Popular Culture

Popular Culture





Chapter 8

The Human Mosaic

Characteristics of popular culture

! Constantly changing

! Based in large, heterogeneous groups of

people

! Based mainly in urban areas

! Material goods mass-produced by machines

in factories

! Prevailing money economy

Recreation and clothing

Characteristics of popular culture

! More numerous individual relationships, but

less personal

! Weaker family structure

! Distinct division of labor with highly

specialized professions and jobs

! Considerable leisure time available to most

people

! Police, army, and courts take the place of

family and church in maintaining order

Leisure time

Popular culture

! If a single hallmark of popular culture exists, it

is change

! Words such as growth, progress, fad, and

trend crop up frequently in newspapers and

conversations

! Some people unable to cope with fast change

! Change can lead to insecurity expressed in

the term future shock

! Vast majority of people in developed countries

belong to the popular culture

Popular culture

! If a single hallmark of popular culture exists, it

is change

! Contributions to the spread of popular culture

! Industrialization

! Urbanization

! Rise of formal education

! Resultant increase in leisure time

! All the reasons popular culture spread caused

folk culture to retreat

Placelessness: Anywhere USA

! Without the sign, we would

not know if these were

houses, apartments, or

condos.

! Their style is no style; a

sense of sameness

pervades.

! Nothing sets these structures

apart as being in a particular

place; this is placelessness.

Placelessness: Anywhere USA

! In fact, the complex is in

suburban Columbus, Ohio

otherwise known as “Test

Market USA.”

! Because the demographic

character of Columbus offers

a representative cross

section of American society,

it is an appropriate place to

try out new products.

! Most fast food menus are

tested here.

Popular culture

! If a single hallmark of popular culture exists, it is

change

! We and our recent ancestors embraced the free, open,

dynamic life-style offered by popular culture

! Science challenged religion for dominance in our daily

lives

! We profited greatly in material terms through this

transition

! In reality, all culture presents a continuum on which

popular and folk represent extreme forms

Popular culture

! If a single hallmark of popular culture exists, it is

change

! Many graduations between the two are possible

! Disadvantages become apparent as one moves toward

the popular end of the continuum

! We forfeited much in discarding folkways



! Popular culture is not superior



! We weaken both family structure and interpersonal

relationships

! Tne prominent cultural geographer has said of popular

culture “only two (things) would I dislike to give up:

inside plumbing and medical advances.”

Popular culture

! Popular Culture Regions

! Diffusion in Popular Culture

! The Ecology of Popular Culture

! Cultural Integration in Popular Culture

! Landscapes of Popular Culture

Placelessness or clustering?

! Superficially, popular culture appears to vary less areally than

folk culture

! Canadian geographer Edward Relph’s proposal

! Popular culture produces a profound placelessness

! A spatial standardization that diminishes cultural variety

! Demeans the human spirit

! James Kunstler speaks of “geography of nowhere” in describing

America

! One place become much like another, robbed of its

geographical essence

! Pervasive influence of a continental or worldwide popular

culture

McDonald’s in Tokyo

Wendy’s in Idaho

Pampas Grill in Finland

Placelessness or clustering?

! Folk cultures, rich in uniqueness, appear to

make the geographical face of popular culture

seem expressionless

! Michael Weiss argues that “American society

has become increasing fragmented”

Cappadocia province, Turkey

Placelessness or clustering?

! Jonathan Robbin identifies 40 “life s clusters”

- tyle

based on postal ZIP codes

! Says the ZIP codes can tell him what people eat, drink,

drive—even think

! Each life-style cluster is a formal region with a colorful

name, for example:

! “Gray Power”—upper middle-class retirement areas



! “Old Yankee Rows”—blue- and white-collar older



ethnic neighbor-hoods of the Northeast

! Norma Rae-Vile—lower- and middle-class southern



mill towns

Lifestyle clusters

Placelessness or clustering?

! Old Yankee Rowers” typically have a high school

education

! Like bowling and ice hockey

! Three times as likely to live in rowhouses or duplexes

! Residents of Norma Rae V - ile

! Mostly nonunion factory workers

! Have trouble making ends meet

! Consume twice as much canned stew as the national

average

Placelessness or clustering?

! The above examples are to make a point

! A whole panoply of popular subcultures exists

in America and the world

! Each possesses its own belief system,

spokespeople, dress code, and lifestyle

! Popular culture creates new places

! Paul Adams sees television as being a

gathering place

! Social space where members of a household

and their friends assemble

Placelessness or clustering?

! Television has become to popular culture,

worldwide, what fire and hearth were to folk

culture

! Must remember region and place exist from

micro to macro scales

Cyberspace

! Perhaps the personal computer and Internet

access have created another new type of

place

! Certain words we use imply it has a

geography—”Cyberspace”

! The information superhighway connects not

two points, but all points, creating a new sort

of place

Cyberspace

! Does cyberspace contain a geography at all?

! Place, as understood by geographers, cannot be

created on the net

! “Virtual places” lack a cultural landscape and a cultural

ecology

! Human diversity is poorly portrayed in cyberspace

! Old people, poor people, the illiterate, and the



continent of Africa are not represented

! On the net, users end up “meeting” people like



themselves

! The breath and spirit of place cannot exist in



cyberspace

! These are not real places and never can be

Cyberspace

! Still, cyberspace possesses some

geographical qualities

! Enhances opportunities for communication

over long distances

! Allows access to rare data banks

! Encourages and speeds cultural diffusion

! The Internet helps heighten regional contrasts

! Uneven spatial distribution of Internet

connections creates a new way people differ

Internet Connections

Food and drink

! What we eat and drink differs markedly from one part

of the country and world to another

! Difference in alcoholic drink consumption in the

United States

! Beer has highest per capita consumption levels in the

West

! Least beer is sold in the Lower South and Utah

! Corn whiskey, both legal and illegal, has been a

traditional southern beverage

! Californians place more importance on wine

Kitsch Architecture:

Lacross, Wisconsin

! Kitsch – trivial, showy,

designed for mass

consumption – it is

increasingly common in

placeless landscapes.

! Much kitsch in North

American and Australia is

characterized by gigantism

! This is purported to be the

world’s largest six-pack.

Kitsch Architecture:

Lacross, Wisconsin

! Gottlieb Heileman, a

German immigrant,

founded his brewery in

1870 and this region

has one of the highest

per capita beer

consumption figures in

the nation.

Food and drink

! Foods vary across North America

! In the South, barbecued pork and beef, fried

chicken, and hamburgers have greater than

average popularity

! More pizza is consumed in the North

! Focus of Italian immigration

! Pizza diffused to the southern states only in the

- 950s

mid 1

Food and drink

! Importance of fast food restaurants varies

greatly within the United States

! Stronghold is in the South — 57 percent in

Mississippi

! Northeast has lowest rate of such eateries —

27 percent in New York and Vermont

! We should not expect geographical uniformity

within popular culture

! Placelessness has been overstated

Popular music

! The many difference styles of popular music all

reveal geographic patterning in levels of acceptance

! Pop musicians can receive adulation of a magnitude

reserved for deities in folk culture

! Elvis Presley, a generation after his death retains an

important place in American popular culture

! Illustrates the vivid geography of the culture

! Sale of memorabilia reveals a split personality

! Hotbeds of Elvis worship lie in eastern states

! Elvis largely forgotten out West

Sports

! Abundant leisure time has allowed North Americans

to devote time watching or participating in sports

! Few aspects of popular culture are as widely

publicized as our games, both amateur and

professional

! From Little League through professional contests,

athletics receive almost daily attention from members

of popular culture

! The further we withdrew from our folk tradition, the

more important organized games became

Sports

! The nineteenth century gave us football, ice

hockey, baseball, soccer, and basket-ball—

our major spectator sports

! Our folk ancestors played games, but most

were limited to children and little time was

spent on them

! Concept of professional athletes and

admission-paying spectators is not found in

folk culture

Sports

! With diffusion of commercial spectator sports

through North America, distinct

! regional contrasts developed

! “Hotbeds” of football arose in some regions

! Basketball became a winter mania in some

areas

! Baseball came to rule supreme in some states

! Ice hockey reigned in still other provinces

Sports

! Participant sports reveal similar

regionalization

! Ten “sports regions,” each with its own

special character was developed after a study

done by two geographers

! These ten regions provide a more definitive

identity to regions formerly revealed mainly

through intuition

Beauty pageants

! Contests are not confined to sports arenas

! Nearly everyone participates in one or

another less strenuous competition

! Provide a typical expression of American

popular culture

! Began in earnest at Atlantic City, New Jersey

in the early 1920s

Beauty pageants

! Reveal pronounced areal contrasts

! Winners tend to come preponderantly from

certain parts of the country

! A “beauty queen belt” stretches from

Mississippi to Utah

! Directly north of this belt lies a sizable block of

states that have never pro-duced a major

contest winner

! As with other culture regions the question

arises concerning cause and effect

Vernacular culture regions

! Defined as those regions perceived to exist by their

inhabitants

! Product of the spatial perception of the population at

large

! Not a formal region based on carefully chosen criteria

! Such regions vary greatly in size, from small districts

to multistate areas

! Often overlap and usually have poorly defined

borders

Vernacular culture regions

! Example of “Green Country” in northeastern

Oklahoma

! Name pushed by Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation

Commission

! Proclaim “where a blend of natural beauty, ideal

climate and frontier heritage offers visitors a

memorable vacation experience”

! News media in Tulsa repeatedly drum “Green Country”

into minds of local Oklahomans

! Billboards and businesses spread the same message

Vernacular culture regions

! These regions can be found in almost every part of

the industrialized Western world

! Wilber Zelinsky

! Compiled province-sized regions in North America

! Used most common provincial name appearing in the

white pages of urban telephone directories

! One curious feature is found in the populous districts in

New York, Ontario, eastern Ohio, and western

Pennsylvania where no affiliation to province is

perceived

Vernacular culture regions

! Joseph Brownell, in 1960, sought to delimit the

“Midwest”

! Sent questionnaires to postal employees in the

midsection of the United States from the Appalachians

to the Rockies

! Asked each employee whether he/she felt the

community lay in the “Midwest”

! Revealed core area where residents felt themselves to

be Midwesterners

! Similar survey done 20 years later, using student

respondents, gave almost the same result

Vernacular culture regions

! A resident of Alabama’s “Black Belt” might

also claim residence in “Dixie” and “the

South”

! Vernacular regions of America are perceptual

in character

! Vernacular regions are often perpetuated by

the mass media

Popular culture

! Popular Culture Regions

! Diffusion in Popular Culture

! The Ecology of Popular Culture

! Cultural Integration in Popular Culture

! Landscapes of Popular Culture

Hierarchical diffusion

! Might play a larger role because popular

society is highly stratified

! McDonald’s restaurants

! Beginning in 1955 spread hierarchically

! Revealed a bias in favor of larger urban

markets

Hierarchical diffusion

! Wal Mrt stores

- a

! Diffused from its Arkansas base in a largely contagious

pattern

! Spread into neighboring states

! Initially chose smaller towns and markets for locations

using a pattern called reverse hierarchical diffusion

! Later spread into cities

! Combination of contagious and reverse hierarchical

diffusion led Wal-Mart, within 30 years, to become the

nation’s largest retailer

Hierarchical diffusion

! Speed of diffusion in popular culture

! Progresses far more rapidly than in folk culture

! Time-distance decay is considerably weaker

! In the early nineteenth century time span was

measured in decades

! Modern transportation and communications networks

now permit cultural diffusion to occur within weeks or

days

! Rapid diffusion enhances the chance for change in

popular culture

Advertising

! Most effective device for popular culture

diffusion

! Commercial advertising of retail products

bombards us visually and orally

! Using psychology, we are sold products we

do not need

! Popular culture is equipped with the most

potent devices and techniques of dif-fusion

ever perfected

Advertising

! Modern advertising is very place-conscious

! Products and services are linked to popular,

admired places

! Example of the “Marboro Man” and the

romanticized American West

! Remarkably such techniques work in countries

as far away as Egypt

Advertising and Diffusion:

Sibu, Sarawak, Malaysia

! Advertising plays a key role in

the diffusion of popular culture.

! Symbols are important

marketing tools and companies

aim to get instant recognition for

their products.

! Here a row of former Chinese

shophouses has been

renovated as a “strip mall.”

! The signs are international

status symobls meaning

“American.”

Advertising and Diffusion:

Sibu, Sarawak, Malaysia

! American pop culture is

becoming increasingly

popular in Asia to the dismay

of many traditional parents.

! How do you think these

young Malaysians learn

about American products

and why are they so much in

demand?

! Where do you think they are

manufactured?

! What signs do you

recognize?

International diffusion

! Innovations diffuse between countries and

continents as rapidly as jet airplanes and

satellite-beamed television programs

! Popular cultures of North America, Europe,

and Australia have become similar and in

constant contact

! Country-western music now heard in Northern

Ireland’s pubs

! Levi-clad Romanians in small towns flock to

American-made movies

International diffusion

! Popular cultures of North America, Europe, and

Australia have become similar and in constant

contact

! Americans lineup to hear touring British rock musicians

! Rocky Mountain ski resorts are built in Alpine-Swiss

architecture

! Latest Paris fashions appear in American department

stores

! Fast-food franchises of MacDonalds and Kentucky

Fried Chicken diffused to Russia

! Motel chains such as Holiday Inn took root in Tibet and

other countries

International diffusion

! In many lesser-developed countries

acceptance of Western popular culture

occurs among a socioeconomic elite

! Many people across the world now share

aspects of a global culture

Stimulus Diffusion and Fast Food:

Sao Paulo, Brazil

! Not only have

McDonalds and other

fast food outlets spread

around the world but

also they have

stimulated the

development of new

ones.

Stimulus Diffusion and Fast Food:

Sao Paulo, Brazil

! At McDingos, one can

buy a hamberger,

cheeseburger, a “Big

Dingo” with double

meet and cheese, and a

“Bomba de Chocolate”

ie a chocolate sundae

! The American influence

is unmistakable

Communication barriers

! Spread can be greatly retarded if access to the media is denied

! Billboard, a magazine devoted largely to popular music,

described such a barrier

! Record company executive Seymour Stein complained radio

stations and disk jockeys refused to play “punk rock”

! Stein claimed punk devotees were concentrated in New York

City, Los Angeles, Boston, and London

! Diffusion of punk rock could only be heard in other areas

through live con-certs and the record sales they generated

! Other musical forms had the same problem -- pachanga,

ska, pop/gospel, “women’s music”, reggae, and “gangsta

rap”

! Time Warner Inc., a major distributor of gangsta rap, had to

endure scathing criticism in the United States congress in 1995

Communication barriers

! To control programming of radio and television is to control

much of the diffusion of popular culture

! Government censorship can also provide barriers to diffusion

! Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran during 1995

! Long opposed Western popular culture as a corrupting

influence

! Outlawed television satellite dishes to try and prevent citizens

from Watching programs broadcast in foreign countries

! Repressive regimes must cope with a proliferation of

communication methods—the fax and Internet

! It is probably impossible for even totalitarian nations to

completely keep out some influence of popular culture

Communication barriers

! Government censorship can also provide barriers to

diffusion

! Example of Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran —

outlawed television satellite dishes in 1995

! Control of media can approach control of the mind in

popular culture

! Repressive regimes must cope with a proliferation of

communication methods

! Status of inward-looking “hermit” nations is probably no

longer attainable

Communication barriers

! Newspapers also act as selective barriers

! Reinforce the effect of political boundaries

! Between 21 and 48 percent of all news

published in Canadian newspapers is of

foreign origin, mainly United States news

! About 12 percent of news in American

newspapers foreign

Diffusion of the rodeo

! Rooted in ranching culture of North American West

and has never completely escaped that setting

! Modern rodeo had its origin in folk tradition

! Began simply as roundups of cattle in Spanish

livestock ranching

! Started in northern Mexico and the American

Southwest

! Word rodeo derived from the Spanish rodear, “to

surround” or “to round up”

Diffusion of the rodeo

! Cowboys from adjacent ranches began

holding informal contests at roundup time to

display their skills

! After the Civil War, some cowboy contests on

the Great Plains became formalized, with

prizes awarded

Diffusion of the rodeo

! Transition to commercial rodeo, with admission

tickets and grandstands, came quickly

! The “Wild West Show” and its role in the diffusion of

the rodeo

! A rodeo at North Platte, Nebraska in 1882 led to some

events being included in a Wild West Show held in

Omaha in 1883

! Wild West Shows moved by railroad from town to town

! Probably provided the most potent agent of early rodeo

diffusion

Diffusion of the rodeo

! Within a decade of the Omaha affair

commercial rodeos were being held

independently of Wild West Shows at several

towns

! The first apparently at Prescott, Arizona, in

1888

! By 1900, commercial rodeos appeared

throughout much of the West

! Frontier Days rodeo, at Cheyenne, Wyoming,

was first held in 1897

Diffusion of the rodeo

! By World War I, rodeos became an institution in provinces of

western Canada

! The Calgary Stampede began in 1912

! Professional rodeos are now held in 36 states and 3 Canadian

provinces

! Oklahoma listed 98 scheduled events in 1977

! Ethnic and gender lives have been crossed

! Creek Nation All Indian Rodeo at Okmulgee

! All Girls Rodeo at Duncan

! All Black Rodeo at Wewoka

! In Texas and other states, rodeo competition has become an

official high school sport

! Major acceptance is found west of the Mississippi River

Diffusion of the rodeo

! Absorbing and permeable barriers to diffusion

! Mexico—bullfighting occupies a dominant position

! Mormon culture region centered in Utah

! In central Mexico the charreada exists as a unique

form of rodeo

! In California the rodeo penetrated the mountains to

reach the Pacific

! Greatest strength of commercial rodeo lies in the

cattle ranching areas

The American diner

! Restaurant in the general shape of a railroad or

trolley car

! Experienced a failure to diffuse throughout the United

States

! Arose before World War II in the northeastern United

states

! Spread through the manufacturing belt states — New

York City-Philadelphia urban quarter

! Perhaps as many as 6000 eateries were founded by

26 companies

The American diner

! Spread of the diner generally failed in the

American South

! Connoted cities, industries, ethnicity, and

“northernness”

! Threatened southern way of life

! Rejected from Virginia southward

! Only Florida proved receptive to the idea