Page 180 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL THEORY IN POPULAR CULTURE

maintains legitimacy and integrity. But more generally and more recently it has
taken on a comprehensive meaning for any cultural expressions or products
that are found broadly among a population, whether the popularly shared cul-
ture has elite, folk, or mass elements at work. In the Americas, ‘the popular’
became an inclusive term in the work of Latin American critics and North
American academics, particularly those associated with the organizations and
publications centered in the Center for the Study of Popular Culture at Bowling
Green State University. The popular became, as well, especially associated with
mediated forms of communication, those cultural expressions relayed through
technology both in interactive forms shared through the Internet or the tele-
phone, and in the mass media.
The definitional development of an accepted category for ‘popular culture’
provides an effective tool for destabilizing other privileged assumptions. The
elitist rejection of popular culture as unworthy expressions of the unwashed
masses has been unmasked as class bias. Value judgments built into the voca-
bulary of elitist theory for upper-class culture have had to make way for more
eclectic and egalitarian recognition of the legitimacy and even the functionality
of working-class culture. The struggles of Richard Hoggart and Raymond
Williams in the 1950s to legitimize studies of music hall culture or pop fiction
represented the first generation of ‘Oxbridge’ scholars whose class background
and sympathies broke from the elitism of Eliot, Arnold, and the classicists. In
parallel developments in the United States, mass communication research was
validating the cultural power of sports, popular music, prime-time television,
Hollywood movies, and other non-elitist expressions within advanced indus-
trial society. Bernard Berelson (1949) found that ‘What “Missing the News-
paper” Means’ included primarily non-rational, non-informational factors.
The 1947 New York newspaper strike not only left readers without political
and public information but also left them with nothing to do at breakfast or on
a commuter train; it left a huge ritual hole in their day. From this and similar
influential pioneering studies – Herta Herzog on soap operas, Kurt and Gladys
Lang on the MacArthur Day parade in Chicago, for instance, the literate,
technological, industrialized West was indeed found to be non-rational in its
dominant cultural expressions.
Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School took this definitional destabilizing
further. For example, feminist scholarship examining the popular culture of
teen magazines and romance fiction underscored the paternal biases in previ-
ous definitions of significant culture. ‘Popular culture’ meant not only
working-class expression and life but also all those traditionally marginalized
cultural practices most popular with, or even found only among, women.
Angela McRobbie’s (1978) stencilled Occasional Paper from the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, ‘Jackie: an ideology of adolescent
femininity’, was one of the pioneering studies that took seriously the expressions
of youth culture and feminine experience.
McRobbie’s thorough study of a teen magazine aimed at a female market

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