As I started to read more and more about youth and popular culture, I became acutely aware that in terms of popular culture I didn’t actually know what this meant. Whilst I understood to a certain degree that it involved something that was popular amongst a group of people, I didn’t understand why particular subjects, items, books and websites would be considered part of popular culture, more so who decides what things form part of this popular culture?
One article that particularly helped me was “Toward a definition of popular culture” (Parker, 2011). In this article Parker takes readers through traditional definitions of popular culture that usually focused on production and class systems, however there has now been a shift towards focusing on consumption and status. Weber (1978) acknowledges this change as a result of “‘classes’ being stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods; whereas ‘status groups’ are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘styles of life.’” I think this is particularly relevant these days as with the advent of social media platforms, video and computer games, consumption of these popular tools allows more people to enjoy popular culture mediums.
Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital can also play a significant role in the development of popular culture. Bourdieu tends to view “cultural capital” as the capital necessary to succeed in an advanced consumer society (Bourdieu cited in Parker, 2011, p. 161). Whilst I would love to go into an extended discussion of cultural capital, I feel that I may be going off on a bit of a tangent here. And my understanding only goes as far as knowing that there are different levels of cultural capital, high and low, broad or narrow. For example if you were to go to a classical opera performance you would probably need to know what the opera is about and have an appreciation of the music, performers and that type of singing. In order to do this you would need a certain amount of cultural capital in this area and this would probably be defined at a form of high cultural capital, as you need certain skills and interests to understand opera. However if you were to go to a rave party you would need little to no cultural capital to understand the music and be able to dance, so this would mean that you would need low cultural capital.
Now please pull me up on this if I am barking up the wrong tree or have completely missed the point however as a result of reading about cultural capital I understand that popular culture is created as a result of people not having access to cultural capital or the means to produce cultural capital. Or as Parker (2011, p. 161) states “Popular culture consists of products that require little cultural capital either to produce or else to consume.”
My basic understanding of this is that things that are considered popular culture require little to no cultural capital to produce or consume. I think that whilst this does sound somewhat harsh towards popular culture if you were to examine trends amongst youth and their popular culture you would soon realise that this is probably the case. For example: movies, TV, and music may need a large amount of money and power to produce, however they need virtually no cultural capital to consume, as it does not require much talent to partake in these activities. I am not sure if I have really reached a definition of popular culture, however I now understand the phenomenon of popular culture and how different generations or groups of people will have different interests within their popular culture depending on what is accessible and what is produced. Furthermore “popular culture can be found in different societies, within different groups in societies, and among societies and groups in different historical periods.” (Strinati, Introduction to Theories, xv) When thinking about how popular culture does not require cultural capital I have also started to wonder if these days youth popular culture is more geared towards consumption over production?
References
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 30_-306; also 932-933, 93_-938. For Weber on the ancient world, see 1340-1372. See also Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 43-44.