Midterm Review Pop Culture Flashcards
What is Pop Culture
Popular Culture
Popular- messages with a wide reach
Culture- ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images and other phenomena within mainstream Western Culture
Influenced and transmitted by mass media, permeates everyday lives of society
Two Types of Reception Analysis
Preferred Reading and Negotiated Meaning
What is preferred reading?
Most overt, no active analysis
What is negotiated meaning?
Active analysis, multiple, interpretations
What are the exposure states?
Automatic, Attentional, Transported, Self-reflexive
Automatic State
exposed to messages, but not consciously aware
Attentional State
Aware of messages, actively interact with messages, concentration varies, conscious of exposure
Transported State
Swept away, lose sense of separateness from message, different than attentional state, emotionally involved
Self-Reflexive State
hyper-attentive, consciously attend to messages and aware of how they are processing info, meta-analysis takes place
Dimensions of identity
Race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability status
What is race?
Categorization of human based on shared physical or social qualities into groups viewed as distinct; A social construct- identify assigned based on rule created by society
Ethnicity
Identification of a group based on perceived cultural distinctiveness
Why is ethnicity separate from race?
Identity is not a separate race, your race does not determine your ethnicity
How is each race represented?
White- Heavily underrepresented
Black- Heavily overrepresented
Hispanics- Heavily underrepresented
Asian- Underrepresented
What is the traditional progression of racial minorities on television?
Nonrecognition (exclusion)
Ridicule (stereotyping, buffoonery)
Regulation (police officers, lawyers)
Respect (diverse, nuanced)
What is a parasocial relationship?
To think of fictional characters as your friends
Intergroup Contact Theory
when majority and minority groups mingle- under the right circumstances- negative feelings about each other tend to dissipate
Why does intergroup contact theory affect us?
Your ideas about that group get more complicated; increases ability to emphasize with people they might not otherwise relate to; IGCT holds true only when everyone in social situation feels safe comfortable and respected
Homophily
Love of the same-> people tend to hang out with others who look and think like them
5 Major Social Functions
Popular culture generates basic social norms; Popular culture produces social boundaries; Popular culture produces rituals that generate social solidarity; Popular culture generates innovation; Popular culture generates social progress
Genesis amnesia
We often forget the beginning, especially in regards to Indigenous and colonized peoples
Anomie
Normlessness
Define power
The ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person
Symbolic Annihilation
No stories about a population (ex. Native Americans), cause them to become basically nonexistent
What kind of opportunity does Tv provide us?
It helps people lower defense and connect with people they might try to avoid in real life
Define Gender
Gender is socially constructed—> Challenges our idea that gender is a fixed outcome of our biological differences
For individuals, gender means sameness
For society, gender means difference
What are the 5 dimensions of identity?
Race, sexuality, gender, disability, and class
Define Interpretation
It is how we determine what the cultural good means and how we act on those meanings
What is a stereotype?
A stereotype is a representation of a group that is repeated so often that it comes to dominate the way that the group is thought of in the social world
What is cultural appreciation?
The adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture
What is intersectionality?
Identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage (ex. gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, disability); we cannot understand the full story if we only look at 1 dimension at a time
What is the message of pop culture?
The message of pop culture taken as a whole is that we are not good enough. We are insufficient persons due to our race, or ethnicity, gender or social identity, social class, etc.
What is creation?
The artistic dimension and the ways the work is infused with meaning
What is consumption?
How we access and select a cultural good
What is production?
The economic dimension including the labor force that makes work and the determination of its economic value
What is class?
A group of people sharing the same social, economic or occupational status. Class categories such as low, middle and high- or poor, working, middle, and wealthy- are cultural categories more than official distinctions
What is double consciousness?
A theory of the unique experience of being black and American in a country where, and at a time when, it seemed one simply could not be both
Which group is consistently underrepresented on TV?
Latina women
What would be the best word to describe the representation of LGBTQ people on TV?
Overrepresented
Key pieces of the Critical Media Project
Sexuality (or sexual orientation) refers broadly to an individual’s physical and/or emotional attraction to a person of the same or opposite sex. Sexual orientation is interpersonal.
LGBTQ, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), has become the common shorthand to inclusively reference this diverse set of sexuality and gender-based identities and communities. Historically, many societies have been intolerant of homosexual and bisexual individuals, or anyone who does not adhere to heterosexist norms. Media has played a role in both perpetuating and resisting this state of affairs.
There has been an increase in LGBTQ representation and visibility in the media since the late 1990s, but there are still very few prominent LGBT characters in the mainstream media.
