Page 193 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

POPULAR/POPULAR CULTURE

example of a black dress as a sign, depending on the context in which
it appears it may signify evening attire, a sexy outfit or a costume of
mourning.
This should not be taken as an excuse to assume that analysis is
impossible due to the nature of the sign. Barthes’ (1973) notion of
‘anchorage’ argues that strategies are employed in all texts to anchor
the preferred meaning or in other cases suggest one meaning as being
more applicable than others. In advertising this may be the words that
appear alongside the images in the text, and in film as well as
television, it may be expectations of genre which limit potential
multiple meanings. Barthes claimed that anchorage is necessarily an
ideological imperative through which the polysemic nature of the sign
is controlled. Writers such as Fiske (1987), on the other hand,
understand polysemy as part of the pleasure, and indeed one of the
required features, of media that strive to reach a mass and diverse
audience.
See also: Semiotics/semiology, Sign

POPULAR/POPULAR CULTURE

Of people in general; for people in general; well liked by people in
general. ‘Popular’ is often synonymous with ‘good’ in ordinary
conversation, but this is an inversion of its earlier pejorative
connotations. In its original form, popular was used to distinguish
the mass of the people (not ‘people in general’) from the titled,
wealthy or educated classes. Not surprisingly, since most writers on the
subject were either members or clients of the latter three classes, its
synonyms were gross, base, vile, riffraff, common, low, vulgar,
plebeian, cheap (OED).
From these inauspicious beginnings the term has to some extent
been ‘decolonised’, principally through its usage in democratic politics
in and since the nineteenth century. However, it still retains sufficient
traces of its history to be a multi-accentual term: the popularity of
something may be taken either as an indication of its positive or of its
negative value, depending on your alignment to ‘the people’.
Thus the concept is not exempt from politics, which has in fact
dogged its usage within the sphere of cultural analysis. The popularity
(ubiquitousness) of the mass media in particular has resulted in a
recurring ambiguity in both academic and public debate about
whether the products of the media are good because they are popular,

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