Popular Global Culture

Assess the view that the mass media are helping to create a single global popular culture (January 2013)

Popular culture is a culture ordinary people can relate to and is enjoyed by mass audiences. It is also referred to as low or mass culture and it is a mass produced product and sometimes trivial in its content and has no artistic value. High culture is seen as set apart from everyday life and often highly valued and aimed at mainly upper class and middle class people. The mass media can be argued in creating a single global popular culture due to many different processes.

Postmodernists would suggest that the difference between high and popular culture is weakening due to easier international transportations and expansions of media based industries. High and popular culture can be produced and exchanged more easily and the boundaries between them have become blurred. Strinati supports this and says that there is no real distinction between high and popular culture. Giddens also argues that forms of high culture are used to produce products for the mass popular culture market.

One way in which the mass media has helped to create a single global popular culture in through convergence. This is a combination of the different ways of presenting a variety of the types of information such as video, text and music into a single delivery system. Compression has also contributed to this which is the way in which digital technologies can send many signals through the same sable.

Globalisation describes the process in which the world in becoming increasingly interconnected as a results of increased trade and cultural exchange. This has been accelerated by technology and the media. McLunhan argues that technological change is now so great that the world is becoming a global village. Hobbs uses the term glocal to describe the interconnectivity between global and local markets. Electronics mass media and the internet have removed time and space barriers in...