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Phenomenon associated with the political retrenchment following civil rights, women’s and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The backlash was first noted in the violent response of whites to SCLC’s 1966 march in Chicago, MI, followed by Nixon’s success drawing on the “Silent Majority” and the assault on busing. It is also seen as a reason for the failure of ERA, the growth of the anti-abortion movement and the rise of the “Moral Majority” during the Reagan era. Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1991) has examined the reaction against feminism, and numerous studies have outlined the problems facing the Democratic Party, given the loss of much of its New Deal coalition.
The backlash has been captured in several television series: first in All in the Family (CBS, 1971–83) with Archie Bunker representing a not-so-“Silent Majority”; then in the 1980s series, Family Ties (NBC, 1982–9), which pitted Alex Keaton’s political and social conservatism against his parents’ 1960s idealism.
Industry:Culture
Philosophy in American academia went through two phases after the Second World War.
The first was influenced and shaped by the ideas of the Vienna Circle and a small collection of thinkers from Oxford and Cambridge and lasted from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. Although there were notable exceptions, this approach, loosely known as analytic philosophy dominated academic philosophy and largely displaced previously influential systems such as Neo-Hegelianism, transcendentalism and pragmatism. Analytic philosophers focused on areas that had achieved prominence in the first part of the century: symbolic logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and language analysis. There was a marked skepticism about ethics and political theory and an increasing disconnection between academic philosophers and mainstream society.
The second phase, which had no single dominant system, arose partly because of dissatisfaction with the analytic movement, both from analytical philosophers themselves and from those who felt that it did not adequately address a number of important social issues. From within the movement, writers like W.V.O. Quine (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”), Edmund Gettier (“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”) and Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) all challenged fundamental tenets of the analytic approach. Kuhn’s work, moreover, had profound impact outside colleges and universities, introducing the notion of a paradigm into popular culture.
Concurrently the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, debate over Vietnam, environmental activism and advances in medical technology were only a few of the social forces that an increasing number of philosophers felt were being inadequately addressed. The desire to grapple with these, coupled with the publication of John Rawls’ influential A Theory of Justice (1971), led to a resurgence of interest in social political philosophy and ethics. Ethics, in turn, further branched into a series of sub-specialties: medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, engineering ethics and legal ethics—each of which gave rise to its own association, conferences and journals. Far from being disengaged from everyday concerns, many of these applied ethicists became consultants to governments, hospitals and businesses, and developed influential think tanks and centers throughout the country (e.g. the Hastings Center).
In addition to these reactions against the analytic approach, at least three other trends emerged: contemporary continental philosophy feminism and pragmatism. The first came about in the 1960s as the work of existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and Albert Camus reignited interest in non-Anglo European philosophy This continued into the 1970s and 1980s with the growing popularity of deconstructionism, and other variations of postmodernism by authors like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. As the number of women in the field grew, feminism became increasingly influential, although academic philosophy remained heavily dominated by white males.
Feminist texts, articles and conferences on everything from science and logic to business and politics became increasingly common. Finally, pragmatism, due in large part to the work of Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), was revived and ceased being exclusively the province of historians.
Industry:Culture
Policy and philosophy promoting a vision of knowledge and experience that does not privilege any single group; usually directed against a Eurocentrism that defines history and value by reference to a Northern European experience in America. Multiculturalism has been especially important in the reform of universities and other educational institutions since the 1980s to embrace African American, Asian American, Latino American and other European ethnic authors, celebrations and perspectives; “culture” here is often used here indiscriminately to encompass race, class and even gender.
Outside the academy it may be linked with political coalition-building like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Conservatives have attacked multiculturalism in the name of enduring values, assimilation and the threat of fragmented knowledge; their critiques have often been diluted by the impact of civil rights and new immigration on American society and culture itself.
Industry:Culture
Political rhetoric, a term especially but not (unfortunately) exclusively associated with conservatives. The term elevates models of the middleclass, two-parent monogamous heterosexual family as mores for all social issues, without recognizing the multiplicity of family forms, roles and challenges that constitute contemporary American society. Many conservatives have claimed that the lack of family values results in homosexuality singleparent families, teenage pregnancy drug abuse, sexual abuse and domestic violence. Still, given the emotional and ideological appeal of the family it becomes a particularly divisive way of phrasing issues, especially when touted by white men with unstable marriages.
Industry:Culture
Popular accounts heralded the close of the twentieth century as the dawn of an “information age.” In some utopian visions, technical and economic infrastructures of communication and data exchange, such as the Internet, promise a society of empowered, mobile and resourceful individuals. At the same time, information industries, such as hardware and software manufacturers, data collectors and managers, communication service providers and producers of cultural commodities, are increasingly global, integrated and concentrated. Thus information practice is at the nexus of contradictory trends towards individualism and corporate power, and the ideals and promises of the information age must be understood within current structures of information production and use.
The genesis of the information revolution may be located in the dawn of the industrial age, when processes of production, distribution and consumption became increasingly complex and geographically far-flung. Management and control of these industrial processes required methodization of data creation, information management and decision making. This methodization took the form of increasingly refined bureaucratic practice.
Bureaucracy consists essentially of two processes. The first is rationality in which activities, entities and decision processes are abstracted and formalized into information systems. Information production is largely the representation and formalization of phenomena. That is, phenomena are examined and evaluated according to their role in a particular rational process. Some ontological model is applied to the phenomenon to articulate it into constituent parts. Decisions are made regarding which parts are important enough to note and record, and what formal relations hold among those parts.
This involves judgments that are informed not only by explicit, goal-oriented criteria, but also by deeply held and unexamined cultural beliefs. The second essential structure of bureaucracy is specialization, in which decisionmaking power is assigned to particular organizational nodes, and communication flow is channeled and restricted to those nodes.
These three facets of information—its administrative purpose, its inherent valuation and representation of subjects, and its unequal distribution—make information production and processing a focus of struggles over representation and power.
The use of information technologies such as wireless phones, hand-held computers and remote access to databases and services via the World Wide Web has made it possible for many workers and consumers to free themselves from the geographic bounds of the office and the shopping mall. However, as those technologies transgress geographic bounds, they extend administrative bounds. Workers and consumers alike become subject to oversight as their location and activities are tracked through their media use. This information then becomes the property of the overseer, and may be used to rationalize the production and consumption processes in ways which benefit capital. In the case of the management/labor relationship, the information may be used to extract from workers their knowledge of how to do things, and formalize that knowledge into automated “expert systems,” thus transferring to capital the embodied assets of labor. Similar processes occur when consumer data is collected, evaluated and manipulated into demographics and patterns of consumption. In each case, management has greater access to knowledge about a population than that population itself has. In addition to the modeling of the activities of a subject population, information and surveillance are used to act upon individuals in that population—to control the flow of work to individuals, to trigger fraud control processes in credit-card systems, to offer (or to choose not to offer) discounts on purchases, etc. In these ways, information is used both to model human behaviors and to impose that model on human populations.
Similarly, informational practices are used to convert communal resources to private resources as cultural practices are captured, recorded, commodified and sold back in the form of popular cultural products.
Finally, information is a structuring element of markets themselves. Markets are in part defined by the ability of the participants to interact with one another and to understand current market conditions. Imbalanced access to information resources (including networks and databases) produces imbalanced market power. For example, corporate capital, able to access data and communicate globally, acts in a global labor market, while laborers themselves are often able to access only local resources, and so operate only in a local market. Thus information resources give corporate capital the power to negotiate the global labor market as a set of local markets, while labor is able to negotiate only their own local market.
Information products, such as databases, software, network services, video games and entertainment, enter the market economy as inputs to the production process, as vehicles of distribution, and as consumer items in themselves. However, information products offer special problems in this process of commodification, and significant social, economic and technical resources are being spent in order to alleviate these problems. For example, it is notoriously difficult to restrict the use of information to those who have paid for that use. This difficulty is compounded by the increasing immateriality of information—rather than purchasing a medium such as a book or compact disc containing certain, more or less permanent, information, users are increasingly likely to access information via electronic networks in the form of a recordable, reproducible and malleable electronic pattern. Organizations in advanced information economies are responding to these problems of commodification by developing encryption technologies capable of metering the use of information services, or limiting their use to certain people. Other responses include the propagation of copyright and database protection laws and treaties which ensure that corporate gatherers of information have legal recourse to establish and defend property rights in their information holdings.
Industry:Culture
Popular culture is difficult to define, partly because both terms—“popular” and “culture”—have meant different things at different points in history depending on the theoretical or disciplinary framework employed. In the simplest terms, popular culture is culture that is widely favored by many people—the culture “of the people.” But this definition leaves unanswered the question of what culture is and what, if anything, differentiates popular culture from other conceptual categories such as folk culture, mass culture, or workingclass culture. In making distinctions, social, economic and aesthetic criteria are not easily disentangled. For example, “culture” can refer to: (1) a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development (“the development of Western culture”); (2) the expressive activities of communities and societies, as in sports, holidays, festivals, ceremonies; or (3) particular intellectual and artistic practices, as in literature, painting, dance and song (Storey 1993). “Popular” can mean not only “of the people,” or that which is well-liked by a large number of individuals, but also “common,” accessible to the average person, and even “inferior” (Shiach 1989).
As Storey has pointed out, it is often easier to understand popular culture in contrast to what it is not. Perhaps most obviously, popular culture is not elite or “high” culture, which is, by definition, unpopular and exclusive. Nor is popular culture synonymous with folk culture or working-class culture. The former generally refers to culture that is local, non-commercial and expressive of a particular group or community identity (quilting, folk tales, or folk music); the latter, to texts and practices associated with a working-class sensibility and enjoyed primarily by members of the working class (nickelodeons, burlesque, bingo or bowling, as well as organizational strategies). Of course, all three types can, and often do, overlap. Yet there is no direct one-to-one relationship between a class or community and a particular cultural form. To paraphrase Stuart Hall (1981), “class” and “popular” are deeply related, but they are not absolutely interchangeable.
Moreover, it is important to bear in mind when distinguishing popular from elite culture that these categories are not fixed or static, so that what was once considered “low” may now be “high,” and vice versa. For example, Shakespeare was once the most popular playwright in America, but his works were gradually “rescued” from the marketplace and enshrined in official institutions controlled by wealthy patrons; as a consequence, Shakespeare became high culture, the purview of the social and intellectual elite (Levine 1988). Likewise, as Storey notes, the seaside holiday began as an aristocratic practice and within a hundred years had become a popular one, while film noir started as a despised popular cinema and is now the preserve of academics and film critics. Thus it is not the specific contents of the categories “high” and “low” that matter, since these change over time, but the fact that a distinction exists, one that tends to sustain cultural hierarchy.
Nor is popular culture simply mass culture, although the overlap is perhaps greatest here. Indeed, in highly industrialized contemporary societies like the US, there is very little that we might call the culture “of the people” that is not derived from commercial culture and that is not dependent upon commercial consumption for its expression.
Consequently, American popular culture is increasingly tied to mass culture, and, by implication, to mass production and mass consumption. This association more than anything reinforces popular culture as high culture’s opposite: low, vulgar and base; lacking in creativity originality and tradition.
So what distinguishes popular culture from mass culture? The difference lies less in the specific content than in the relationship between content and consumer. According to Storey, Fiske (1989) and other scholars, mass culture consists of the texts, objects and relations of the culture industries; popular culture is what people make of those texts, objects and relations. For example, the culture industry produces many television programs, but how people understand them and what role television plays in everyday life is not self-evident or necessarily “given” in the programs themselves. Thus mass culture is the objective repertoire from which people create subjective, popular meanings—albeit meanings inevitably circumscribed in key ways by the repertoire itself.
This meaning-making not only acknowledges an active dimension to consumption, it requires us to consider popular culture in a more local, personal and political sense. As Hall insists, the making of popular culture involves an ongoing negotiation or struggle between people’s needs and desires (what he calls the forces of resistance) and the needs of the culture industries (what he calls the power bloc, or the forces of incorporation). Of course, this is hardly an equal struggle, for the power bloc by definition has disproportionate clout in establishing the terms and limits of the cultural terrain in the first place. Popular culture is contradictory in nature: both constraining and enabling; limiting how we think about the world and offering opportunities for creative social and personal expression within those limits.
Popular culture is therefore not a fixed set of objects and practices, nor a fixed conceptual category but something constituted both through the act of consumption and through the act of theoretical engagement. Scholars have focused on different aspects of popular culture, some turning to texts (romance, television, film, pop music, etc.), others examining lived culture such as holidays, hobbies, or fandoms. Different scholars have employed distinct theoretical approaches, most of them “structuralist theories” that generally claim that forms of popular culture—food, clothing, sports, games, rituals, entertainment—help reveal the underlying rules, structures and values of a society. For example, Marxists emphasize the relation between popular culture and the capitalist mode of production, suggesting that popular culture reproduces class inequality by generating enormous profits for those who control the culture industries while inculcating in consumers the values and ideology necessary to justify this—and other—unjust social arrangements. Psychoanalytic approaches tend to see popular culture as symptomatic expressions of society’s “collective unconscious,” as articulating indirectly through the symbolic language of entertainment our collective fears, anxieties, fantasies and desires.
Ethnographic approaches investigate how forms of popular culture are produced and consumed in everyday life, what it means to people, how they contribute (or not) to the formation of individual, group and community identities. What all approaches have in common is the assumption that objects and practices taken to be part of popular culture are “readable,” that they “speak” to us and that they tell us important (though not necessarily positive) things about the society in which we live.
Industry:Culture
Popular television format since the 1970s, involving 4–15 hours of narrative, somewhere between one-time specials and regular series. Miniseries offer flexible responses to market trends (including news items, historical reflections and popular novels) and may target audiences during ratings “sweeps.” They also allow more character and plot development and lush use of exotic locales; they have attracted major cinematic stars, reinforcing their cachet. Sometimes linked to PBS Masterpiece Theatre, miniseries tend to be relentlessly middle-brow—evident from one of the earliest, Irwin Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man (ABC, 1976) or Upstairs, Downstairs (PBS, 1975–80).
Roots (ABC, 1977) remains the watershed (if not the first)—the highest rated miniseries ever and among the most watched television programs. Beginning January 23, ABC broadcast this 12-hour dramatization of Alex Haley’s family history for eight successive nights. Vivid images of capture, slavery punishment, separation and love sparked conversations in families, schools and offices even if Roots did not evoke the racial catharsis some contemporary commentators predicted. Nor did the popular sequel Roots: The Next Generation (1979) or Queen (1993) change the overall problems of African Americans in television.
Other thematic clusters in miniseries include the Second World War (NBC’s Holocaust, 1978, or The Winds of War, 1983, and ABC’s War and Remembrance, 1988– 9, based on novels by Herman Wouk), the West (especially work by Larry McMurtry like Lonesome Dove, 1989), crime (CBS’ Helter Skelter, 1976) and exotic historical locales (feudal Japan in Shogun, 1980, and Australia in The Thorn Birds, 1983). The immense popularity of the last two earned star Richard Chamberlain the nickname “King of the Miniseries.” The miniseries continued as a programming tool in the 1980s and 1990s without its initial fanfare. Religious and fantasy themes have cropped up beside lengthy romances, historical recreations and other genres. One might also ask how these intersect with popular PBS documentary series by Ken Burns like The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994).
Industry:Culture
Portland and Salem lie approximately 47 miles apart in Oregon (Pacific Northwest).
Salem is the state capital. Portland, the largest city in the state, has become known as a progressive center for its planning controls on urban sprawl and has also attracted hightech investment in computers and media. It also hosts the Portland Trailblazers (basketball). Despite growth limits, this dual metropolis continues to grow rapidly, with a projected metropolitan population in 2020 of 2.8 million (a 38 percent increase from 1995), challenging the natural landscapes and lifestyles that have fostered its attractiveness for many.
Industry:Culture
Postmodernism is a loose term for a variety of movements that arose within the art world and the university as separate responses to two different understandings of the term “modern”: modernity and modernism. Modernity is the term used by philosophers and historians to designate a historical period ranging from the Renaissance and extending to the early part of the twentieth century It was marked by: a belief in the power of reason, as opposed to faith, for securing progress; the separation of science, morality and art into their own autonomous spheres; and the search for a unifying foundational theory or principle that would capture the universal aspects of existence. Modernism is a term primarily employed within the art world. The American modern movement ran from the 1870s to the late 1950s, and included the paintings of Jackson Pollock, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, the poetry of Walt Whitman and the choreography of Martha Graham. The movement centered around images of nature and machinery, explorations of the myths and stories of American history, ambivalent feelings about urban versus rural spaces and a desire to break with European dominance. Despite the different senses of the term “modern,” American postmodernists in both the university and the art world shared a number of common features. Leading postmodernist thinkers and artists resisted attempts to classify or label their work as being postmodern or as being part of any type of organized movement. In part this arose because of a skepticism about the possibility of any transcendent, trans-historical, or transcultural truths that could provide a basis for a unified allencompassing theory. As a result there rapidly developed a highly diverse set of theories in the university (e.g. neo-pragmatism, deconstructionism, neo-Marxism, critical legal studies) and in the art world (e.g. pop art, cyberpunk, avant pop, minimalism). Although they were all lumped under the general rubric “postmodernism,” they had significant methodological and theoretical differences about how to replace their predecessors. Both the intellectual and artistic versions of postmodernism began to emerge in the late 1950s and early 1960s, both were influenced by European movements (the artists were influenced by the British pop artists, while the intellectuals were influenced by the French post-structuralists) and both quickly spread from their original source (painting and literary theory) to other fields. Furthermore, both tended to collapse or blur traditional boundaries: sometimes between genres, as in the music of John Zorn and Terry Riley or the journalism of Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe; between academic disciplines as with Camila Paglia and Stanley Fish; or between media, as in the performance art of Laurie Anderson or the theater pieces of Robert Wilson.
Both strains of postmodernism were fascinated with popular culture and its role in society and both challenged the notion of any significant difference between high and low art or between avant-garde and commercial artists.
Industry:Culture
Post-studio, end-of-the-millenium Hollywood since the 1970s belongs to a new industrial structure. Film is not the only product; the new Hollywood has become home to expanded mass entertainment entities, including television, cable, satellite, publishing, newspapers, music, merchandising, theme parks and other entertainment venues. The industries, now owned by multi-national conglomerates, like Disney or News Incorporated, are vertically integrated while they have expanded horizontally.
Aggressively entering other world markets, they often control production, distribution and exhibition of transnational entertainment products, whether international film financing of non-American films, distribution of Hong Kong kung fu films, or ownership of multiplexes in Europe.
Industry:Culture
