A culture that only a mass public made possible

Popular culture, in this telling, is what a large public can share without much difficulty: popular songs, dramas, films, fashions. The idea itself is not old. Before modern society, people's lives were bound to the village, and rank divided them, so a culture centered on a mass public could not spread far. As the status system broke down, and as industrialization and urbanization moved quickly, a mass society formed. Wider schooling and the growth of mass media — television, radio, the internet, the press — then helped the form travel still faster. It is made to a majority taste, produced in quantity, and consumed in quantity, and its reach can run ahead of what anyone planned.

The strength named first is a democratization of culture: what a small privileged group once enjoyed can be shared by many, often without a special outlay, and leisure can be filled with pleasure and with new information. Popular taste can enter the making of culture, and attention can sometimes be drawn to a social problem. The risks are set beside that. In order to hold interest, a commercial form may turn to sensational or violent material, and the quality of the culture may fall. When the same information reaches everyone at once, tastes may be flattened, and a person's particularity may be worn down. Producers may also shape the information in a direction they intend. Because the reach of the media is so large, the writer says, the form has to be handled with care, or people may meet only a culture that has been remade by the media, and distortion may follow.

Two views of a traveling form, and hip-hop as a case

From the late 1980s, as a capitalist economy spread worldwide, the reach of multinational media firms grew, and popular culture took on a more planetary character. An early worry was that Western popular culture would make other places the same. More recently, the meeting of a local culture with a global form is often read as hybridization. Two views are named. One is global cultural homogenization: a center, with capital, technique, and political power, holds a superior position and strips a periphery of its character. The other is transformation by the periphery: the center may still supply an ideal form and a basic frame, but the receiving place does not take it unchanged. It remakes the form to fit its own character and social setting, and a new culture comes out of that work. In 1995, Thompson is cited as saying that conflict in receiving a globalized media product can lead to an appropriation of its meaning and value, the making of an alternative, and a questioning of one's own culture.

Hip-hop is taken as a case. It is described as a name for a dynamic dance and music that became popular in the United States in the 1980s, and also as a wider cultural current. The word is said to come from a phrase about shaking the hips. In the late 1970s it named a new cultural movement among Black and Spanish-speaking young people in Harlem, and it has been called a culture that grew in the United States on its own. Its usual elements are rap, DJing, graffiti, and breakdance; this account concentrates on the music. The spread of new digital tools for making music is named as one technical reason the form traveled so widely, and hip-hop is described as a genre in which crossing and mixing are especially visible. In Korea, a distinctive cultural sensibility of satire and humor is introduced as a way of receiving the form. Satire, here, means showing a social fact by exaggerating it, distorting it, or turning it wryly on its head. That is as far as this account takes the Korean reception.

Sources

1. an account of popular culture as a modern mass form, of two views of its globalization — homogenization from the center and remaking at the periphery — with a 1995 remark by Thompson, and of hip-hop from late-1970s Harlem to a reception in Korea through a taste for satire and humor.

Last updated: 14 November 2026