Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (4th Edition) PDF

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POPULAR IMRE SZEMAN SUSIE O'BRIEN CULTURE POPULAR CULTURE A USER’S GUIDE FOURTH EDITION POPULAR CULTURE A USER’S GUIDE FOURTH EDITION FOURTH EDITION A USER’S GUIDE NELSONbrain.com offers you a wide range of print textbooks, ebooks, eChapters, digital homework, multimedia content, and study tools. We make it easy, convenient, and affordable for you to purchase and access your course materials. Visit NELSONbrain.com for more information! nelson.com ISBN-13: 978-0-17-670014-0 ISBN-10: 0-17-670014-5 SUSIE O'BRIEN 9 780176 700140 IMRE SZEMAN  Popular Culture A User’s Guide Susie O’Brien McMaster University Imre Szeman University of Alberta Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). 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Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Contents PREFACE: A USER’S GUIDE TO POPULAR CULTURE: A USER’S GUIDE   ix PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION   xiii ACKN OWLEDGMEN TS   xv CHAPTER 1—INTRODUCING POPULAR CULTURE 1 Approaching Popular Culture 1 Defining Popular Culture 2 What Is Culture? 3 What/Who Defines the Popular? 4 What Is Popular Culture? 7 The Politics of Popular Culture 9 Why Study Popular Culture? A Brief History of Cultural Studies 14 Popular Culture Invades the Classroom 15 Sneaking in through the Back Door 15 The Democratization of Culture 16 The Americanization of Popular Culture 18 The Decolonization of Culture 19 What’s an Education For? 19 Culture Wars 20 Culture and Economics—The Post-Industrial Revolution 21 Why This? Why Now? Why Me? A Couple of Final Arguments for the Importance of Studying Popular Culture 22 Coffee as Popular Culture 24 The Representation of Coffee 24 The Production of Coffee 25 The Consumption of Coffee 28 Summary: And It All Boils Down to... What Is in a Cup of Coffee? 32 Suggestions for Further Reading 34 NEL    iii Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  CHAPTER 2—THE HISTORY OF POPULAR CULTURE 35 Introduction: Taking It from the Streets 35 Making the Streets Safe for Commerce 36 Popular Recreation before 1830 37 The Bonds of Community 38 Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution 38 Redefining Cultural Spaces 39 Industrialism 41 The Production of the Working Class 43 Popular Recreation and Resistance 46 Rational Recreation 46 Popular Culture and Politics 50 The Production of Commercial Mass Culture—The Birth of the Culture Industry 51 Technology 53 The Engines of Change 53 Regulation, Innovation, Consolidation 54 Continuities and Changes 57 The Organization and Commercialization of Sports 58 Back to the Streets, Forward to the Present 62 Suggestions for Further Reading 66 CHAPTER 3—REPRESENTATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY 67 Introduction: Truth2Power 67 Constructing a Crisis—The Discourse of Violent Youth 68 Signification—The Production of Social Sense 70 Structuralist Theories of Representation 70 Mythologies 72 Reading the Headlines 73 Discourse and Power 74 Representing the Youth Crisis 75 The Construction of Youth 75 The Kids Are Not All Right 76 Making the News 80 Media and Youth Crime 83 Picturing Crime 83 Crime on Television 86 Truth2Power: The Politics of Representation 89 Enhancing Visibility, Challenging Negative Representation 89 Beyond Representation: Who’s the Boss? 92 iv   Contents NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Contexts of Representation 94 The Myth of Mass Media Manipulation 95 What Do We Do with Texts? The Role of the Audience in Constructing Meaning 98 Encoding and Decoding 99 Representation in Contemporary Culture 101 The Trouble with “Truthiness” 104 Suggestions for Further Reading 105 CHAPTER 4—THE PRODUCTION OF POPULAR CULTURE 107 Introduction: The Business of Culture 107 “Money Changes Everything”: The Pitfalls of Thinking about Production 109 Economic versus Artistic Success 110 Walter Benjamin 112 The Culture Industry Thesis 113 The Frankfurt School 114 What Is the Culture Industry? 114 Culture, Experience, and the Culture Industry 116 Summarizing Horkheimer and Adorno 122 Some Problems with the Culture Industry Thesis 123 Shifting Modes of Cultural Production 126 Changing Production through the Lens of Film 126 Cultural Production Today 130 Lifestyle Marketing and Market Segmentation 132 Copyleft: Challenging Copyright 135 Digital Production 139 The Culture of Business 141 Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing 147 CHAPTER 5—THE CONSUMING LIFE 149 Introduction: Back to “Normal” 149 Consumption Patterns 150 A Brief History of Consumer Culture 152 Commodities and Desire 153 The Creation of Consumer Society: Advertising, Credit, Debt 154 Consumer Culture and Mass Culture 159 Consumption as Distinction 162 Consumption and Agency 163 Taste and Distinction 164 Consumption and Power 167 Consumption, Desire, and Pleasure 168 NEL Contents   v Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Making Meaning in Use 169 The Politics of Consumption 171 The Consequences of Consumption 171 A Different Kind of Consumer Culture 174 Authenticity and Co-optation: “The Merchants of Cool” 176 Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing 179 CHAPTER 6—IDENTITY AND THE BODY 181 Introduction: Identity—A Necessary Fiction? 181 The History of Identity—Some Different Theories 184 Identity and the Unconscious 184 Identity and Ideology 185 All Selves Are Not Created Equal 187 Identity and Power/Knowledge 188 The History of Sexuality 190 Summary of the Key Theories of Identity 192 Hegemonic Masculinity, Post-Feminism, and the Third Wave 193 Post-Feminism 195 Being and Doing 197 LGBTQ+ 199 It Gets Better? Possibly... 201 Identity and Affect 204 Different Bodies, Different Selves? 205 Embodied Selves 205 The Human Body: Natural or Cultural? 205 Physical Capital and Social Status 208 Altered States 209 Enhancing/Producing the Healthy Body 210 What’s Natural/Normal? 212 Transcending the Body? 214 Suggestions for Further Reading 216 CHAPTER 7—IDENTITY, COMMUNITY, COLLECTIVITY 219 Introduction: Who Do You Want Me to Be? 219 “The People Who Are Ours” 224 Like Us, Only Worse 226 Cultural Symbols, Material Contexts 227 Collective Identity and Crisis 227 vi   Contents NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Modern Identities: Nation, Empire, and Race 229 “I Am Canadian” 230 Nations and Nationalism 233 Imagined Community, Invented Tradition 234 Nation and Empire 237 The West and the Rest 238 Orientalism—Then and Now 238 Race and Identity 239 Post-Colonial Identities 240 Decolonizing Cultures 240 Diaspora and Cultural Hybridity 242 Consumerism, Identity, and Resistance 245 Identities in Globalization: Melted, Frozen, Reconstituted 248 The Postmodern Nation 249 Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization 251 Imagined Community/Collectivity 253 Suggestions for Further Reading 255 CHAPTER 8—SUBCULTURES AND COUNTER-CULTURES 257 Introduction: The Mainstream and Other Streams 257 Minority–Majority Relationships 259 Subcultures and Counter-Cultures: What’s the Difference? 261 Subcultures 262 Counter-Cultures 263 Popular Representations of Subcultures and Counter-Cultures 267 Forrest Gump: Subcultural Deviance 268 Fight Club: Fight the Power? 271 Ghost World: Being Ghostly 273 The Politics of Subcultures 276 Hiding in the Light 276 The Invention of Skateboarding 283 From Zines to Blogs 285 Suggestions for Further Reading 289 CHAPTER 9—GLOBALIZATION AND ENVIRONMENT 291 Introduction: (Dis)Locations of Popular Culture 291 Organizing Space and Place 293 Private versus Public Space 295 The Big Picture: Globalization 299 NEL Contents   vii Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Economic Globalization 300 Globalization and Politics 303 The Technological Dimensions of Globalization 304 Globalization and Popular Culture 305 Culture and Space 305 Global Culture and Cultural Imperialism 307 The Noble Savage versus Ronald McDonald 309 Globalization: What’s Next? 314 Planetary Consciousness 314 N ature 314 Environmental Awareness 320 Suggestions for Further Reading 329 CHAPTER 10—POPULAR CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY 331 Introduction: In with the New? 331 Many Popular Cultures? 333 Learning to Love Céline: 21st-Century Taste 335 New Technology and Its Discontents 338 Social Media and Political Change 339 The Fate of Information 344 Living Online 353 The Real-World Costs of E-Life 359 Lost Generation? 360 Entrepreneurship and Subjectivity 366 The Future of Higher Education 370 What’s Next? 374 Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing 375 Appendix: Timeline 376 Glossary   383 Works Cited   399 Index   421 viii   Contents NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Preface: A User’s Guide to Popular Culture: A User’s Guide Popular Culture: A User’s Guide provides readers with an introduction to the critical study of popular culture. Our aim is to give readers the analytical tools to understand the everyday texts and practices that surround them, as well as their own roles as consumers of and participants in popular culture. Why does anyone need a guidebook to popular culture? Don’t we all already know not only what is meant by popular culture but also how to consume and use it? Guidebooks are supposed to make mysterious lands with unusual customs more familiar or help us learn how to navigate complex tasks (like building a deck or planting a good-looking garden) with greater ease. Popular culture, on the other hand, is, well, popular. When it comes to watching films, listening to pop music, shopping, or sucking down cups of coffee, we believe that we know exactly what we are doing and why we are doing it. Like our native tongue, popular culture is something we know how to “speak” without resorting to lessons, audiotapes, courses, or guidebooks. So what can a user’s guide tell us about popular culture that we don’t already know? In many respects, it is precisely because of the intimacy and familiarity with which we engage in contemporary popular culture that it requires critical reflection, explora- tion, and analysis. After all, knowing how to speak a language because we are immersed in it does not mean that we are necessarily able to read or write it or that we understand its syntax and structure. Reading and writing take an enormous amount of effort to get right. And once we have learned how to read, we are faced with other questions, such as how written language on a page can convey information about real and imagined worlds. As with language, so, too, with popular culture. Because we are immersed in it, popular culture is both uniquely accessible and frustratingly opaque; it is hard to get a critical purchase on something we inhabit so completely and, most of the time, more or less unconsciously. To help us understand the “syntax” and “grammar” of popular culture—the unacknowledged but crucial structures that give popular culture its shape, meaning, and significance—this book attempts to help readers to see this familiar terrain more acutely and with greater insight. Our familiarity with popular culture tends to hide some of its most important features and its relationship to broader social, political, and economic currents. Popular Culture: A User’s Guide will help readers to see parts of the contemporary cultural landscape that they may have been looking at all along without really perceiving. NEL    ix Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  This book aims to take readers beyond the “common sense” approach to popular cul- ture, an approach that is defined by an odd mix of cynical knowingness and complacency. We are working from the premise that readers today possess an unprecedented level of media literacy. We are all aware, for example, that certain forms of media, such as adver- tising, operate according to particular agendas that may or may not reflect our own inter- ests, and we also believe that we are smart enough to resist. This book seeks to create a level of awareness that goes beyond cynical complacency, not only to make readers aware of the underlying socio-economic structures that determine the shape of media and, by extension, consciousness, but also to make them recognize the myriad ways that popular culture manages to manoeuvre around these structures. We want to give students the tools to understand their role not just as consumers but also as agents of popular culture. We also want to showcase the full range of activities and practices that can be con- sidered part of contemporary popular cultural experience. Unlike “high culture,” which is generally understood to refer to a discrete body of books or artworks that are unified by their adherence to specific aesthetic and cultural codes, the field of popular culture is diverse and uneven, comprising texts and practices ranging from commercial media to subcultural styles to the activities of everyday life (eating, shopping, drinking coffee, recreational activities, etc.). Many books about popular culture are actually surveys or overviews of academic or theoretical approaches to the study of popular culture. In other words, what such books offer is a roughly historical account of a specific academic discipline (what is now often called cultural studies) and the individuals and theories that have been important to the development of that discipline. While we certainly discuss and make use of many of the most important theories of popular culture, we have chosen to emphasize practical strategies for understanding and interpreting the popular. Working from case studies and examples, this book aims to provide readers with a critical vocabulary and methods of analysis that will allow them to perform independent readings of cultural texts extending far beyond the sampling we offer here. The specific analyses we provide in each chapter exemplify ways of using and adapting critical and theoretical materials to address the issues and problems at hand. The text is organized mainly around broad themes rather than specific genres or forms of popular culture (television, music, film, etc.), and is bookended by chapters that focus on the prehistory of contemporary popular culture (Chapter 1) and on the complexities that the current historical context introduces for the study of popular culture (Chapters 9 and 10). A number of other features make this book a distinctive contribution to the study of popular culture. There is, first, an emphasis throughout on the politics of popular culture—that is, on the way in which popular culture is always connected to practices and discourses related to the exercise of and struggle over power and recognition in con- temporary society. Second, there is an emphasis on Canadian examples and situations. Why? Even though our understanding of popular culture has been shaped and influenced by writers and thinkers from around the world, our approach to and understanding of popular culture is informed by our experiences of growing up and teaching in Canada. x   Preface NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  This does not mean, of course, that everything that we talk about or make reference to in this book has been made or created in Canada. This would be a false reflection of the experience of popular culture in Canada, which has historically always included radio and television programs from the United States and the United Kingdom (and elsewhere) and film and literature from around the world—alongside and in conjunction with home- grown programming and cultural production. Sometimes at the expense of our own cultural producers, Canadians have been (for a variety of reasons) avid consumers of pop culture produced around the world. This book reflects this diversity of pop cultural sources, but just as importantly provides an interesting, uniquely Canadian perspective on Western pop culture that emerges out of Canada’s specific structural relationship to the mythical pop cultural centre— “America.” Because Canada is both outside of American pop culture and also uniquely and deeply engaged with it, we hope that this book sheds an interesting and useful light on phe- nomena that have thus far been examined from the perspective of too few geographical locations—for the most part, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In the study of popular culture, what you see and do not see often depend on where you are looking from. Finally, to help our readers work through Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, we have incorporated a number of pedagogical features. Important terms and concepts are listed in a glossary at the end of the book and highlighted in bold in the text to allow readers to cross-reference with ease. Each chapter contains one or more suggested activities and questions that are intended to get readers to think further about particular subjects and to apply them to their own experiences. In course use, these Suggested Activities may form the basis of oral or written assignments. Close-Ups in each chapter clarify key concepts, theories, or movements, and may also form the basis for further study and investigation. Each chapter ends with a list of suggestions for further reading or viewing. These titles include other introductory texts that may deal with the same material in a different way or with a different emphasis, as well as original works by scholars and theorists referred to in the chapter. This text also has a website with more helpful resources and information, located at nelson.com/popularculture4e. Of special note at this site is a zine by Hamilton artist Simon Orpana, called The Art of Gentrification, which offers a different (and more visu- ally compelling!) take on the cultural changes our book seeks to explain. Like the writers of any guidebook, we hope that readers use our maps and recom- mendations of places to visit and things to think about as a jumping-off point for the elaboration of their own maps of the landscape of popular culture. The authors would be the first to admit that not only are there plenty of things they have not seen, but there are places they do not yet know even exist. NEL Preface   xi Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Preface to the Fourth Edition This edition of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide was written and revised against the back- drop of all manner of strange and exciting—and terrifying!—developments in contem- porary culture. Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in November 2015 promised a new era of politics in Canada; his response to a question of why he opted for gender parity in his cabinet—“Because it’s 2015”—meant that, perhaps, finally, the institutions of social and political life were starting to catch up with changes of attitude already present in Canadian culture, including concerns about climate change and long-standing injustices regarding the treatment of Indigenous people. On the other side of the border, the rise to political prominence of unlikely candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders during the U.S. presidential nomination process suggested that many people had given up on traditional political institutions’ will or ability to serve the interests of the people they claimed to represent (Trump’s rise was also a reminder of how close to the surface racist and sexist beliefs remain and how quickly they can be animated by playing on fears about, among other things, job security). While Elon Musk’s announcement of the first (relatively) affordable version of the Tesla electric car and the launch of the virtual-reality headset Oculus Rift promised to reshape how we move and interact, the continuing flood of refugees from Africa and the Middle East reminded us that for billions of people electric cars and VR platforms are far from the experience of everyday life. At the same time, refugees, along with diverse groups of marginalized people, have used increasingly accessible social media and other com- munication technology as tools for networking and self-advocacy. The #BlackLivesMatter movement in particular has been successful in claiming both online and physical spaces for black people to share their experiences with racialized police violence and other sys- temic issues of racism. The dark side of digital technology has also become increasingly visible as widespread practices of government and corporate surveillance, including the gathering and sale of personal data, threaten our privacy and freedom (often in the name of keeping us safe!). Those of us who want to understand popular culture need to remain alert to its ever-present contradictions and complexities, especially to the ways in which the popular is experienced differently around the globe. The fourth edition of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide has been revised and updated throughout in order to capture the ever-evolving landscape of popular culture. As well as the addition of new material on social media and climate change, the text has been NEL    xiii Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  reorganized so as to make the flow of information more intuitive and accessible. We hope that this book continues to be of value to readers everywhere who want to grapple with the shifting dynamics of the popular in the 21st century. Susie O’Brien Hamilton, Ontario Imre Szeman Toronto, Ontario April 2016 xiv   Preface to the Fourth Edition NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Acknowledgments We would like to thank all the reviewers who gave us feedback on the third edition and so helped us prepare for the fourth: Gregory Cameron, Wilfrid Laurier University Kevin Fraser, Humber College Ruthann Lee, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus Vincent Manzerolle, University of Western Ontario Mark Silverberg, Cape Breton University Marianne Stenbaek, McGill University Many thanks to Cathy Witlox, copy editor extraordinaire, and to Leanna MacLean and Lisa Berland for all their work in bringing this edition to fruition. Susie thanks: Laura McLeod, whose astute editorial guidance shepherded this book through its challenging early and mid-life phases—thanks, Laura, for all your help!; Carolyn Veldstra, whose insights and editorial skills have informed each addition; Margaret Boyce; the students and TAs of 1CS3, who’ve helped to test-drive case studies and explanations of theory; Peter Mountford and Bridget Mountford, whose knowledge and smarts run the gamut of topics in popular culture and all manner of other things. Special appreciation to Bridgy, whose advice and editorial assistance was vital to the completion of this edition! Imre thanks: The amazing research assistants who have worked with me since the publica- tion of the third edition of A User’s Guide: Adam Carlson, David Janzen, Jordan Kinder, Sean O’Brien, Valerie Savard, and Zoran Vuckovac. And to my partners-in-crime on all manner of recent projects: Brent “Brett” Bellamy, Ruth Beer, Sarah Blacker, Dominic Boyer, Nicholas Brown, Jeff Diamanti, Dan Harvey, Cymene Howe, Mark O’Driscoll, Andrew Pendakis, Mark Simpson, Justin Sully, Jennifer Wenzel, and Sheena Wilson. And a special thanks to Jordan Kinder, who provided some last-minute input that helped pull this book into shape. NEL    xv Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  CHAPTER 1 Introducing Popular Culture APPROACHING POPULAR CULTURE “Let’s go get a coffee.” Every day, throughout North America, this sentence is uttered thousands of times, by different people—students, teachers, construction workers, lawyers, mothers, retail clerks, unemployed people, old people, young people—and in different social contexts, such as work, breaks from work, dates, interviews, therapy sessions, or hanging out. Going for a coffee is a major part of popular culture, not only in the sense that it is such a common practice, but also in that it means so much more than the literal act of tossing back a hot caffeinated beverage: in fact, “going for coffee” need not involve drinking coffee at all. So what does it mean? And what is it about coffee drinking that makes it part of popular cul- ture while other equally common practices—like, say, yawning or mowing the lawn—are not? Or are they part of popular culture, too? These are the kinds of questions this book sets out to answer—not by offering a com- prehensive account of what fits in the category of popular culture and what does not, but by helping us to think about the question of why popular culture is such a critical part of contemporary life. For this reason, it might be misleading to call this book a “user’s guide” to popular culture. A standard user’s guide to, say, the smartphone that you may have received for Christmas (a common occurrence in television commercials, less of one in real life) tells you everything there is to know about the specific object that you have in your hands, what its functions are, and what it can and cannot do. Popular culture is not like that. For one thing, popular culture is a far more difficult “thing” to pin down than a smartphone or an Ikea desk; it is constantly changing shape, shifting locations, assuming new identities and new tasks and functions. The goal of a user’s guide to popular culture NEL Introducing Popular Culture   1 Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  is to provide culture’s users—that is, all of us—with a way to think about popular culture that is flexible enough to also allow us to think about its changes and redefinitions and to figure out what’s at stake in the definition of popular culture. How can we learn to read and participate in—to use—what is popular in a way that strengthens our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in? This book approaches these questions through the analysis of texts (objects that we can interpret, like a book) and practices (things that we do): seeing movies, listening to songs, watching television shows, playing sports, going shopping—and drinking coffee. The purpose of this introduction is to lay out a working definition of popular culture, to outline a few key concepts that will reappear in later discussion, and to give you a dia- gram of the way this book is put together—a “guide to the guide”—that should help make the task of piecing together the bits of popular culture a productive one. We also offer a rough guide to the field of cultural studies (see Close-Up 1.2) for readers who want to delve further into the question of how popular culture has come to be seen as something significant and tricky enough to require a user’s guide. Just be forewarned: even if you follow all the assembly instructions, by the end of the book, you will still be left with extra parts, and you will likely end up with a concept of popular culture that looks different from that of your neighbours. But trust us: this is a good thing. DEFINING POPULAR CULTURE Like most things that form a big part of our daily lives, popular culture is familiar and obvious at first glance but very complicated as soon as you start to think about it in any detail. Before we outline the concept of popular culture that informs this book, we suggest you take a couple of minutes to try to come up with your own working definition. When we’ve conducted this exercise in introductory university classes, a typical range of ideas tends to come up: popular culture consists of those things—products, texts, practices, and so on—that are enjoyed by lots and lots of people; popular culture is commercial culture (as opposed to, say, “high” culture, which people still tend to associate with the activities they imagine rich people enjoy, like listening to opera or going to the symphony); popular culture consists of the traditional practices and beliefs or way of life of a specific group; and, finally, the most wide-ranging definition of all, popular culture is simply the prac- tices of everyday life. What is interesting about these definitions is not just their range but their ­differences—differences that are shaped to a large degree by the way we understand the terms popular and culture. It is worth taking the time to think about these varied ideas, but not so we can dismiss some of them to identify a “correct” definition. Like most other important social concepts—concepts such as democracy, progress, justice, civilization, and so on that produce the shape of the societies that we live in—it does not really make sense to hope for a correct definition that would solve the puzzle of all of these different meanings by establishing the essential one supposedly lurking in their midst. Rather, we want to suggest that popular culture is informed by all these perspectives, not just in the 2   Chapter 1   Introducing Popular Culture NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  sense that each is partially true but also in the sense that the tension between them is fundamental to understanding the meaning of popular culture today. So before we erect a definition of popular culture that we can all feel comfortable inhabiting, we need to think about this tension. This may initially seem to be a frustratingly circuitous and unhelpful route to finding out the “facts.” However, such meanderings are a critical part of the study of culture, in which the question of meaning is never evident but always up for negotia- tion and disagreement. What Is Culture? When we ask our students to track the word culture as it is used in the media and other sources, two things tend to emerge: (1) culture (along with variations such as multicul- turalism) gets mentioned a lot, implying that it is a significant concept in our society, and one that we likely can’t do without; and (2) it appears in many different, often contradic- tory, contexts, suggesting that exactly how it signifies is hard to pin down. When we talk about culture in the sense of building opera houses, the word obviously means something different than when we talk about Western culture or youth culture, national culture or business culture. Culture in the first sense—the one that fits with opera houses, ballet, and Shakespeare, which for convenience we’ll call capital-C Culture—focuses on what we usually think of as high-end creative production: artistic pursuits that are enjoyed by an elite minority as opposed to more accessible leisure activities, such as sports. These kinds of cultural productions are those that have over time (they are often associated with the past) assumed an especially privileged place in the collection of ideas and artifacts that comprise a cultural tradition. A second definition encompasses a much broader understanding of culture as a whole way of life of a society or a distinct subsection of society: along with art, it encompasses everyday rituals such as meals, work, religious observances, sports, sex, family, and friendship. Implicitly opposed to “nature,” which we associate with biology (the things we share with the living non-human world), culture in this context refers to the practices that define us, collectively and in distinct groups, as human. This definition of culture, or something close to it, informs the disciplines of the social sciences—particularly anthro- pology, which until recently tended to focus on the cultures of pre-industrial societies. When we go on vacation to experience other cultures, it is this sense of culture that we are making reference to: a glimpse into a different way of life organized according to its own principles and around its own unique practices. The Mass Media   Interestingly, neither the familiar humanities definition of culture nor the one employed by traditional anthropologists adequately encompasses the experience of living in a postmodern capitalist society—the experience of most of us who teach and study those subjects—which is a way of life increasingly dominated by the mass media. Not only do the mass media tend to fall outside the definitions of culture centred around elite artistic production or the practices of ordinary everyday life; they also are frequently cited as the thing that threatens to destroy culture in both these senses: while one set of critics laments the dumbing-down of Shakespeare to satisfy the tastes of a mass audience NEL Introducing Popular Culture    3 Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  in Hollywood productions such as William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, O (based on Othello), or 10 Things I Hate about You (based on The Taming of the Shrew), another warns of the corruption of “authentic” grassroots cultures by the global entertainment industry, which has made it more difficult to find cultures that are all that different from our own in our travels. While they come from different places, what these criticisms have in com- mon is an element of nostalgia, a feeling that something has been lost, that a once pure realm of culture has become contaminated by commerce. It is the desire to understand this world-contaminated-by-commerce that motivates the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, into which this book fits (and whose development as an academic field is discussed in more detail later in this chapter). Objects of Study   To avoid the limitations of earlier definitions of culture, cultural studies defines its object of study in very broad terms. One definition, offered in Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, describes culture as “the social produc- tion and reproduction of sense, meaning and consciousness. The sphere of meaning, which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations (politics)” (O’Sullivan et al. 68). This is a useful definition insofar as it manages to encompass a wide variety of “meaning-producing” practices and technologies, including both traditional definitions of culture—fine art and everyday practices—and mass media. Of course, while the incorporation of these diverse meanings into one functional frame might give us a snapshot of what it is that cultural studies actually studies and why, it is difficult to ignore that the different conceptions of culture that are named in this definition are historically not only different but also contradictory. Rather than seeking to smooth over these contradictions, cultural studies is interested in actively teasing them out and laying them bare. It is committed to an understanding of culture that does not just expand on earlier definitions to include practices, objects, and people that tended, for different reasons, to get left out (such as television game shows, science fiction novels, or skateboarding), but also thinks about why and how such inclusions and exclusions occur in the first place. This means that cultural studies thinks deeply about the connections between culture and the spheres of politics and economics and seeks to understand how that realm of activity concerned with “meanings, pleasures, and identities” shapes (and is shaped by) relations of power (Fiske 1). Among the key questions that are raised by the contradictions between the different definitions of cul- ture cited above are these: How is culture produced (made by a society) and reproduced (passed on by a society into the future)? Who makes culture? For whom is it made? This brings us to the other half of the concept of popular culture. What/Who Defines the Popular? Having wrestled with the complicated problem of what constitutes culture, the meaning of popular seems much more straightforward, at least initially. Derived from the Latin word popularis, which means “of or belonging to the people,” popular is often used in a contemporary context to describe something that is liked by a lot of people. For example, 4   Chapter 1   Introducing Popular Culture NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  when an authoritative source cites NCIS as the most popular show on television, based on ratings in 20 nations (“TV Guide”), we can assume, reasonably, that a lot of us like slick crime dramas shot in glamorous settings. But when we start to look a little further into how the word popular is used today, it becomes obvious that it has to do with more than numbers—that the words popular and the people don’t refer to absolutely everyone, but to a particular group to whom a certain quality or value is attached. A couple of examples will serve to illustrate this. First, a number of major art museums have recently come under fire for abandoning their mandate to promote serious art in favour of “popular” blockbuster shows guaranteed to fill up the galleries (and the museum shop). Early examples of this phenomenon include the Art of Star Wars exhibition that toured galleries in Japan, Singapore, Scotland, and England between 2002 and 2004 and Diana, A Celebration, a tribute to the late Princess Diana that drew crowds at museums in Toronto, Fort Lauderdale, and Dayton, Ohio, in 2006 and 2007. These kinds of exhibits are increasingly common. For example, the Museum of Modern Art now has a permanent exhibit of video games, which includes experimental games (e.g., Vib- Ribbon) as well as old standards (e.g., Pong, Pac-Man, and The Sims). Art and museum critics are not all happy about the trend of blurring high and popular culture, however. As George Neubert, former director of the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, puts it, A lot of museums are now torn between two extreme opposite philosophies.... One feels it has to compete with pop culture and mass culture to be relevant and for the big E, education, with lots of well-intentioned outreach and participatory programs. It does for a short moment bring up the numbers, but I wonder how meaningful those are in the long term. (Wolgamott) A counter-argument can be easily mounted in favour of the museums’ decision to show more “popular” work: as a public space, the museum should respond to the preference of people in general rather than to the tastes of an overly educated minority to whom museums have typically catered. Since these latter tastes are often seen to be disproportionately supported by state subsidy of the arts, this argument also often concerns the appropriate allocation of tax dollars and the need for the arts sector to be more market-driven. While a cultural institution can readily apply to governments for support of a show on Canada’s Group of Seven, it is harder to justify showing off con- cept drawings of the Sith Lord, Darth Maul, even if this is what the public might “really” want to see. In this case, the “popular” is evoked both as a democratic principle and as a judgment about who can make sense of “real” art. The increasingly common practice of incorporating virtual experiences in museums complicates the conception of “reality” even further. By including more “popular” shows, including those that make substantial use of digital culture, museums invite more people inside them, whether physically or virtually—but not necessarily to see the kinds of art objects the museums were initially designed to exhibit. NEL Introducing Popular Culture    5 Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Tinxi/Shutterstock.com Many museums have begun to incorporate exhibits that use virtual reality, or VR, to embed the viewer more deeply in the experiences. A major appeal of these exhibits (or drawback, depending on your perspective!) is that they can be experienced from a laptop at home, rather than physical attendance at the museum. Another example of the slipperiness of the concept of the popular concerns the use of the related word people in the context of political protest. International political meetings, from the G20 to Rio+20, frequently encounter opposition in the form of “people’s sum- mits” organized by activist groups. In this example, the word people connotes something like “democratic” or “grassroots” or “ordinary,” in contrast to the powerful minority of state leaders and corporate CEOs. While government leaders denounce the organizers of such meetings as “special interest groups” (versus “democratically elected” leaders), activ- ists counter this labelling by highlighting governments’ subordination of social justice to corporate agendas and the resulting failure to represent the interests of the people. The term people becomes the symbolic linchpin of a battle to gain the moral high ground over the substantive issues under debate. As with the art museum, the word people and its derivative popular are used here to convey something roughly opposite to “elite,” though the value of those terms means something entirely different in each context. So we can add a couple of new elements to our understanding of the word popular. First, it tends to carry with it connotations of value that are implicitly contrasted with the value of what it is not, though those values are seen differently depending on who is talking and in what context. Second, as is particularly evident in the latter example of people’s summits, the question of who or what constitutes the popular is tangled up with questions of power. 6   Chapter 1   Introducing Popular Culture NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  With this in mind, let’s return to the apparently simple usage of popular with which we began this section and think about it in a little more detail. Who are the people who define the “popularity” of NCIS? Are they the unenlightened masses who lack the ability to discriminate between schlock and substance? Are they discerning viewers exercising their consumer choice? Or are they engaged in an act of political activism, employing the cultural resources of NCIS to construct an agenda for crime prevention or progressive social change? The slightly ludicrous quality of the last possibility raises a quite serious question about how we understand the popular: What kind of agency—that is, possibility for self-motivated activity or action—is involved on the part of “the people” in deter- mining or defining something to be “popular”? This question has particular significance when we start to talk about popular culture. What Is Popular Culture? Common uses of the term popular culture reflect in interesting ways our understandings of the two separate words we discussed above. The most familiar use of the term popular culture identifies it with the entertainment produced through and by commercial media (television, film, the music industry, etc.) that have the economic and technological capacity to reach large, demographically diverse, and geographically dispersed audiences. Popularity is measured, in this case, by patterns of consumption: it refers to the things we buy (or watch or listen to, etc.). A somewhat different use of popular culture defines it in terms not of consumption but of production: popular culture is what “the people” make or do for themselves. This definition fits fairly closely with the anthropological definition of culture as “the practices of everyday life.” Both of these definitions differ quite clearly from the elite capital-C Culture defended by cranky art patrons. Apart from this, however, their connotations are quite different and even oppositional: “do-it-yourself ” popular culture is explicitly different from the culture that is produced by large corporate entities whose interest in the everyday prac- tices of their consumers is shaped by their need to figure out how best to sell them things. Indeed, the kind of culture produced by the commercial media is often seen as threatening to the culture of everyday life by diverting people’s desire for fulfillment—a desire that can ultimately be satisfied only by productive activity—into habits of passive consumption. Folk Culture and Mass Culture   To distinguish clearly between these two different forms of cultural production, critics will sometimes use the terms folk culture and mass culture. Folk culture refers to those cultural products and practices that have developed over time within a particular community or socially identifiable group and that are com- municated from generation to generation and among people who tend to be known to one another. It tends to be seen as the direct expression of the life experiences shared by its creators and their audience (Nachbar and Lause 15; Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney 37). Mass culture, on the other hand, is produced for an unknown, disparate audience. While the transmission of folk culture is generally technologically simple (e.g., face-to-face, oral communication), mass culture depends on electronic (or mechanical) media to convey NEL Introducing Popular Culture    7 Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  its message to the largest possible audience in order to secure maximum profit, which is its ultimate goal. These terms can serve to make useful distinctions between kinds of cultural production, highlighting the differences between, say, an Inuit soapstone carv- ing and a rap video. On even a superficial examination, however, the differences start to look a little fuzzy. Inuit art has become so popular among non-Inuit people that it has spawned factories in southern Canada, where carvers use power tools to create an identical series of polar bears, for which they are paid by the piece (George). Rap music, now a multi-billion-dollar industry, emerged relatively recently from the black street culture of the South Bronx. In each of these cases, it is difficult to identify the precise moment when folk culture metamorphosed into mass culture. Such examples also raise questions about cultural appropriation—a process we discuss in more detail in Chapter 7. However we regard the transformation of culture, the attempt to maintain a strict divi- sion between folk and mass forms is not just tricky in a practical sense but also, arguably, somewhat suspect ideologically—a problem we consider further in Chapter 4. The desire to preserve a folk culture safe from the corrupting influence of commerce is often inflected by a nostalgic desire to return to a (mythical) moment of history in which cultural and social identities were secure and cultural boundaries were clear. When this desire is extended to a socially and economically disadvantaged group, as in the two examples above, the situation becomes even more complicated. While Inuit might argue that the preservation of folk culture is a matter of community survival, the unhappiness of white collectors at the move toward mass-produced art may be motivated by concerns that have little to do with Indigenous peoples’ autonomy and more to do with the effect on the value of their own art pieces. A less crudely materialist motivation for consumer nostalgia in this case might be a well-intentioned, if racist, aesthetic investment in the image of the “noble savage.” This imaginary figure conjures up a purer, more natural world outside Western commercial culture while occupying a comfortable place within it. However seemingly progressive the cause that is being (or has been) promoted in the name of “the people,” folk culture remains a term whose peculiarly heavy ideological bag- gage should set off alarm bells every time we hear or read it (the same alarm bells that should go off when we hear politicians invoke the mythical category of “ordinary working Americans/Canadians/Australians.” Just who are these “ordinary” people?). This is not to say that we need to abandon completely the idea of folk culture and all its troublesome derivations. Like mass culture, folk culture retains some value as a descriptive term to des- ignate particular kinds of cultural production, especially when referring to a time before our present capitalist moment—a moment when authenticity and commercial value are increasingly impossible to disentangle, when there’s a sense in which, as one critic puts it, “all culture is mass culture” (Denning 258, emphasis added). To complicate matters further, mass culture has begun to take on elements of folk culture as ordinary people—those whose role was once confined to that of the audience for commercial culture—use social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram to compose and share their own stories, commentaries, videos, and images. Some social media produc- tion, like fan fiction, is closely tied to commercial culture. Others—such as recipe or craft 8   Chapter 1   Introducing Popular Culture NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  blogs—explicitly hearken back to more traditional cultural forms. The increasing acces- sibility of social media tools also allows users to engage support for, and attempt to raise consciousness about, issues such as mental health, bullying, and identity politics and even allows for more radical forms of digital political protest. Like other forms of mass culture, social media productions target a geographically dispersed, often unknown audience. But, as with earlier forms of folk culture, this audience is often small and intimate, united by common, even niche, interests—further complicating the question about what defines the popular in popular culture! For further discussion of social media, see Chapter 10. Suggested Activity 1.1 Does commercialism destroy the authenticity of a cultural product or practice? Or does the authenticity of an object or practice increase its commercial value and potential? What does it mean if it is possible for us to answer both of these ques- tions affirmatively? How does the divide between authenticity and commercial value work in the case of a practice like ecotourism and an object like the first release of an indie band on its own label? (How) do values like authenticity and commercialism apply to cultural expression on social media? The Culture of Everyday Life   To signal the range and ambiguity of the practices discussed above—and to avoid producing a definition of popular culture that falls too clearly on the side of celebrating the folk or denigrating the masses—we might define popular culture as something like “the communicative practices of everyday life” (where “communicative practices” comprises all those activities concerned with the production of meaning: talking, writing, social rituals such as eating, shopping, dancing, music, visual culture, sports, fashion, etc.) that are shared among many members of a society, including and especially those who aren’t particularly socially, economically, or politically powerful. This somewhat clumsy definition accomplishes three things: (1) it signals the inclusion of mass media alongside, and even within, the practices of everyday life, without determining in advance what relationship it has to those practices; (2) it emphasizes the meaningful nature of popular culture—meaningful in the sense that it is important, as well as in the sense that it is concerned with the production of sense and social value; and (3) it highlights the issue of power that always and overtly dogs the production of culture in general and popular culture in particular. The Politics of Popular Culture Why is power such a central issue for understanding popular culture? As we have already tried to suggest, culture is bound up closely with other aspects of human existence. As “the sphere of meaning which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social rela- tions (politics)” (O’Sullivan et al. 68), culture is concerned not just with individual tastes NEL Introducing Popular Culture    9 Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Roman Pyshchyk/Shutterstock.com Social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram have altered the terrain of popular culture, blurring the distinction between mass and folk culture by allowing ordinary people to compose and share their own stories, commentaries, videos, and images. and desires but also with the fundamental organization of society—with the distribution of material and symbolic power. Culture both reflects and influences social organization and the distribution of power. In the early 21st century, in most parts of the world, the dominant economic system is capitalism (for more on capitalism, see Close-Up 1.1). This means that the key characteristics of capitalism, including both its wealth-generating capacity and the patterns of inequitable distribution on which that capacity depends, help to determine the shape of culture. This is particularly true for popular culture. Close-Up 1.1 Capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of produc- tion and distribution and geared toward the generation of profit. It is the dominant economic system in the world today. However, it is not the only economic system that has ever been in place, nor is it likely to be the last way in which human beings orga- nize their economies, despite some claims to the contrary. 10   Chapter 1   Introducing Popular Culture NEL Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Close-Up 1.1 (cont’d) Loosely definable as a system of private enterprise whose primary aim is the pro- duction of profit, capitalism has been developing since at least the 15th century and underwrites many of the economic and cultural institutions that we take for granted today, such as private property, individual freedom, and the imperative of economic growth. Our tendency today to see these features of capitalism as not only positive but also natural—the products of human nature rather than consciously worked-out ideas—makes it harder to see its less desirable aspects, such as social fragmentation, the unequal distribution of wealth, and the conversion of everything (including life itself) into something that can be bought or sold. These brutal elements of capitalism were particularly evident during the heyday of European colonialism from the 17th to the 19th centuries. During this period, the exploitation of resources and enslavement of people from the non-European world helped make possible the massive accumulation of wealth enjoyed by a relatively small percentage of Europeans. This, in turn, fuelled the Industrial Revolution, in which both the productive and the destructive elements of capitalism were further intensified. In capitalist economies, the means of creating, distributing, and exchanging wealth lie mainly in the hands of individuals and corporations (which in N orth America have the legal rights of individuals—see Close-Up 5.2), rather than in public or state hands. The value of goods and labour is defined not by their social useful- ness or significance but by how much they can be exchanged for. The main goal of individuals in capitalist societies is to maximize the profit or the wages they receive. Proponents believe that, through the dance of supply and demand, goods and ser- vices are optimally and efficiently distributed throughout society. Detractors point to the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, whose life activity is often organized to generate even more wealth for those at the top. Postmodern—also referred to as post-industrial or late—capitalism is distin- guished by the fact that by comparison to earlier eras of capitalism there is now a far greater emphasis on the exchange of information and services (e.g., software and banking) as opposed to hard goods (e.g., steel and cars) in an economy that has become globally integrated. In fact, one could argue that capitalism doesn’t just inform particular versions of popular culture, in the sense of sustaining some dominant narratives (e.g., the story of success through hard work) and disabling others (e.g., the triumph of the group over the individual) or by enabling certain kinds of technological innovation. Capitalism enables the production of popular culture, period. We will go on to trace the historical evolution of NEL Introducing Popular Culture    11 Copyright 2018 Nelson Education Ltd. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Nelson Education reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  the relationship between capitalism and popular culture in Chapter 2. For now, it is suf- ficient to note that the economic and social struggles that are intrinsic to capitalism are fought, to some extent, on the terrain of popular culture. File Sharing   A simple example will serve to illustrate the kind of struggle we’re talk- ing about. Through much of the 20th century, the evolution of the music industry in North America was a story of skyrocketing profits. This story culminated in the intro- duction of the CD, which forced consumers to pay considerably more than what they had paid for vinyl LPs (with what many agreed was only a marginal improvement in sound quality), not to mention the need to shell out for expensive new sound systems. As promised price reductions never materialized, a quiet groundswell of annoyance with the recording industry grew. It seemed like a classic case of the customer getting cheated by corporations. Then, in the mid-1990s, using the same digital technology that enabled the development of the CD, peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as Napster crept onto the scene, allowing people to swap music files on their computers without paying a cent. The recording industry fought back on two fronts, launching a series of lawsuits in a bid to recoup lost profits and creating programs that would enable users to download individual songs, albums, movies, television episodes, and series for (moderately) low fees. Meanwhile, determined file sharers—“pirates,” in industry parlance—continue to find new ways to use the technology and the decentralized structure of the Internet to outmanoeuvre their relatively cumbersome, slow-moving corporate opponents. The story of the changing dynamics of music and film distribution is a complicated one, with seemingly clear battle lines between “the people” and “corporations,” blurred by such issues as the rights of musicians and filmmakers to get paid for their work, the accessibility of technology, and its implications for the construction of the commu- nity. Moreover, it isn’t clear what effects the trend toward increasingly individualized, ­privatized music and film might have on our shared public culture (see Chapter 4 for further discussion of intellectual property and digital culture). Suggested Activity 1.2 Most of us are now familiar with ads warning us against the evils of illegally downloading or exhibiting online music and videos. Many of these ads draw analogies between these practices and more familiar examples of theft (e.g., an ad that ran at the start of DVDs in the early 2000s compared illegally downloading files to stealing a car). How effective do you think these ads are at discouraging unauthorized downloads or sharing? Do the words theft and/or piracy accurately describe the significance of these actions? (Answering this question prompts us to consider another: In what ways are movies like cars, and in what ways are they different?) What are your own feelings about file sharing or illegal downloading? What ideas, values, or experiences influence these feelings? 12   Chapter 1   Introducing Popular Culture