CHAPTER 10

POPULAR CULTURE AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

INTRODUCTION
The popularity of Big Brother and reality television more generally opens up the
private space of the home and interpersonal relationships to the public arena.
The kinds of intercultural interaction and intercultural conflicts that take place in
reality television are broadcast widely to a very large audience.
These shows bring some of these cultural tensions into public discussion on
various discussion boards, Web pages, newspapers, and other outlets.
This chapter explores one type of culture that is often overlooked by intercultural
communication scholars but that plays an important role in the construction,
maintenance, and experience of culture, particularly in intercultural interactions.
This type of culture is popular culture.
LEARNING ABOUT CULTURES WITHOUT PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
As discussed previously, people can experience and learn about other cultures by
traveling to, and
relocating and living in other regions.
But there will always be many places around the world that we have not visited and
where we have not lived.
How do we know about places we have never been?
Much of what we know probably comes from popular culturethe media experience of
films, television, music, videos, books, and magazines that most of us know and share.
How does this experience affect intercultural communication?
THE POWER OF POPULAR CULTURE
The kind and quality of information we all have about other places are influenced by
popular culture.
But the views that the media portray supplement the information we get from other
sources such as movies.
In this sense, popular culture is pervasive.
The complexity of popular culture is often overlooked.
People express concern about the social effects of popular culture
for example, the influence of television violence on children,
-- the role of certain kinds of music in causing violent behavior by some youths,
and

-- the relationship between heterosexual pornography and violence against

women.
Yet most people look down on the study of popular culture, as if this form of culture
conveys nothing of lasting significance.
So, on the one hand, we are concerned about the power of popular culture;
on the other, we dont look on popular culture as a serious area of academic research.
This inherent contradiction can make it difficult to investigate and discuss popular
culture.
U.S. Americans are in a unique position in relationship to popular culture.
Products of U.S. popular culture are well known and circulate widely on the
international market.
The popularity of U.S. movies such as Transformers and Spider Man, of U.S. music
stars such as Britney Spears and Madonna, and of U.S. television shows from Modern
Family to CSI and Desperate Housewives creates an uneven flow of texts between the
United States and other nations.
In contrast, U.S. Americans are rarely exposed to popular culture from outside the
United States.
Exceptions to this largely one-way movement of popular culture include pop music
stars who sing in English, such as
Wyclef Jean (Haitian),
Shakira (Colombian), and
Cline Dion (French Canadian).
The study of popular culture has become increasingly important in the communication
field.
Although intercultural communication scholars traditionally have overlooked popular
culture, we believe that it is a significant influence in intercultural interaction.
What Is Popular Culture?
The 19th-century essayist and poet Matthew Arnold, who expressed concern about
protecting civilization, defined culture as the best that has been thought and said in
the world
a definition that emphasizes quality.
In this context, many Western societies distinguish high culture from low culture.
High culture refers to those cultural activities that are often the domain of the elite or
the well-to-do: ballet, symphony, opera, great literature, and fine art.
These activities sometimes are framed as international because supposedly they can
be appreciated by audiences in other places, from other cultures, in different time
periods.

Their cultural value is seen as transcendent and timeless.

To protect these cultural treasures, social groups build museums, symphony halls, and
theaters.
In fact, universities devote courses, programs, and even entire departments to the
study of aspects of high culture.

In opposition to high culture is low culture, which refers to the activities of the
nonelite: music videos, game shows, professional wrestling, stock car racing, graffiti
art, TV talk shows, and so on.
Traditionally, low-culture activities have been seen as unworthy of serious studyand
so of little interest to museums or universities.
The cultural values embedded in these activities were considered neither transcendent
nor timeless.
The elitism reflected in the distinction between high and low culture points to the
tensions in Western social systems.
In recent decades, however, this distinction has begun to break down.
Rapid social changes propelled universities to alter their policies and also have
affected how we study intercultural communication.
For example, the turbulent 1960s in USA brought to the university a powerful new
interest in ethnic studies, including African American studies and womens and gay
and lesbian issues.
These areas of study did not rely on the earlier distinctions between high and low
culture.
Rather, they contributed to a new conceptual framework by arguing for the legitimacy
of other cultural forms that traditionally would have been categorized as low culture
but were now framed as popular culture.
Because of this elitist view of culture,
the distinction between high culture
and low culture has led to low culture
being reconceptualized as popular culture.
Popular Culture: A new name for low culture, referring to those cultural
products that most people share and know about, including television, music, videos,
and popular magazines.
According to this definition, television, music videos, YouTube, Disney, advertising,
soap operas, and popular magazines are systems of popular culture.
In contrast, the symphony and the ballet do not qualify as popular culture because
most people cannot identify much about them unless they have studied them.

Intercultural contact and intercultural communication play a central role in the

creation and maintenance of popular culture.
There are four significant characteristics of popular culture:
(1) It is produced by culture industries,
(2) it differs from folk culture,
(3) it is everywhere, and
(4) it fills a social function.

Culture industries: Industries that produce and sell popular culture as commodities.
Folk culture: Traditional and nonmainstream cultural activities that are not
financially driven.

This Chart highlights some of the distinctions between High Culture, Folk Culture, and
Popular Culture:

Type

Definition

Who Knows
It?

What Does It
Look Like?

High Culture

Elite aristocratic
expressions of culture

Rich members
of the political
establishment

Opera, classic
sculpture,
symphony
performances

Folk Culture

Traditional and
nonmainstream
cultural activities that
are not financially
driven

Most cultural
groups, but
especially
middle-class
groups

Folk music

Popular
Culture

Ever-present cultural
products designed for
profitable consumption

Almost
everyone in a
social group

Mainstream
music, movies,
television,
romance novels

CONSUMING AND RESISTING POPULAR CULTURE

Consuming Popular Culture
Faced with this onslaught of cultural texts, people negotiate their ways through
popular culture in quite different ways.
Cultural Texts: Popular culture messages whether television shows, movies,
advertisements, or other widely disseminated messages.
Popular culture texts do not have to win over the majority of people to be popular.

People often seek out or avoid specific forms of popular culture.

There is some unpredictability in how people navigate popular culture.
After all, not all men enjoy watching football, and not all women like to read romance
novels.
However, some profiles emerge.
Advertising offices of popular magazines even make their reader profiles available to
potential advertisers.
Reader Profile: Portrayals of readership demographics prepared by magazines.
These reader profiles portray what the magazine believes its readership looks like.
Although reader profiles do not follow a set format, they generally detail the average
age, gender, individual and household incomes, and so on, of their readership.

For example, The reader profile for Vogue

will not look like the reader profi le for Esquire.
Each magazine targets a particular readership and then sells this readership to
advertisers.

Resisting Popular Culture

People often resist particular forms of popular culture by refusing to engage in them.
For example, some people feel the need to avoid television and even decide not to
own televisions.
Some people refuse to go to movies that contain violence or sexuality because they do
not find pleasure in such films.
In this case, these kinds of conscious decisions are often based on concerns about the
ways that cultural products should be understood as political.
Resistance to popular culture can also be related to social roles.
Likewise, some people have expressed concern about the supposedly homophobic or
racist ideologies embedded in Disney films such as Aladdin.
Resistance stems mainly from concerns about the representation of various social
groups.
Popular culture plays a powerful role in how we think about and understand other
groups.
The Disney film Pocahontas was criticized for its rewriting of the European encounters
with Native Americans.
REPRESENTING CULTURAL GROUPS

People often are introduced to other cultures through the lens of popular culture.
These introductions can be quite intimate, in ways that tourists may not experience.
For example, movies may portray romance, familial conflict, or a death in the family;
the audience experiences the private lives of people they do not know, in ways that
they never could simply as tourists.
Yet we must also think about how these cultural groups are portrayed through that
lens of popular culture.
Not everyone sees the portrayal in the same way.
For example, you may not think that the TV shows Desperate Housewives and Two and
a Half Men represent quintessential U.S. American values and lifestyles.
But some viewers may see it as their entree into how U.S. Americans (or perhaps
European Americans) live.

Migrants Perception of Mainstream Culture

Ethnographers and other interpretive scholars have crossed international and cultural
boundaries to examine the influence of popular culture.
We can see that popular culture images are often more influential in constructing
particular ways of understanding other cultural groups than our own.
The use of popular culture to learn about other cultures should not be surprising.
After all, many teachers encourage their students to use popular culture in this
manner, not only to improve their language skills but also to learn many of the
nuances of another culture.
Popular Culture and Stereotyping
In what ways does reliance on popular culture create and reinforce stereotypes of
different cultures?
Our knowledge about other places, even places we have been, is largely influenced by
popular culture.
For people who do not travel and who interact in relatively homogeneous social circles,
the impact of popular culture may be even greater.
Stereotypes are connected to social values and social judgments about other groups of
people.
These stereotypes are powerful because they function to tell us how we value and
judge these other groups.
Many familiar stereotypes of ethnic groups are represented in the media.
U.S. POPULAR CULTURE & POWER
One of the dynamics of intercultural communication that we have highlighted
throughout this text is power.

In considering popular culture, we need to think about not only how people interpret
and consume popular culture but also how these popular culture texts represent
particular groups in specific ways.
If people largely view other cultural groups through the lens of popular culture, then
we need to think about the power relations that are embedded in these popular
culture dynamics.

Global Circulation of Images and Commodities

As noted previously, much of the internationally circulated popular culture is U.S.
popular culture. U.S.-made films, for example, are widely distributed by an industry
that is backed by considerable financial resources.
Some media scholars have noted that the U.S. film industry earns far more money
outside the United States than from domestic box office receipts
This situation ensures that
Hollywood will continue to seek
overseas markets and that it
will have the financial resources
to do so.
Many other U.S. media are widely available outside the United States, including
television and newspapers.
For example, MTV and CNN are broadcast internationally.
And the International Herald Tribune, published jointly by the New York Times and the
Washington Post, is widely available in some parts of the world.

Cultural Imperialism
It is difficult to measure the impact of the U.S. and Western media and popular culture
on the rest of the world, but we do know that we cannot ignore this dynamic.
The U.S. government in the 1920s believed that having U.S. movies on foreign screens
would boost the sales of U.S. products because the productions would be furnished
with U.S. goods.
Discussions about media imperialism, electronic colonialism, and cultural
imperialism, which began in the 1920s, continue today.
The interrelationships among economics, nationalism, and culture make it difficult to
determine with much certainty how significant cultural imperialism might be.
Media Imperialism: Dominating or control through media
Electronic Colonialism: Dominating or exploitation utilizing technological forms.

Cultural Imperialism: Dominating through the spread of cultural products.

Popular culture plays an enormous role in explaining relations around the globe.
It is through popular culture that we try to understand the dynamics of other cultures
and nations.
Although these representations are problematic, we also rely on(?) popular culture to
understand many kinds of issues:
the conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan,
the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church,
the conflict in the West Bank between Israelis and Palestinians,
and global warming.
For many of us, the world exists through popular culture.