Popular culture is all around us and has only grown with the growth and worldwide acceptance of globalization. Today one is just as likely to see shows like Big Brother or variations of Pop Idol playing in different parts of the world. That is the pull of globalization. While globalization is great in spreading popular culture, it also presents problems with intercultural communication. A show as big and widely played across the globe as Big Brother brings intercultural conflicts and interactions into our living rooms (Martin and Nakayama 348). They show us tensions that arise as a result of cultural differences and how they are handled on the big screen. That popular culture is mostly overlooked by scholars does not change the fact that they too can affect intercultural communication.
While we can never truly understand the culture of the world as well as we understand ours, popular culture ensures that we can have some idea – true or falsified about other cultures. This is achieved via magazines, television, music, books and films. Popular culture plays a very important role therefore in the dissemination of information. It ensures that someone that has never been to Nigeria, India, Russia or even China can have a picture in their minds of these countries. On the other hand though, a youngster could watch all the violence on TV and immediately believe it to be a cool trait. The power popular culture wields has made it a necessity for it to be studied. This is very important in America as they are the major distributors of popular culture to the world. While America is known to spread popular culture they are hardly exposed to popular culture from other countries. All around we hear of people who travel to places as far away as Warsaw being bombarded with American popular culture (Martin and Nakayama 350).
What is Popular Culture?
Popular culture is a system or systems that are common to most people and as a result shared by most people. As a result television, music or popular magazines could be seen as popular culture while the opera could be seen as an elitist sort of culture. The professor of communication, John Fiske said that popular culture is not consumption (Martins and Nakayama 351) but culture that bears the interest of the people. There are four major characteristics of popular culture
- Culture industries produce it
- It should be different from folk culture
- It is hard to miss and is everywhere
- It fulfils a social function
A very good example of popular culture therefore is Disney as it not only produces movies, but parks and a plethora of other merchandise. It should be noted however that pop culture grows as folk culture diminishes. An example of one of the very few existence of the folk culture could be the Amish country as globalization has swept through the world.
Consumption of Popular Culture
The fact that popular culture exists does not mean that everybody must be won over by it. While romance novels are generally tailored toward the female gender and known to be very popular, there are indeed many women who do not like that genre of novels. The same can be said about popular sports and men. Therefore popular culture might indeed be sent out but may not be received by all it was sent to. This is where encoding and decoding comes into play. A communication researcher in a bid to interpret how rural Brazilians decoded a telenovela that urban Brazil found out that these rural people watched these soaps but interpreted them through their own unique rural circumstances (Martins and Nakayama 355).
Profiling is therefore done by advertisers in a bid to judge the required viewership of a particular product and then tailor that product to the need of that group. Looking at magazines today, the people that the magazine Vogue is tailored for is different from the people that Rolling Stones is tailored to as one group enjoys fashion while the other enjoys music and the effect it has on popular culture. Popular culture therefore provides problems in intercultural communications when broad generalizations are made as a result. While Asian-Americans may generally prefer magazines geared towards them, it should not be expected that they will as a result have a unified Asian- American position on a particular topic.
Resistance to Popular Culture
People resist the pull of popular culture in many ways. Sometimes they refuse to engage in them like people who refuse to own televisions. Other times they may express their concern over pop culture that depicts their kind in a negative light. For a long time Disney came under a lot of pressure as people claimed that there had not been any black princesses in any of their movies. Many little girls grow up watching Disney and dreaming of a day they too would be princesses. The lack of a black princess told the little black girl that that was a dream she would never have. Eventually Disney fixed that and showed The Princess and the Frog. There are other times that a nation stands up to reject popular culture because of how it portrays them. An advert involving LeBron James and Nike was pulled off the Chinese televisions because this advert showed LeBron fighting a cartoon depiction of a Kung Fu master. It was said to have insulted the national dignity of China.
Representing Cultural Groups
People learn about many cultures as a result of popular culture. We may watch a romantic movie and the audience may be drawn to a fictional family that is not theirs. However you may watch another show and find it hard to believe that show honestly depicts the people they are portraying. Stereotypes are built as a result and in most cases the negative stereotypes are easily remembered and believed than the positive stereotypes. This has been the case for a while with the depiction of the African American where their men were shown to be drug addicts and murderers at the worst or rappers and basketball players at the best. Such stereotypes tend to stick to the detriment of the race involved.
The Korean woman may watch American shows because the people there are glamorous even though the ideas and ideologies are purely American. She knows as a Korean woman she may never have the opportunity to flaunt her independence as the American woman or hear about a man committing incest as she had seen the American actor do. But she does watch it for fun as she aims to learn the American way but understanding that the Korean shows will be more relatable to her way of life.
Popular culture will only grow stronger as the world gets smaller. For America, the main protagonist of popular culture to be able to reach the world fairly and truthfully, she has to understand that intercultural communication is a vital aspect to determining if the people will accept or resist pop culture.
Reference
Martin, Judith and Nakayama, Thomas. “Intercultural Communication in Contexts.” 5th ed.
New York: McGraw Hill, 2010. PDF. http://ymerleksi.wikispaces.com/file/view/Intercultural+Communication+in+Contexts.pdf
Bakić-Mirić, Nataša. “An Integrated Approach to Intercultural Communication.”
UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. PDF.
http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/978-1-4438-3524-4-sample.pdf
