SOCIOL 1 Study Guide - Final Guide: George Lipsitz, Ella Shohat, Hegemonic Masculinity
Document Summary
Popular culture is defined as being well known, well liked, mass cultural, and democratic. Mass culture means it"s average and common, sometimes even inferior, it"s not elite. Democratic means it"s by the people and of the people. Mass culture is the tests objects, and relations of cultural industries; popular culture is what people make of those texts, objects, and relations. Mass culture is the noun and pop culture is the adjective/verb. We are active in the pop culture project, which means the lines are blurred between producer and consumer. Willis argues that just because something is mass produced, it does not devalue it. His theory is symbolic work, which means the work people do in creating meaning out of the cultural phenomena. This is necessary because human beings are fundamentally expressive and communicative creatures. Symbolic creativity is the transformation of raw materials of culture into specific forms of identity and meaning; these raw materials often come from mass culture.
