Understanding Popular Culture: Media, Consumerism, and Critical Theory

Popular Culture: Defining Human Connection

Popular culture is the way humanity relates to the world, encompassing everything we do, think, and value.

The Plurality of Culture

Plurality expresses, first of all, an accumulation of human experiences that is our shared heritage. It teaches us different ways to be social and to create the future. Its main feature is that people are the origin and end of its production; it is made by and for the people. It is through this plurality that a group constructs its cultural identity.

Massification of Culture and Consumerism

Massification of culture refers to a culture produced by specialists to sell a particular idea or object, forming the “consumer society.” This creates a huge consumer market to which all production is directed.

The Cultural Industry: Origins and Critique

The term Cultural Industry was first used in 1947 in the publication Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, replacing the term “mass culture.”

For Adorno, the cultural industry reflects the interests of the modern industrial world, reducing humanity and each of its elements to conditions that represent its interests, or to mere consumers. Instead, freed from the magic of fear, humanity once again becomes the victim of deception: the progress of technical domination.

Adorno’s Critique: Preventing Autonomous Thought

In Adorno’s own words, the cultural industry “prevents the formation of autonomous individuals, independent, able to judge and decide consciously.”

Commodity Fetishism: The “Good” as a Fetish

The “good” (or commodity) becomes a real “fetish,” something needed to satisfy a psychological need, and money drives consumer decisions.

Alienation of the Spectator in Mass Culture

The object of contemplation is the result of unconscious activity, expressed thus: the more one contemplates, the less one lives; the more one accepts recognizing oneself in the images, the less one understands one’s own existence and desire. The spectacle’s purpose, in relation to the active individual, appears within it; it is no longer their own gestures, but one that presents itself.

Simulacra and Simulation: Baudrillard’s Hyperreality

Simulacra and Simulation is a collection of essays by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, addressing the question of the hyperreal and its implications in the loss of humanity’s reference points. This occurs through models and modeling of a reality without its own origin.

Defining Semblance

Semblance: To deceive, to make the fake pass as true.

Understanding Simulation

Simulation: Does not seek true nor false. It provides models capable of virtually reproducing reality and realizing its operation, but without explaining it.

Evolution of Cultural Transmission

A new order of cultural transmission has emerged. In the past, lived and learned experiences of reality were simply reported by elders to younger generations orally, through proverbs and stories.

Contemporary Cultural Transmission: The Digital Age

In the contemporary world, this new order is characterized by the invasion of technology and the revolution in communication and information technology. This overlays everything and everyone, increasingly detaching information and objects from direct human experience.

Muniz Sodré on Television as a “Mirror of Narcissus”

Journalist and sociologist Muniz Sodré clarifies this in his analysis of the fate of the simulacrum. For Sodré, television is not just an image tube; it is a modern “Mirror of Narcissus.”

The Image as Object: Hindering Critical Thought

What makes the image an object field is its property of producing facts and news stories in a way that prevents the viewer from engaging in reasoning or critical thinking. Everything watched on TV is already pre-packaged.