Popular Culture

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Popular Culture

• AP Human Geography

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• Popular Culture
• A wide-ranging group of heterogeneous people,
  who stretch across identities and across the
  world, and who embrace cultural traits such as
  music, dance, clothing, and food preference that
  change frequently and are part of the cultural
  landscape.

Madonna wearing a red string Kabbalah bracelet.
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How is Pop Culture Determined?

• By everyday interactions, needs and desires, the
  cultural moments that make up our daily lives

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Forms of Pop Culture

• Television
• Music
• Fashion
• Food
• Sports

• Toys
• Comic books
• Film
• Advertising
• Cyberspace

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Characteristics of popular culture

• Constantly changing
• Based in large, heterogeneous groups of people
• Based mainly in urban areas
• Material goods mass-produced by machines in
  factories
• Prevailing money economy

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Characteristics of popular culture

• More numerous individual relationships, but less
  personal
• Weaker family structure
• Distinct division of labor with highly
  specialized professions and jobs
• Considerable leisure time available to most
  people
• Police, army, and courts take the place of family
  and church in maintaining order

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Popular culture

• If a single hallmark of popular culture exists,
  it is change
• Words such as growth, progress, fad, and trend
  crop up frequently in newspapers and
  conversations
• Vast majority of people in developed countries
  belong to the popular culture

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Popular culture

• If a single hallmark of popular culture exists,
  it is change
• Contributions to the spread of popular culture
• Industrialization
• Urbanization
• Rise of formal education
• Increase in leisure time
• Increase in technology

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Cyberspace

• Perhaps the personal computer and Internet access
  have created another new type of place
• Certain words we use imply it has a
  geographyCyberspace
• The information superhighway connects not two
  points, but all points, creating a new sort of
  place
• Encourages and speeds cultural diffusion

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Internet Connections
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Food and drink

• What we eat and drink differs markedly from one
  part of the country and world to another
• Difference in alcoholic drink consumption in the
  United States
• Beer has highest per capita consumption levels in
  the West
• Least beer is sold in the Lower South and Utah
• Whiskey, both legal and illegal, has been a
  traditional southern beverage
• Californians place more importance on wine

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Food and drink

• Foods vary across North America
• In the South, barbecued pork and beef, fried
  chicken, and hamburgers have greater than average
  popularity
• More pizza is consumed in the North
• Focus of Italian immigration
• Pizza diffused to the southern states only in the
  mid-1950s

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Food and drink

• Importance of fast food restaurants varies
  greatly within the United States
• Stronghold is in the South 57 percent in
  Mississippi
• Northeast has lowest rate of such eateries 27
  percent in New York and Vermont

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Popular music

• The many different styles of popular music all
  reveal geographic patterning in levels of
  acceptance
• Elvis Presley, a generation after his death
  retains an important place in American popular
  culture

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Sports

• Abundant leisure time has allowed North Americans
  to devote time watching or participating in
  sports
• Few aspects of popular culture are as widely
  publicized as our games
• From Little League through professional contests,
  athletics receive almost daily attention from
  members of popular culture
• Even fantasy sports now are increasingly
  important in pop culture

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Sports

• The nineteenth century gave us football, ice
  hockey, baseball, soccer, and basketballour
  major spectator sports
• Our folk ancestors played games, but most were
  limited to children and little time was spent on
  them
• Concept of professional athletes and
  admission-paying spectators is not found in folk
  culture

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Advertising

• Most effective device for popular culture
  diffusion
• Commercial advertising of retail products
  bombards us visually and orally
• Using psychology, we are sold products we do not
  need

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Advertising

• Modern advertising is very place-conscious
• Products and services are linked to popular,
  admired places
• Example of the Marlboro Man and the
  romanticized American West

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Communication barriers to diffusion

• Spread can be greatly reduced if access to the
  media is denied
• To control programming of radio and television is
  to control much of the diffusion of popular
  culture
• Government censorship can also provide barriers
  to diffusion
• Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran during 1995
• Long opposed Western popular culture as a
  corrupting influence
• Outlawed television satellite dishes to try and
  prevent citizens from watching programs broadcast
  in foreign countries

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Consumerism and the link to Pop Culture

• Consumerism propels the insatiable belief that we
  need what we do not have
• A fundamental frame of reference for relating to
  oneself, to others, to the environment as a whole

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Consumerism and the link to Pop Culture

• Ideas propelled by the culture industry
• Last seasons fashions are so last season
• Shopping completes us
• Average adult 48 new pieces of clothing a year,
  child 70 new toys
• We can all live like celebrities
• We evaluate our consumption in reference to
  groups that live financially beyond our own means
  (rather than our neighbors)
• Average household credit card debt is 15,799

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Beauty and the link to Pop Culture

• Our self-worth is determined by our looks and
  cultural norms of sexual attractiveness
• Airbrushed images of perfected bodies normalize
  an unattainable expectation of beauty.

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• https//www.youtube.com/watch?vomBfg3UwkYM

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Brands and the link to Pop Culture

• Brands matter
• McDonalds coffee beats Starbuck in unbiased
  Consumer Reports taste tests.
• Ramones t-shirts have outsold their cds and
  records 10 to 1
• People just want to be cool

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Folk Culture

• Refers to cultural traits that are traditional,
  no longer widely practiced by a large amount of
  people and generally isolated in small, often
  rural areas

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TV and the Cloning of Culture Close Reading
Activity

• You will have the next 12 minutes to close read
  and annotate this text.

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TV and the Cloning of Culture Close Reading
Activity

• In Elbow Partners, answer the following questions
  on a separate sheet of paper
• 1. In what ways did the arrival of the television
  hurt the culture of the Inuit?
• 2. Why did the Canadian government want the Inuit
  to be exposed to television?
• 3. How did men and women appear to be affected
  differently by the arrival of television and
  other aspects of modernization?
• 4. What does Jerry Mander think should be done
  about the destruction of indigenous culture?
• 5. What do you think should be done?
• 6. Mander attributes the decline of traditional
  culture to the arrival of television. What other
  factors could it be?
• 7. Mander discusses the values that people learn
  from tv. Think about the last time you watched tv
  (with commercials) and write down what it is that
  people on TV appear to value.