications? To what degree does this make popular music more formulaic? What
room remains in this system for invention?

65) Jenkins argues that the desire for community within a highly transitory society has been a key factor fueling the
adaption of the internet and the web. Do you agree or disagree with that argument? How basic is the need for community
to human interactions? Does the net facilitate the building of community or is it more likely to isolate us from each other?
Read Howard Rhinegold's "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community." Rhinegold helped to popularize the concept of
"virtual community." What does he mean by this phrase? What evidence does he offer for the community-building
potentials of these media? How does he define "community"? What factors in the "real world" does he think fuel the
desire for virtual community?  Does he acknowledge the limitations of virtual communities?
 

PREPARING TO WRITE
1)Look more closely at the selection from Allen Steele's "Lost in a Shopping Mall." What kinds of information gets
conveyed by his reference to contemporary stores here? Look for your own passage that also uses reference to
contemporary popular culture to communicate information about a character or a lifestyle. What do we learn about the
characters through this passage?
Which contemporary writers are most apt to reference popular culture? What do you see as the benefits and limitations of
making explicit reference to particular popular texts, performers, or institutions?
     Below is a passage by the popular 19th century writer Charles Dickens.  What kinds of information do they
provide us about their character's relationships to the culture around them? You might also consider the kinds of passages
that occur in historical fictions or science fiction novels that focus on creating believable alien or future societies. What
kinds of information do they give us about the characters and their relationship to their cultures?

     As their walk, which was not above two miles long, lay through shady lanes and sequestered
     footpaths, and as their conversation turned upon the delightful scenery by which they were on every
     side surrounded, Mr. Pickwick was almost inclined to regret the expedition they had used, when he
     found himself in the main street of the town of Muggleton. Everybody whose genius has a
     topographical bent knows perfectly well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor,
     burgesses, and freemen; and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor to the freemen,
     or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the corporation, or all three to Parliament, will learn from
     thence what they ought to have known before, that Muggleton is an ancient and loyal borough,
     mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights;
     in demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other inhabitants, have presented at divers
     times, no fewer than one thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance of
     Negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any interference with the factory system at home;
     sixty-eight in favour of the sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing Sunday trading
     in the street.
          Mr. Pickwick stood in the principal street of this illustrious town, and gazed with an air of
     curiosity, not unmixed with interest, on the objects around him.  There was an open square for the
     market-place; and in the centre of it, a large inn with a sign-post in front, displaying an object very
     common in art, but rarely met with in nature--to wit, a blue lion, with three bow legs in the air,
     balancing himself on the extreme point of the centre claw of his fourth foot.  There were, within sight,
     an auctioneer's and fire-agency office, a corn-factor's, a linen-draper's, a saddler's, a distiller's, a
     grocer's, and a shoe-shop--the last-mentioned warehouse being also appropriated to the diffusion of
     hats, bonnets, wearing apparel, cotton umbrellas, and useful knowledge.  There was a red brick
     house with a small paved courtyard in front, which anybody might have known belonged to the
     attorney; and there was, moreover, another red brick house with Venetian blinds, and a large brass
     door-plate with a very legible announcement that it belonged to the surgeon.  A few boys were
     making their way to the cricket-field; and two or three shopkeepers who were standing at their doors
     looked as if they should like to be making their way to the same spot, as indeed to all appearance they
     might have done, without losing any great
     amount of custom thereby. ---from THE PICKWICK PAPERS by Charles Dickens

     2) Choose a contemporary social issue and compare how it has been treated on television news and on television
sitcoms. What might you learn about this issue from each source? What would be the dangers of learning about this
topic only through entertainment sources? What perspectives and information do entertainment sources provide that are
not easily obtainable through the news?

3)Jenkins outlines some of the "cultural competencies" necessary to watch and make sense of television. What might be
some others? Watch an episode of your favorite television series and make notes about what kinds of knowledge it
assumes on the part of the viewer. Some of the knowledge it assumes may be social knowledge (things we know about
the real world); other knowledge may be program specific knowledge (things we know as regular viewers of this
series); still other knowledge may be genre-specific knowledge (things we know because we have seen other series of
the same kind). How central are these various kinds of knowledge to your experience of the series? What would you
miss about this episode if you lacked this knowledge?

4)All artworks are a mixture of convention and invention. How does Jenkins define these two concepts? Choose a work
from a genre you know well and outline the forms of convention and invention you see there. (If you are a fan of mystery
novels, you might write about a mystery novel. If you like to watch MTV, you might write about a music video.)  What
does it borrow from other works? What original contributions does it make?

5) The essay presents several different models of authorship, suggesting that our culture tends
to value individual authorship and to disdain various forms of authorship that are collaborative or appropriate from
preexisting works. Look at a book, film, or video that recounts the making of a contemporary popular work.  You might,
for example, look at the "Making of Myst" quick time movie that was bundled with the software, since Myst's
promotion represented one of the few times that individual authorship was claimed for a computer game. What claims
do various participants in the process make about their status as authors? How does the film represent the
collaborations that resulted in the creation of this work? What arguments do they make about the artistic value and
originality of this artwork? How valid do you think those arguments are? Are there situations where we see
collaboration as resulting in better artistic creations?

6)Learn something about the history of a folk culture figure such as Robin Hood, King Arthur, Coyote, or Brer Rabbit.
What do we know about the origins of these figures? How did they change over time? What role did collective
authorship play in reshaping these characters?

7)This essay argues that new media are only adopted if they fit into the existing social and cultural needs of consumers.
His examples are the VCR and the internet.  Learn more about the history of the adoption of another media technology
(such as the telephone, radio, television, the printed word). What factors played a role in determining whether people
embraced or rejected this technology? Which groups were first to adopt it? What fears or concerns were raised about
this technology that led some groups to initially reject it? What promises were made to encourage the adoption of this
technology? What social issues needed to be resolved before use of this technology become widespread? How long did
it take from the introduction of this technology until its wholesale adoption? What analogies might we draw between
this process and the so-called "digital revolution"?

8) Using country music as an example, Jenkins suggests that we may best understand the meaningfulness of a form of
popular culture by identifying its audience and the role that it plays in their lives. Choose a form of popular culture and
develop your own argument about its
audience, their values, their expectations, and the meanings that this cultural form expresses for them. You may either
investigate a form of popular culture you know well and that is part of your own life or you may take a form of popular
culture you hold in disdain or see as alien to you and try to look at it from a new perspective. If you do the later, you
need to guard against projecting your pre-existing stereotypes onto the culture and its audience. One way to do this
would be to read magazines or discussion lists targeted at consumers of this cultural form to see how they talk about it.
Try to base your arguments on things you have observed directly rather than on what you believe to be true about these
groups.

Writing About Popular Culture

OBJECTIVES, ASSUMPTIONS, AND APPROACHES
The goal of this anthology is to help you become a participant in contemporary discussions on various aspects of
popular culture.  This volume offers a sampling of some of the best, most interesting, and provocative writing from a
broad range of contexts, including both journalistic and academic writing and  reflecting different critical assumptions
about the place of popular culture in modern life.

These essays are intended to serve as models and catalysts to help you record and articulate your own thoughts about
and experiences with popular culture.  Informing the selection of essays and the development of questions for
discussion and writing are some explicit approaches to and assumptions about popular culture:

1.  Popular culture is not primarily a social problem or one of the root causes of any of a number of social problems.
Popular culture has often been blamed for racism, for violence, for misogyny, for the disrespect children show their
parents, perhaps even for the number of cavities we have in our teeth. But, this "media effects" approach assumes that
popular culture is something that happens to us, not something we participate within.

2. Popular culture is so persuasive it is meaningless to argue for its abolition.  We cannot opt out of consumer culture.
It is meaningless to make arguments for the abolition of television or for us to "just say no" to video games.  Imagine if
you tried to strip your dorm room of every consumer good, everything you hadn't made yourself. There wouldn't be
much left. In the process, you would have gotten rid of a lot of "junk" that was special or important to you and not
necessarily because of its high tech functionality, but because it has served as tokens of exchange within emotionally
meaningful relationships or because it is a memento of some significant turning point in your life.

3. Rather than trying to discourage our involvement with consumer society, we need to develop better strategies for
evaluating popular culture and interacting with it to get what we want from the media we consume. No form of media is
inherently bad. No form of popular culture deserves only our contempt. No person's tastes are simply and undeniably
wrong. Rather, this book wants to help us to understand why certain forms of popular culture are meaningful to the
people who consume them or to assess why a given work is a good or bad example of its genre tradition.

WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW
     Most guides for student writers start with the basic advice, write about what you know.  Well, one thing most
of you know very well is popular culture.  In truth, one can't accurately write about one's own life experiences without
acknowledging that in some way, we are influenced by or make use of various forms of popular culture within all of our
key social
relationships. All of us are consumers of popular culture. Some of us are fans of popular culture who seek out others
who share our tastes, who enjoy debating the merits or demerits of specific songs, episodes, films, and so forth, or who
actively create their own alternative versions of popular stories for publication in zines or circulation on the Internet.
Some of us have worked in jobs which directly relate to popular culture, whether they are positions at fast food
restaurants or at the mall, at amusement parks, movie theaters, record stores, book stores, or comic book shops. Those
experiences will be important to you as you begin to write essays about popular culture. You already start this course
with a certain degree of expertise. We don't want to change your tastes. We don't want to turn you against your favorite
rock star or teach you to watch art films instead of Hollywood blockbusters. We want to help you to better articulate
what you are thinking and feeling about the popular culture you are already consuming.  So, we believe that teaching
writing courses centering around popular culture is one of the best ways to allow students to write about what they
know.

STEPS IN WRITING
     Writing is a process.  An essay, like any other cultural artifact, does not just happen, it is the result of a
complex series of discrete steps.  If these steps are hurried through or ignored, the writing will most likely be less
effective.  Different writers, however, perform these tasks very
differently.  Some writers, for example, need to write formal outlines before they start to write; other writers, however,
can think through an essay in their head, and, at most, need only to jot down a few sentences. Although we can present
the general framework of the writing process, all writers need to discover and refine their own specific strategies for
performing these tasks.
     Try to incorporate the following steps when you write about popular culture. You will not always need to
include all of them; you almost certainly will mold them to fit your own styles of thinking and writing; and you may
perform them in a different order or repeat a step several times during the whole process.  In most cases, however, these
actions will make your writing more interesting and effective, both to you and to others.

1. Analyze your assignment and purpose.

All writing has a purpose and an audience.  Even when we write in a journal that we know no one else will see, we still
are writing to a specific audience, ourselves in the future, and with a specific purpose, to preserve our thoughts and
memories.  When we write something on an online forum we always have one or more definite purposes in mind: we
may want to inform, to
persuade, to ask a question, or even just to insult someone.  One of our first actions before we write, is to ask ourselves,
exactly why we are writing and what goal are we trying to achieve?
     Classroom assignments have particular motivations and objectives for writing.  You are writing, often,
primarily because you are required to do so.  Furthermore, you are often being required to write primarily not to inform,
persuade, question, praise, or blame, but to learn and practice how to perform one or more of these actions through
writing.  A prime measure of
your essay's effectiveness the grade you earn from your instructor.
     Classroom assignments on popular culture, however, often provide students with other motives for writing.
They encourage students to write with greater vividness and passion, with greater concreteness and specificity, with
greater argumentative force and rigor, and with greater personal voice. Many writer instructors have observed with
frustration that students often do their best writing not for class-room assignments but as part of Internet discussion
groups, plowing into the issue of why last week's episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer sucked or why Sen. Joseph
Lieberman is wrong to want to impose a ratings system on the video game industry. These contexts provoke us to do
our best work for a number of reasons. For one thing, anyone writes better when they are writing for a reason. Grades
can offer some motivation but they probably don't inspire us to do our most vivid writing. Trying to convince someone
else presents an intellectual challenge. You want to polish up your best arguments and dig a little deeper to find more
compelling evidence.  In these on-line forums, you are writing for someone other than the teacher. Often, students in a
composition class start to picture their teachers reading their papers and scribbling all over them with red ink. Let's face
it. This is not a very attractive image. The idea that your post might spark a flame war may be every bit as intimidating,
but one still can start to picture communication as occurring within a social context and a group of one's peers
responding for better or for worse to what you have written.
     Generally, classroom writing assignment can be classified as either directed or open-ended.  A directed
assignment often specifies not only the topic but also a specific approach.  It may ask you, for example, to compare how
two films visually portray women or minorities.  An open-ended assignment, on the other hand, usually specifies one or
more possible
subjects (for example, specific films or essays) or a general approach (for example, defining the characteristics of rap
music) but not usually not both.  With open-ended assignments, a major part of the writer's job is to fill in the blanks in
the assignment in ways that will produce an interesting response.
     When responding to a  directed assignment, a writer first needs carefully to analyze what is being asked.  The
following is a directed writing assignments based on the essay in this volume, "Contacting the Past: Early Radio and the
Digital Revolution":
     Henry Jenkins begins his essay by describing the opening scene of the movie Contact.  He then
     goes on to criticize the film for this scene's misrepresentation of the history of radio and then offers
     some explanations for why parts of the actual history were suppressed. Think of one scene from
     another movie, television show, or novel that misrepresents a specific historical moment or incident
     you are familiar with. In a well-constructed essay, briefly describe the scene and explain exactly
     how it was inaccurate and then offer some tentative explanations for why the creators of the work
     misrepresented the past. Make sure that your essay contains a thesis or main idea that will give
     focus to your discussion. For example, in the Contact discussion in Henry Jenkins' article, Jenkins'
     thesis is the suggestion that the creators of Contact "erased" the real facts of radio history
     because, as representatives of the corporate-controlled media industry, they didn't want to show a
     past in which the media was relatively free of corporate control.

          This assignment asks for three specific types of writing.  First, it asks for a brief summary of a work.  Second,
it then requires a comparison of the work's representation of a historical event with a more accurate or comprehensive
account.  Third, it asks the author to provide an  explanation or argument for possible causes for the discrepancy
between the accounts. Finally, it requires the writer to develop a thesis that will unify and focus all three parts.
Identifying the specific elements required in any piece of writing is an important and crucial first step in the writing
process.
 

2. Construct your audience
      We do our best writing when we have in mind what kind of audience we want to address. We use different
vocabularies, different examples, different kinds of arguments when speaking to a classmate, a girl friend or boyfriend,
a teacher, a parent, a boss, a religious leader, or someone we really don't know very well. We write differently when we
are addressing someone with whom we agree than someone with whom we disagree. Everything I've said above about
the audiences for popular culture applies to the audiences for our own writing. They will be drawn towards those ideas
and arguments that are meaningful to them, that "fit" into their own lives, that take into consideration their own needs
and interests, and that do not violate their own tastes and expectations. When you take up a pen to write, you should
always be writing for someone and one of the real problems with writing classes, historically, is that they have not been
very attentive to this fact. They often have students writing in a much more abstracted context, though the smart ones
always knew that they were really writing to the particular biases of their instructors. We hope you will take what you
learn about writing in this class and use it to become more active participants in net discussion groups, to write better
letters to distant friends, to engage in better debates late at night in your dorm room. One popular magazine promises
you "news you can use." We hope that learning to write about popular culture will give you skills you can use.

3.  Record data.
     Start planning your writing by making mental or written notes of specific items you have encountered that
might help form a future essay.  These notes can consist of everything from a display in a mall store, a particular dress a
friend is wearing, a line from a TV sitcom, or an image from a recent movie.  You can also keep a reading notebook to
record responses to articles in this collection as well as to arguments you may encounter in newspapers, magazines, or
on the Web.  Note down specific examples or counter-examples that support or contradict arguments you encounter.
Feel free to use these notebooks for free association and rambling.  Some of the best ideas begin as random thoughts
that eventually coalesce into a solid argument.  Also use the notebook to record your reactions and the reactions of
others to an essay or item or popular culture.  Finally, write down any interesting questions that might arise out of your
observations.  You might, for example, write down why most women in your class liked a particular essay or movie
discussed in class while most men did not.  Many of these questions may  be difficult, if not impossible to answer but
they will often point you towards essay topics and questions that will be interesting both for you to write and for your
audience to read.
 

4. Develop an interesting and accessible thesis and structure.
     Your writing will be best if you give your readers a strong sense of what you are trying to say.  If the reader
knew what you were going to tell them before they read your essay, then there is no compelling reason for you to write
it.  Make your essay interesting by selecting a specific approach to a topic or to an argument that you don't think your
reader will have encountered before.  You then, however, need to make this approach accessible to your audience.
Being accessible as a writer means that you take responsibility for making sure that you give the readers all the
information they are going to need to make sense of what you have to tell them.
     Don't let your readers intimidate you. Imagine your readers sitting around naked reading your essay. Are they
having a good time or are they simply looking chilly and embarrassed? A good writer can make the reader feel
comfortable and at home in any circumstances. The same rules apply to good writing that apply to being a good host
under any circumstance.  If a guest
at a party asked you where the bathroom is, you would probably give them easy-to-follow directions; you wouldn't make
them guess. Take your readers step by step through the things you want them to know, making sure at every point that
they know enough to understand what you are trying to communicate. Use signposts to guide them through the basic
segments of your
discussion. Signal when you are changing topics and how the new topic relates to what you have already said. Think
through the best way to organize your material so you can minimize doubling back on yourself and give the reader a
sense of moving in a consistent and logical direction.
Assume that anything that could be confusing or could be misunderstood probably will be.
     You need to be sure to define any terms or concepts which might be unfamiliar to someone who is not as
enmeshed as you are in a particular form of popular culture.  You don't necessarily need a formal Webster's style
definition. You can weave your definition informally into your text, but you need to think through how you are going to
explain your key terms to your readers. And that means you need to try to think what it is reasonable to expect your
readers to know. You don't need to define words that are in common usage and being used in their traditional sense, "a
school, you know, the place where students go to sit in desks and study textbooks and be taught by teachers," but you
may need to explain what a submission hold is
if you are writing a paper about professional wrestling. You need to provide a little historical background about your
topic and place the works you are discussing into a larger context, often one which factors in how and why the popular
artifact was made and what audience it was intended to address.
     You need to make sure to provide vivid examples to illustrate your larger claims. As a rule of thumb, you want
to provide two or more examples for each generalizations you make. Use a variety of different kinds of examples and
describe them clearly enough so that your reader is likely to grasp why they are important to your essay. And remember
that, as a rule, examples don't speak for themselves. As a beginning writer, you might try thinking about a basic
formula. For every generalization, several examples. For every example, some analysis which shows why that example
is relevant to your generalization.
     A useful step in developing an interesting topic is to identify unresolved issues.  In any discussion, all the
participants agree on many points but disagree on others.  These, points-at-issue, the specific areas of disagreement can
be classified into four general categories: 1) fact; 2) definition; 3) value, and 4)jurisdiction.
     Issues of fact are concerned if something did or did not happen or whether something is the cause of something
else.  In his essay "Contacting the Past: Early Radio and the Digital Revolution" Henry Jenkins makes several claims of
fact.  First he makes an uncontroversial description of how the film Contact represents the sound of early radio.  He then
claims that the
majority of early radio signals were not from commercial radio shows but from participatory ham radio operators.  Later
in the essay, he makes a claim of fact concerning cause and effect by stating that  government regulation of radio was a
principal cause of "a dramatic shift in radio's use from a grassroots medium to a more centralized system of commercial
broadcasting." While most audiences may accept the first two claims of fact, the assertion that government regulation
produced centralized and corporate  controlled radio may not be accepted by all audiences.  In many contexts, it is a
point-at-issue that needs to be argued.
     Arguments about definitions are often pivotal elements in writing.  Some essays, particularly essays defining a
genre like Susan Sontag's "Imagination of a Disaster" or Paul Schraeder's "Notes on Film Noir" are often framed largely
as an argument for a particular definition of something.  But definitions are almost always important.  Many of the
essays this volume contain arguments that rely on specific definitions of key terms such as "freedom," "violence,"
"obscenity" and "erotic."
     Issues of value are concerned if something is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, or better or worse than something
else.  One crucial claim of value in Henry Jenkins' essay "Contacting the Past: Early Radio and the Digital Revolution"
is the assertion that a broad-based particpatory medium is preferable to a centralized medium controlled by
corporations.  Aesthetic arguments, arguments about whether something is good, beautiful, or interesting, are key
elements in many discussions about culture, including, of course, popular culture, and many of the essays in this volume
are focused around these kinds of claims of value.
     Finally, the point at dispute in argument is often who decides questions of fact, value, or definition.  Who has
jurisdiction?  The views of Matthew Arnold and Raymond Williams offer different assumptions about who gets to
decide which forms of culture matter or are valuable. Arnold's account assumes the value of having an educated elite
function as a central gatekeeper for the culture determining which works have lasting or sustaining value. Williams
embraces  more populist assumptions where people are thought to be competent to make their own judgements about
the relative merits of different forms of popular culture.
     All the essays in this volume contain arguments focused on one more of these categories.  In key step in your
own writing is to identify what points are widely accepted and what points are in dispute.  Then use one or more of the
point-at-issue you have identified as a starting point for your own writing.
     The biggest problem you are likely to face in constructing your argument is the "so what" question. As you
make each generalization, ask yourself so what and tell your readers clearly and unambiguously why what you are
saying should matter to them. Recognize that this problem may be even more acute in writing about popular culture
than in telling people what you think about gun control. Most of us recognize that gun control is an important social
issue, but we have been taught to underestimate the centrality of popular culture to our lives. We need to work through
many of the prejudices I've tried to address in this essay before we start to write, but we also need to recognize that
many of our readers are probably still carrying a lot of that baggage around with them. That means, you need to come up
with a compelling thesis statement that encompasses what you see as your central ideas and allows the reader a clear
road-map of the argument or analysis or personal narrative that is to follow.  You need to try to anticipate your reader's
objections or skepticism and head them off at the pass, addressing them before they have a chance to challenge you on
them.

5. Write your first draft.
     Write your draft without worrying too much about specific grammatical and mechanical issues.  Circle any
questions you might have, but don't fall into the trap of stopping to fix some relatively minor problems while forgetting
some of your most interesting ideas.

     Creating a Teaser
     The opening paragraph needs to be vivid and compelling.  A good television episode starts with a teaser, an
especially dramatic scene which grabs your attention and holds you there over the first commercial break. You want to
give a teaser to your paper -- a compelling image, a challenging question, a surprising statistic, a provocative quote,
something that gets your reader to move onto the second paragraph.
      You want to operate on the assumption that the reader isn't going to read what you write - - not given the
sheer number of words we all confront everyday in our information saturated culture -- unless you give them one or two
pretty good reasons why they should care about what you have to say. If you can get them to read past the first page, you
probably have them hooked.
You should think a little bit about the reasons why they might want to read your paper before they start reading. Are you
going to tell them something about popular culture most people don't already know? Are you going to make an
argument they haven't heard before? Are you trying to get them to understand something from a different point of view?
As you answer those questions, work your answers into the introduction. You don't necessarily want to be too
mechanical in giving them reasons to read your paper, but those reasons need, at the very least, to be implicit in what
you write.

     Ending it All
     In the end, there is your conclusion. It should be brief and to the point, but it should give your reader a sense
that your essay is gradually coming to a close. Think back to your driver's education classes and what they told you
about how to use your brakes. If you slam on your brakes too quickly and without warning, you are likely to toss your
reader through the windshield, give them whiplash, or leave them badly bruised and seriously confused. You want to
glide slowly to a halt, giving clear warning that the readers should be packing up their belongings and getting ready to
depart. It can be effective to have a surprise twist at the end of the essay but the twist shouldn't be having the essay
abruptly stop without any conclusion whatsoever. Ideally, the conclusion pulls together the main lines of your argument
and suggests to the reader how they fit together and what their larger implications are. The conclusion is your last
chance to address the vexing "SO WHAT!" questions, to explain why you think your topic is important. It can open up
some new directions for thought, of course, but its primary function is to bring together the ideas you have already
presented. The art of writing is figuring out how to do this in an aesthetically pleasing way rather than in a purely
mechanical fashion. The old advice was "tell them what you are going to say, tell them, and then tell them what you
said."  This advice is still true, but it can yield tiresome results if we apply it in a banal and uninteresting fashion. Try to
come up with a more subtle and artful way of satisfying these goals.
 

6.  Review your draft.
In some cases, classmates may help you by reviewing your paper. What is your central point or point?  Do you convince
your audience?  Fill in the show me's, the so what's, and why's.
      Formal outlines may be something that you outgrow. However, no writer ever outgrows revisions. You would
have no idea how many times this essay has been revised before it saw print, how many people read it, wrote all over it,
made suggestions for revisions, how many times I returned to my computer and tried to come up with a better way to
formulate a particular point or to rephrase a particular passage. Rewriting is the heart of writing. Many guides for
professional writing tell you to knock off a sloppy first draft and then spend most of your time improving it. Taking this
approach liberates you from a lot of the anxiety which surrounds the writing process. You don't have to worry about
being good enough when you are facing the blank screen. And, then, once you have something on paper, it can be
reassuring. Those words aren't going to disappear. At the end of the day, you have something tangible you have
produced. Now, your task is to make it better. You can always make it better and better. You can always tighten your
language and say it with fewer words. You can always find a more dramatic way of phrasing a particular idea.
      Of course, all of this advice about rewriting assumes that you get started on your writing assignment more
than a few hours before it is due. You can't always do that at crunch time in college, but you should try, because you will
produce a better paper and more importantly you will grow more as a writer if you put your work through the rigors of
the revision process.
Often, when I read student papers, I get to the last paragraph and the student suddenly discovers what the whole
meandering essay had been about. This last-minute discovery, while unfortunate, would not be fatal if this was the first
draft of the essay and the student had allowed time to revise it. The student could simply block move the conclusion to
the front end of the essay and then start rephrasing and pruning from there. This task was a lot harder to achieve before
we had good word processors.

7. Edit your prose to make it accessible and interesting.
     Finding the right tone to write about popular culture can be tricky. Most people get a little uncomfortable if
you seem to be taking popular culture too seriously. They don't want you to drain all the fun out of your subject matter.
If you take something they do for fun and you write a really boring paper about it, they aren't going to be very happy.
Writing about popular culture in a flippant way, however, can be just as annoying. We feel like the writer is wasting our
time if he or she doesn't take what they are discussing seriously. You need to get rid of those cynical postures and "hip"
mannerisms you use to talk with your friends about popular culture. Your paper shouldn't be a joke. Your task is to
inform and enlighten us, not to amuse and entertain us.   Every phrase shouldn't be a subtle put-down of popular culture
and the people who consume it. After all, you are one of the people who consumes popular culture so they can't be all
bad.
     Writing about popular culture should give you a certain degree of freedom to be expressive and sensuous in
your writing. Sometimes, the result is a style of writing which is a little more informal and personal than the way you
would write about literature or painting. Sometimes, there is even a place to use slang in your writing about popular
culture, but be careful. Slang dates badly. Slang doesn't always travel well from one cultural group to another. Slang
sometimes gets in the way of what you are trying to say. Some slang words ring hollow or are even potentially offensive
if used by someone who isn't an insider in a particular cultural community. There's nothing more calculated to provoke
cringes of discomfort than the middle-
aged professor who wants to "get down with the homies" or "chill with the kids." But colorful and colloquial speech can
help to express the social and cultural contexts within which popular culture circulates. It can give your readers a feel
for  what a particular work is like or what its like to be there in person at the Phish concert or the Monster Truck rally.
     If popular culture, as Raymond Williams suggests, captures a "structure of feeling," then you need to choose
your words carefully to share those "feelings" with your readers.  Use words that prod the senses, which help us to
imagine the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes of popular culture.  That doesn't mean using your thesaurus to
look up words you don't already know.  A thesaurus is a dangerous weapon if you don't know how to use it safely. For
one thing, all of those words that the Thesaurus tells you mean the same thing have different connotations. A denotation
is the dictionary definition, what the word means, but a connotation is the set of
feelings or association that word evokes for your reader. If you use a word with the wrong connotation, it undercuts the
impression you want to give your reader. The most powerful impression it creates is of a writer who isn't in control of
his or her language. Use words that are a comfortable part of your vocabulary, but  try to vary your choices so that each
word makes a unique contribution to the picture you are painting for your reader.  The Thesaurus is used most
effectively to remind you of words you already know but might not think of when writing. It is not a good idea to pluck
words at random and plop them into your sentences.
       Read back over your work to see if you are using the same word three or four times in a sentence or
paragraph. Varying your words keeps your readers on their toes and interested in what you have to say. You don't want
all of your sentences to be simply declaratory sentences, but rather you want to use more complex structures from time
to time to insure variety.
     In any case, you want to think about which words you are using and why and you want to write as clearly and
straight-forwardly as possible. Try to cut down on the clutter in your sentences. Don't over-qualify everything. If you are
trying to stake out a position, stand behind it and defend it. People who stand in the middle of the road get hit by cars
going in both
directions.  Don't use so many superlatives that you start to sound like P.T. Barnum. Something can be worth talking
about even if it isn't the best book ever written or the most powerful movie ever filmed.  Make modest claims which you
can support and then set down in words exactly what you want to say and why.
     Here's a phrase you should avoid upon penalty of death: never ever start an essay with the phrase, "In today's
society." For one thing, one out of two of your classmates will probably also use this phrase in the opening sentence and
after a while, your teacher is going to get pretty crabby at seeing the same stale phrase over and over. But, more
importantly, there are no claims you could possibly make about "today's society" which are going to be universally true.
As a result, this phrase sounds a "sweeping generalization" alert which automatically starts making the reader much
more skeptical about what you are trying to say. The phrase also suggests that
you think "today's society" is radically different from "yesterday's society" and thus begs the issue of historical change.
Most of us have trouble picturing our parents having sex. We also have trouble picturing people before we were born
doing much of anything that we do today. We
usually picture them as hopelessly naive. After all, if they weren't so clueless, they'd be part of the modern era.  Unless
we know what we are talking about, however, such assumptions are just as likely to be wrong. And remember, your
teacher probably lived in times before you were born and may take exception to your assumption that nothing
worthwhile occurred before you entered the scene.
     The phrase, "throughout human history" poses the opposite set of problems.  It takes your discussion out of the
realm of history altogether.  There isn't a whole lot that has remain constant "throughout human history" and most of that
has been written to death.
     Other phrases that you should use sparingly include "in my opinion" and "I want to argue that..." In an
argumentative or evaluative essay, we assume the author is expressing his or her opinion. Reminding us of the fact
doesn't accomplish much except wasting words. Be environmentally conscious. Every so many words you write means
that another tree bites the dust. Don't use words you don't need and you will save a good deal of wood pulp over time.

Four Guidelines for Editing Prose:
When editing your writing, focus on these four objectives:
     set the right tone
     make it easy to read
     cut out unnecessary language
     conform to common-sense rules of grammar

     One good strategy for accomplishing these goals is to read back over your writing aloud. Most of us have a
feel for what sounds right and we should probably trust our instincts. I still read my writing aloud and always catch
passages which are less clear, fluent, or engaging than I had noticed when I saw them on the computer screen.
 

A FINAL BIT OF ADVICE
     One last thing, the only rule of good writing is that there are no rules of writing which can not be effectively
and creatively violated if the writer knows what they are doing. If you look closely at the essays in this collection, you
will find very good writers violating any given rule of good writing for very good reasons.  However, you probably need
to learn and internalize some of these basic formulas before you start violating them or you aren't going to be able to
break them intelligently and creatively and you are more likely to create an unsatisfying and confusing mess. Go back to
what I said earlier about all creative work being a balance between invention and convention. If your work is pure
invention, you are going to lose your readers. If your work is pure convention, you are going to bore your readers. What
you want is a balance between the two, and in order to achieve that, you need to learn those rules you are planning to
occasionally ignore down the line.
     That said -- all I can say is good luck. This isn't much of a conclusion, but you are just at the beginning of the
writing process.  The best is yet to come.