Understanding terms like 'popular culture','mass culture' and 'mass media'

It becomes extremely important that the difference in meanings of the terms are discernible. the prime reason being the tendency to use them interchangeably and collapse into one another.

Conventional approachto pop and mass culture is opposed to and distinct from 'high culture'. the different constituents of pop culture like TV, radio, best-sellers, comics, magazines, fashions, pop music, pop art,popular films etc., still bear a lingering stigma of cultural inferiority which long prevented them from meriting attention.

Arts dedicated to higher purposes enjoy an exclusiveness and are opposed to arts that have simple pleasure, or to put it more simply provide simple pleasure, appeals to baser emotions (Classical music/dance vs cinematic/comedy shows/slapstick. While one is deemed to be ennobling, enlightening, transcending, the other is degenerate and enslaving. In this difference we will be able to identify content in Mass Media that exhibit the traits and the extent to which the latter variety dominate content only goes to prove that the Media promote low culture- poor in quality but high in output.

High art is supposedly patronised by the 'cultured', the 'polit' and the 'cultivated'. It is the preserve of the elite. Pop art on the other hand, is accessible to, liked and consumed by the 'masses' in a pejorative sense.

Before the coming of mass culture and mass media, the position was fairly simple. the culture of primitive folk or feudal societies was transmitted by personal and simple contact within the framework of communities. The population involved in cultural communication at any given time was invariably small, since the personal face-to-face element was absolutely essential to it. Thus popular folk culture grew directly from the very people who enjoyed it. folk art was transparent and grew from below. in it there was no fundamental division between audience and performer and meanings were democratically produced.

The separation of folk art and high culture into fairly watertight compartments corresponds to the sharp line once drawn between the common people and aristocracy. The spread of popular culture took a beating with the 'eruption of the masses on to the political stage and as a consequence of the printing press and later of other media of communication.

Henceforth messages from one centre would be broadcast or sent to millions of receivers simultaneously. modern technolgy has seized the world of traditional popular culture and triggered a mutation - Mass culture has merged from it.

Rosenberg explains it thus, "Modern technology is the necessary and the sufficient cause of mass culture." Unlike popular culture which was transmitted by personal and simple contact, mass culture is conveyed through the mass media, and is apparently shaped by them to a great extent. It is argued that once this mode of symbolic transmission is established in society,it expands irresistibly and mercilessly drives out popular culture wherever found.

The mutual incompatibilty of popular and high culture is due to the fact that the mass media penetrate more layers of society and permeate more layers of consciousness in less time than any other system of communication. The attributes of this culture are created and conditioned by the media, whose very structure brings in mass culture. Mass culture is created and shaped by the mass media therefore saturation of media also involves erosion of culture to create a culture for the market.