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Popular Culture: Peoples
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Scholars now regularly access a wide and sometimes unexpected variety of sources in their search for manifestations of popular culture. The role of cultural interlocutors, responsible for the recording and transmission of customs and traditions, is central in most of these transmissions. Standard sources include civic chronicles and diaries depicting events both everyday and unusual, such as carnivals or the elaborate Corpus Christi processions popular in Catholic urban areas. Illustrated broadsheets—the newspapers of the illiterate—depicted occurrences both mundane (the effects of drunkenness on the humors) and wondrous (monstrous births, comets, Marian apparitions, etc.). Broadsheets were the subjects of public readings by literate members of the community, both in the privacy of the home and in taverns. The hub of the local communications network, the tavern was where people from every walk of life congregated to exchange news, conduct business, and, not infrequently, foment protest and revolt.
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The global reach popular and consumer culture made possible by new communications technologies brings new discursive and identity resources with reach. The knowledge of using text messaging comes from mass media [2] and popular culture as an individual sees mobile phone [advertising], used on television, in movies and pictured in magazines and receives them as toys (Marsh, 2005, p.14). Many high school and college students accustomed to sending unlimited messages on their computer and end up with unexpectedly high bills. In the future, text messaging may increase, if the demands of sending text messages are continuously increasing. However, if the price of sending text messages decrease, it would encourage more people, especially young people, to use text messaging more often rather than making phone calls. Furthermore, text messaging does not influence physical health as much compared to mobile phones users.
In 1978, Peter Burke published what has become the standard text on early modern popular culture. Burke takes his cue from the dialectic models of the elite/popular traditions promoted by Redfield and Bakhtin. His developmental conception of popular culture is graphically illustrated by Bruegel's famous painting of Combat of Carnival and Lent, a mock joust between a fat man astride a barrel and a thin woman seated on a chair (Burke, p. 208). The Carnival season prior to Lent set the stage for a ritual inversion of normative values. In this "world turned upside down," people cross-dressed, ate and drank excessively, engaged in blatant sexual innuendo, openly mocked the clergy, and elected a prince of fools who held court in the town square. During the period between 1500 and 1650, Europe entered into the first phase of the reform of popular culture by the culture of the godly, as the arbiters of morality set a more somber tone during the catastrophic years of the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Renewal, and wars of religion.
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The producers of popular culture will go to great lengths to mold their products to reflect the audience beliefs and values. When the producers of Fatal Attraction (1987) screened an early version of their film for a test audience, the response was far from enthusiastic. Audiences were critical of the movie's original ending, and registered complaints about aspects of all three of the film's major characters - Alex, Dan and Dan's wife Beth (Anne Archer). The filmmakers listened to the voice (and groans) of the people and returned to the studio to reshoot critical scenes in a manner more reflective of audience desires.
In today’s mass societies, popular culture has been further shaped by mass production, mass media and the news media. Items of popular culture generally appeal to a wide variety of people. Because of this, some argue that, companies that produce and sell items of popular culture, attempt to maximize their profits by emphasizing broadly appealing items. The exception to this is the music industry, which cannot impose any product it wishes. Many types of popular music have started in small cultural circles.
Along with Reading the Popular , which focusses on more specific case studies, this book examines the production and consumption of popular culture from TV to fashion. Deals with the way in which people appropriate the products of commercial culture to create their own “meanings, pleasures and identities.”
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