Mass Culture

Thesis Statement

Popular culture has become the standard-bearer for modernity, heralding its conversion. But for fundamentalists it is the problem itself. Even among the major intellectuals, some of the effects of popular culture are despised. Popular culture may be welcomed by leftist critics for the release of energy, but it is also condemned among conservatives, as they fear for the nihilistic influence on the tastes.

Introduction

Criticism of the mass culture of advanced industrial society is such images as the ubiquitous media, demagogic politics, grim, standardized aesthetic landscape, routine work, as well as the rest empty, but the critics of mass culture suffers from conceptual ambiguity and lack of research. critics of mass culture, both radical and conservative points of view, covers the arguments that the creation of mass culture is negative, and that this negatively affects the high culture, its audience, and society as a whole.

McDonald writes, "Mass culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinctions." It is a kind of cultural apprenticeship entered what he called "Lords of kitsch" (Horkheimer 275).

The philosopher Theodor Adorno also argued that the culture industry to manipulate the masses. Popular culture was identified as the reason why people become passive, easy pleasure through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic situation. It is culture industries that produce standardized cultural goods such as factories (Horkheimer Adorno 121). There are differences between the cultural values that make them different, but they really just variations on the same topic. Adorno calls this phenomenon pseudo-individualization. Adorno saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs, i.e. needs and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, on the contrary, freedom, creativity and true happiness.

These thinkers, saw celebrities like products "cultural industry" cultural apparatus of mass society; Hollywood stars serve as a distraction from the frustration created by industrial capitalism, and manipulate the 'masses' in the false promises of capitalism as an option (standardized, mass-produced celebrity apparently different physical person) and the universal success (celebrities appear to demonstrate the rewards available to all).

C. Wright Mills wrote in 1950 of professional celebrity, as a summary of progress of American capitalist society, competition and victory, as the "crowning result of the stellar system in a society that makes a fetish of competition, the celebrity shows that awards with those who will benefit, regardless of content competition(Mills 296). Determination celebrities as serial distractions, and their ideological role in the promotion of consumerism, competition, individualism and the myth of open possibilities, continues in many contemporary cultural critics. Celebrities, Democratic Aristocracy

One of the striking features of contemporary Western discourse celebrity way celebrities are treated to cultural status that is both "above" the rest of the people and the population (Horkheimer Adorno120). Celebrities are culturally constructed as a kind of elected aristocracy, such as increased and brought down to watch the crowd, celebrity has become a symbolic ...