Here's an idea, popular culture isn't made up
solely of stuff that's popular.
My sense has always been that popularity in culture
is simultaneously referring to three things.
One, something that a huge number of people like.
Two, something that seems like a huge number of people like it.
And three, something made on purpose
to resemble other things that huge numbers of people like.
The first is pretty straightforward.
"Harry Potter," Beyonce, "The Big Bang Theory,"
all numerically popular.
The second two are a little bit less straightforward.
"Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men" are popular TV shows,
except also sort of not.
The final season finale of "Breaking Bad"
had fewer broadcast viewers than most reruns of "The Big Bang
Theory."
Phish, Jeff Buckley, King Crimson, Tom Waits,
zero hit singles.
These things are popular in that they are talked about.
Though they might not have been experienced
by gargantuan audiences, they are critical successes.
They are important.
And finally lots of stuff is just designed to seem popular.
It has a pop aesthetic.
It's meant to look and sound a certain way, to be familiar.
Usually, though not always, this is
in the hopes of becoming numerically
and/or influentially popular.
Sometimes it works.
Katy Perry, "The Da Vinci Code," "Guardians of the Galaxy."
But mostly it doesn't.
For examples go look in the $2 singles
bin or bookshelf at your local record shop or gas station.
Now as it turns out, my three concepts
of what the "popular" in popular culture means
are really only a very small part of the story.
When you combine popular and culture into popular culture
you can really change the meaning of both words.
Suddenly we're no longer just talking
about culture that's popular, but about more and less
than both of those ideas separately.
In his "Introduction to Cultural Theory in Popular Culture,"
John Storey lays out six, count them
six, concepts of popular culture.
Here they are in not exactly his order.
The first is that which is quote,
"widely favored or well liked by many people."
It has achieved popularity with numbers.
The second is culture that's not difficult or scarce.
If high culture is the opera, a modern art museum, or the stuff
they talk about in "The New Yorker," than everything else,
TV, radio, comic books, that is popular culture.
Mass culture casts popular culture
as a wholly commercial endeavor.
Like mass produced products, mass culture
is mass produced culture.
You just churn it out.
Postmodern culture stands in opposition
to the second concept.
It quote, "no longer recognizes the distinction
between high culture and popular culture."
Hi, Andy Warhol.
There's popular culture as culture made by the people,
not by some corporation or institution.
Popular culture as a folk culture, essentially.
And last but not least, from the perspective
of Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory,
popular culture is quote, "a site
of struggle between the resistance
of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation
operating in the interest of dominant groups."
What does that mean?
Basically, popular culture isn't just
a set of media objects like novels, movies, or music,
but a process that takes place between an audience
and the culture industry.
A set of organizations, businesses,
institutions that produce culture as industry.
Media always communicates ideas about the way its creator
thinks the world works.
That creator is in a position of authority,
but the audience might resist some of those ideas.
Or it might incorporate some of them.
This negotiation, a tension between creator, audience,
and media itself is in this view popular culture.
I find these last two concepts, folk and hegemony,
compelling because well, because internet actually.
Maybe because of YouTube specifically.
YouTube is home to all of these ideas of popular culture,
crass, over-commercialized, high-low culture
viewed an infinity of times.
But it feels particularly, to me at least,
like the place to do something with the texts and practices
of the culture industry.
Acoustic glitch mash up remix this and that YouTube,
that's YouTube.
And in addition to the texts which you know,
can mean basically anything.
Produced by the culture industries, we are able
and I think in certain cases expected
to make use of the text produced by each other, by the folks.
Now painting YouTube as a true folk culture is complicated,
it's true.
YouTube isn't available to nearly all the folks.
The people with access don't live in a media vacuum,
and Google is very much a dominant feature of the culture
industry.
So YouTube's folkatude is tainted, it's true.
But so too, I think, is the strict audience
slash culture industry binary.
Maybe it's naive or optimistic of me to YouTube
and the communities on it as something
other than exploitative canoodling
with a pre-existing culture industry, but I do.
Or at least I see it is the start of something other.
And I think in the gears of that something's process,
the meaning of the word "popular" in popular culture
has become mangled.
Cultural popularity isn't or maybe
is no longer just a number like Billboard charts, best sellers,
or box office sales.
It's a process.
One that doesn't have to involve mass culture.
Popular culture and mass culture are no longer married,
they're just very good friends.
The upshot?
Popular culture doesn't have to be,
strictly speaking, popular, or populist.
How could it be popular?
Are ASMR videos popular culture then?
Or what about the YouTube scything media complex.
My gut says yes.
And hat tip to Destin from Smarter
Every Day for posting about the scything videos on his Tumblr.
Blew my mind.
That was a very sharp and weird rabbit hole that I fell down.
But really, the media landscape is
so complicated and so crowded.
Sure, more stuff is always being handed down
from on high, but more is also being made within communities
and passed around laterally and semilateraly.
The media fueling the pop culture process
doesn't have to come from Warner Brothers or Fox or Disney.
And when it doesn't, it suddenly becomes more likely
that while it might be five million people's favorite thing
ever, it remains relatively unknown in the world at large.
It is amazing when at VidCon say,
to see dozens or hundreds of people so, so, so excited
about glimpsing a particular YouTuber that I do not
recognize even a little.
And I make the YouTube videos for a living.
I know who Our Second Life is.
I'm cool.
Trevor seems like a nice guy.
Hi everybody.
I'm on a fisheye.
But then OK, here's the thing I've been thinking about a lot
lately.
When you make things, especially things that are popular,
it's easy to turn inward, to ignore that pop culture process
or take it for granted.
To not test it or worst of all, as Ze Frank says,
to let your F-I-L-D-I gorge itself on ego and arrogance.
I think it's fair to say that Idea Channel is
popular by some measure.
And maybe it's because of comfort or an F-I-L-D-I with
a poor diet.
But I feel like we could give you more to do something with.
So we're going to try.
And I'm really, really excited about it.
Which I guess is a way of saying we're going
to try a bunch of new things.
We're not going to abandon our normal format.
We're just going to give it a rest sometimes.
Not because we are trying to become
more popular, but because as a feature of popular culture
I feel like we have to.
We don't want to be like Metallica
and just do the same thing forever.
We have to constantly encourage and test that popular culture
process.
And I hope you're on board for it,
because in my mind that is what popular culture is.
What do you guys think?
What is a popular culture?
Does it have to be numerically popular
or does everything have at least the capability of becoming
popular culture?
Let us know in the comments.
And for real, over the next couple weeks
we're going to try some new stuff,
so comment responses for this episode will be in two weeks.
In the intervening time we're going to try some new stuff.
I've had some things up my sleeve for a little while.
It's got very uncomfortable.
It's very nice to get the things out of my sleeve.
I hope you like it.
I'm really excited.
Your comments are worth the world to me.
Let's see what you guys had to say about the ice bucket
challenge.
From the subreddit, which remember we will be responding
to comments from, SevenStrokeSamurai talks about
the attention economy, which is a thing that we should have
talked about but didn't.
And asked the question of whether or not
we are paying for things with our attention
or whether or not our attention is paying for stuff.
Right, which is kind of like where is the relationship?
Is one of them disembodied?
And you know, attention economy always
made me think about screen real estate.
And I always think of the attention economy
as this thing that's sort of butting up
against how much we can actually just
fit on one computer screen.
Also in the subreddit, Platus writes a really awesome comment
breaking down the way you can view
the worth of every step of the kind
of social and monetary transaction
that comprised the ice bucket challenge.
It's a really, really awesome post.
Thanks for writing this, Platus.
dominique Wilson talks about the sponsored post as a way
to prove that social media posts have
some kind of monetary value.
And yeah, I mean I think you look at this a couple different
ways.
Is it the post itself, is it the people taking a look at?
Right, this is the stuff that we were talking about.
I think it also follows ye old adage
of if there is a place we will find a way
to put a product into it.
That's just how world works.
Dbrockop talks about something related
which is the pay with a tweeet mechanic, which
is where you're signing up for something
and instead of paying some small amount of money you can "pay"
with a tweet about that thing, right.
And so that draws a very clear line between those two things.
You can either give us money or you
can try to raise awareness about our product, which eventually
will lead to either more money or more awareness.
So yeah, good point.
Drake 1500, Joseph Catalano, and Hal Gailey
all talk about the complicated constellation of things
that all contribute to our value of something
and that it is incredibly subjective.
And that you cannot say that a social media post is worth
something because someone has labored on it or because it has
taken up resources in the way that was maybe suggested
in the episode.
And I think that is totally spot on, and maybe kind
of the heart of the question we were trying to get at.
That determining value is ultimately so subjective.
And anyways, these are really, really great comments
with links to awesome stuff.
So links to these comments and all the others
in the doobly doo.
Lupiou0 talks about diminishing marginal utility
in that the life of a tweet is a thing that
loses value over time.
And in my other life as someone who occasionally teaches
businesses how to be better at internet,
this is a thing that we talk about all the time.
That these things have like expiration dates and that
they actually become less valuable over time.
Which is the thing that the internet,
being an archive of itself, I want
to fundamentally disagree with.
We made an episode about that, so.
Ha.
Jess Chambers takes the self described marketing approach
to the ice bucket challenge.
And the thing I want to seize on is the idea
of our association between ALS and to the ice bucket
challenge.
That now those two things are two very closely related,
to the degree that the ALS association I read this week
is trying to trademark ice bucket challenge.
Which is, I don't think that seems like a good idea.
But going forward now is the challenge
of some kind of going to be a thing that we will not
separate from ALS?
And is it now, is it now over?
Is the challenge video for charity done?
Have we exhausted it?
I don't know.
This week's episode was brought you
by the hard work of these members of the culture
industry.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a subreddit
that you might have noticed I am now
responding to comments from.
And the tweet of the week comes from goldroman22
who points me towards a video that I'm not
going to try to describe it.
You should just watch it.
I had a great time when I watched it.
I don't know if I was supposed to.
And for this week's record swap we're
actually going to do a kind of dual record swap.
So last week we added Boards of Canada, which you probably
can't even see right now.
And I and a bunch of other people kind of upset Boards
of Canada, can't really see it.
So we're going to do the unthinkable.
I'm going to switch two records.
I'm going to put Boards of Canada
where Django Reinhardt is.
Love Django Reinhardt, but he's been here for a while.
He was on the last record wall.
So I'm going to put him in the corner.
Sorry Django.
We're going to put Boards of Canada, OK.
I'm going to stop talking.
I'm going to do it right now.
So, so many structural problems to contend with.
OK so then for this week's actual record swap,
new record which is the last record
swap, so that means that Sword and Sorcery is going away,
cue Taps.
We're going to be replacing Sword and Sorcery
with Jim Guthrie's Indie Game the movie soundtrack, which
seems only appropriate.
So here we go.
[TAPS PLAYS]
All right, so adios Sword and Sorcery.
It's been real.
And welcome Indie Game the movie.
We're done.
That's it.
No more record swaps.
No more record swaps?
What are we going to do in this part of the episode now?
We'll figure something out.