Nonverbal communication and culture. Identity, stereotypes and prejudices, страница 73

Popular culture is nearly always produced within a capitalist system that sees the products of popular culture as commodities that can be economically profitable. They are produced by what are called culture industries. The Disney Corporation is a noteworthy example of a culture industry because it produces amusement parks, movies, cartoons, etc. Folk culture, by contrast, arises in spite of the drive for financial profit. It emerges from needs that are not satisfied by the dominant culture.

Popular culture is ubiquitous (omnipresent, general). We are bombarded with it, every day and everywhere. It is difficult to avoid popular culture. Not only is it ubiquitous, but it also serves an important social function. How many times have you been asked by friends and family to discuss your reactions to recent movies or television programs? Television serves as a cultural forum for discussing and working out our ideas on a variety of topics, including those that emerge from television programs. Television, then, has a powerful social function—to serve as a forum for dealing with social issues.

The ways that people negotiate their relationships to popular culture are complex. It is this complexity that makes understanding the roles of popular culture in intercultural communication so difficult. Clearly, we are not passive receivers of this deluge of popular culture. We are, in fact, quite active in our consumption or resistance to popular culture, a notion that we turn to next.

Consuming Popular Culture

Faced with such an onslaught of cultural texts, people negotiate their ways through popular culture in quite different ways. Popular culture texts do not have to win over the majority of people to be "popular." People often seek out or avoid specific forms of popular culture. For example, romance novels are the best selling form of literature, but many people are not interested in reading these novels. Likewise, whereas you may enjoy watching soap operas or wrestling, many other people do not find pleasure in those forms of popular culture.

There is some unpredictability in how people navigate through popular culture. However, some profiles emerge. Advertising offices of popular magazines even make their reader profiles available to potential advertisers. These reader profiles portray what the magazine believes its readership "looks" like. Although reader profiles do not follow a set format, they generally detail the average age, gender, individual and household incomes, and so on of their readership.

Each magazine targets a particular readership and then sells this readership to advertisers. The diversity of the U.S. American population generates very different readerships among a range of magazines. This happens in several different ways.

How Magazines Respond to the Needs of Cultural Identities A wide range of magazines respond to the different social and political needs of cultural identities. You may already be familiar with magazines geared toward a male or a female readership. But there are many other kinds of magazines that serve important functions for other cultural identities. You can give specific examples to illustrate this point.

How Individuals Negotiate Consumption Readers actively negotiate their way through cultural texts such as magazines—consuming those that fulfill important cultural needs and resisting others that do not. Hence, it is possible to be a reader of many magazines that compose a particular cultural configuration.

Cultural Texts Versus Cultural Identities We must be careful not to conflate (put together) the magazines with the cultural identities they are targeting. After all, many publications offer different points of view on any given topic.