Mass culture: what it is, how it emerged and its characteristics

We explain what mass culture is, its main characteristics and how it emerged. We also explain what its consequences are.

Mass culture is closely linked to the success of capitalism.

What is mass culture?

Mass culture is the form of culture that reproduces its products with industrial techniques and considers members of society as consumers.

Its appearance takes place after the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the First World War with the emergence of mass society and the development of the first mass media (the newspaper, the printing press and then the radio) and it spread exponentially as the media diversified and became more complex (cinema, television and the Internet).

Mass culture is a concept inseparable from the form of production of capitalism, its practices and its worldviewthat is, the set of values ​​and principles that are derived from it (such as accumulation, individualism, competition and social prestige associated with consumption).

The first analyses of mass culture emerged in the mid-20th century from the studies of the Frankfurt School. Its theorists criticised the way in which artistic creations were treated as consumer products, turned into entertainment and used to manipulate the desires and emotions of the public based on the needs of the market.

Many sociologists have understood the subjects who live immersed in mass culture as passive consumers, incapable of reflecting on the influence of products, the media, their threat to our sensitivity and our reflective capacities.

Other contemporary thinkers such as Edgar Morin (1921-) and his followers suggest a more complex and less pessimistic vision of mass culture. Although they warn of threats (such as distortion of perception, loss of social cohesion, political manipulation, alienation and dependency), they also link it to a certain democratization of knowledge.

The most optimistic theorists admit that while it is true that mass culture has been very effective in propagating capitalist ideasit is also true that it can be used reflexively and take advantage of its massive reach to criticize the system and improve the conditions of society.

An active and thinking social subject, with greater access to information, can take advantage of the media and consumption to empower themselves and have greater participation in socio-cultural phenomena.

Characteristics of mass culture

1. It depends on mass media

Mass culture depends on mass media. Television, radio, cinema, newspapers, social media and the Internet They are essential to access and influence large numbers of people. in the preferences, opinions, beliefs and attitudes of individuals.

Good use of communication tools, however, can foster a sense of community and generate new forms of artistic or scientific expression.

2. It obeys industrial and consumer logic

As the critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer asserted, in mass culture Artistic and cultural creations are treated as industrial products mass consumption.

Although this has allowed for an intense exchange of creations between people from different contexts and origins, everything is standardized, marketed and distributed according to marketing methods that give priority to economic profitability.

3. Concentrate power in a few hands

In mass culture, large owners of corporations that produce goods and services have control over the circulation and expansion of content and messages. This makes the values ​​and ideas that support the centralization of power are reproducedand violates the rights of the rest of society.

4. Standardize, simplify and homogenize

A feature of mass culture is that it excludes particular cultural manifestations. Although globalization allows very distant communities to be connected, cultural differences are usually reduced to pre-established patterns with easy and repetitive content.

An example of this are children’s films produced by Hollywood, which adjust the cultural complexities of distant regions (Arab, Latin American, European or Asian) to elementary and standardized narrative schemes.

5. Conceive of people as consumers

Mass culture sees and makes people act as anonymous consumers of products or services, rather than active citizens with identity, rights and responsibilities in society.

6. It focuses on superficial entertainment and the attention economy

Products of mass culture They are designed to captivate the public’s attention, manipulate your emotions and influence your desires. To do this, they generate instant gratification (they produce immediate and fleeting pleasure), they fragment knowledge (they prevent access to certain knowledge through copyright monopoly or information bubbles) and they promote addictive entertainment (they promote forms of distraction and evasion that generate dependency). ).

This prevents critical reflection and makes it difficult to understand complex phenomena, as well as fostering a passive and conformist attitude that prevents questioning harmful values, circumstances or models.

Aspects of mass culture

1. Mass society

In the automobile industry there was no difference between one model or another.

The mass society born with the French Revolutionafter which a new social, political and economic order emerged that strengthened the bourgeois class.

The mass sale of products and services, added to the fall of the feudal regime, resulted in the advancement and predominance of the bourgeois social class, which emerged thanks to the rise of capitalism and the intensification of consumption.

2. Mass production

With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, machines acquired a main role.

The Ancien Régime (i.e. the period before the French Revolution) It was characterized by agricultural and livestock production on a small scale and for the protection of peasants by feudal lords.

Many of these peasants had decided to be independent (free from the feudal lords) and began to make their products independently.

With the birth of the bourgeoisie and the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, machines acquired a crucial role in mass production. In this way, consumption intensified and spread to more remote territories.

3. Mass communication

Mass media was not necessary when products were sold on a small scale. The arrival of the Industrial Revolution multiplied the manufacturing and supply of products and The media became indispensable to promote consumption.

With the increase and expansion of production and use of the media, advertising emerged, which mediated between the product and the new consumer.

The first mass media that emerged was the newspaper or pamphlet. Before they existed mobile media who were in charge of “singing” or relating news from other lands, since the common population did not know how to read or write.

4. The mass consumer

The first mass consumer was considered a tabula rasa, that is: a flat, empty receiver who just needed to be persuaded with an advertising message through a communication medium. Consumers were conceived as an amorphous and generalized mass that did not require any differentiation.

From this first mass culture come graphic advertisements with orders such as Drink Coca-Cola, Eat popcorn”. In this first period, the consumer responded to unidirectional language, with a single stimulus and a single expected response.

This aspect has been significantly transformed. Today consumer research has changed and a good part of scientific knowledge is at the service of the attention economy (the economic competition for people’s attention) that employs neuromarketing (the use of neuroscience) and more recently, big data (the digital processing of data). personal data) to study purchasing behaviors.

Positive aspects of mass culture

Mass culture has generated an idea of ​​a global community.

Mass culture encourages the massification of consumption, which allows broader sectors of the population to have access to a greater range of products, services and information.

Some positive aspects of mass culture are:

• It encourages the massification of consumption, which sometimes allows goods to circulate and be perfected according to the needs of the population.
• The low cost of products manufactured in mass culture allows them to be accessible to a greater number of people.
• The mass media foster interest in certain social, political and religious events and promote the idea of ​​community between people belonging to very different and distant cultures.

Negative aspects of mass culture

Some negative aspects of mass culture are:

• It contributes to the alienation of society.
• It creates models of behavior that serve the interests of certain business or political groups.
• It establishes ideas, judgments and opinions as if they were consumer products.
• It values ​​economic profitability above human experience, so it does not take into consideration the subjectivity of the inhabitants of society, beyond their purchasing habits.

These problems have increased with the new uses of technology, which have promoted individualism, unnecessary consumption and the idea that it is more important to produce incessantly than to achieve well-being.

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References

• Canclini, NG (1991). Consumption serves to think. Communication Dialogues, 30, 1. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/
• Crary, J. (2015). 24/7. Late capitalism and the end of the dream. Paidós.
• Debord, G. (2006). The society of the spectacle. The publishing brand.
• Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1998). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trot.
• Mass culture in France. (sf). Cairn.info. https://www.cairn.info/