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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
Chapter 9
Popular Culture and Intercultural
Communication
Learning Objectives
After studying the material in this chapter, students should be able to accomplish the following
objectives:
1. Differentiate between high and low culture.
2. Discuss the importance of popular culture as a public forum.
3. Identify the four characteristics of popular culture.
4. Identify some patterns of how people consume popular culture.
5. Identify some ways that people resist popular culture.
6. Describe some of the ways that popular culture influences how people understand another
culture.
7. Explain the role of popular culture in stereotyping.
8. Explain how the global movement of popular culture influences people around the world.
9. Discuss the concerns of some governments about the influence of foreign media in their
countries.
Key Terms
• Cultural imperialism
• Cultural texts
• Culture industries
• Decoding
• Electronic colonialism
• Encoding
• Folk culture
• Media imperialism
• Popular culture
• Reader profiles
Detailed Chapter Outline
I. Learning about Cultures without Personal Experience
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
• Much of what individuals know probably comes from popular culture—the media
experience of films, television, music, videos, books, and magazines.
A. The Power of Popular Culture
• The complexity of popular culture is often overlooked.
culture conveys nothing of lasting significance. This inherent contradiction can
make it difficult to investigate and discuss popular culture.
• The apparent imbalance of cultural texts globally not only renders U.S. Americans more
dependent on U.S.-produced popular culture but also can lead to cultural imperialism.
B. What Is Popular Culture?
study of aspects of high culture.
• In opposition to high culture is low culture, which refers to the activities of the nonelite:
music videos, game shows, professional wrestling, stock car racing, graffiti art, TV talk
shows, and so on.
o Traditionally, low-culture activities have been seen as unworthy of serious
o In recent decades, however, this distinction has begun to break down.
o Rapid social changes propelled universities to alter their policies and have also
affected how intercultural communication is studied.
• These areas of study did not rely on the earlier distinctions between high and low
culture. Rather, they contributed to a new conceptual framework by arguing for the
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
culture but were now framed as popular culture.
• There are four significant characteristics of popular culture.
o It is produced by culture industries.
o It differs from folk culture—traditional and nonmainstream cultural activities that
economically profitable. They are produced by what are called culture industries.
• More recently, communication scholars Joshua Gunn and Barry Brummett (2004) have
challenged the second point that there is an important difference between folk culture
and popular culture.
o They suggest, “We write as if there is a fundamental difference between a mass-
II. Consuming and Resisting Popular Culture
A. Consuming Popular Culture
• Faced with this 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.”
by popular culture institutions—within specific social contexts.
o Decoding—the interpretation of the text’s meaning by receivers—is performed by
various audiences in different social contexts, whose members have different
interests at stake.
• The “real meaning” of any popular culture text cannot simply be located in either the
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
• There is some unpredictability in how people navigate popular culture. However, some
profiles emerge.
o Advertising offices of popular magazines even make their reader profiles
available to potential advertisers.
groups.
o These magazines function as a discussion forum for concerns that mainstream
magazines often overlook.
o They also tend to affirm, by their very existence, these other cultural identities,
which sometimes are invisible or are silenced in the mainstream culture.
• Sometimes people actively seek out particular popular culture texts to consume; other
times they resist cultural texts.
o But resistance to popular culture is a complex process.
o Avoiding certain forms of popular culture is one kind of resistance, but resistance
can occur in a variety of ways.
own televisions.
• Resistance to popular culture can also be related to social roles.
• Resistance stems mainly from concerns about the representation of various social
groups. Popular culture plays a powerful role in how individuals think about and
understand other groups.
• Sometimes resistance is targeted at the profits of popular culture corporations.
III. Representing Cultural Groups
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
• People often are introduced to other cultures through the lens of popular culture. These
Americans.
A. Migrants’ Perceptions of Mainstream Culture
• Ethnographers and other interpretive scholars have crossed international and cultural
boundaries to examine the influence of popular culture.
• In an early study, Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes (1987) set up focus groups to see how
different cultural groups perceived the popular 1980s TV drama Dallas.
o Katz and Liebes found that the U.S. Americans in Los Angeles were much less
programs.
o The respondents stated that, because of the cultural differences, the Korean shows
were more appealing.
B. Popular Culture and Stereotyping
• People’s knowledge about other places, even places that they have been to, is largely
television show Matt Waters.
• African American women also traditionally have been portrayed stereotypically on TV,
especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when the roles they held were secondary (e.g., as
domestics).
• Scholar Bishetta Merritt (2000) also describes how African American female characters
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
• Marian Meyers (2004) studied the ways that the violence perpetrated by African
American men on African American women was represented.
o She found that the media coverage brought together issues of race, class, and
gender and therefore tended to identify the perpetrators as nonstudent local
IV. U.S. Popular Culture and Power
• One of the dynamics of intercultural communication that the authors have highlighted
throughout this text is power.
• In considering popular culture, one needs to think about not only how people interpret and
consume popular culture but also how these popular culture texts represent particular
groups in specific ways.
A. Global Circulation of Images and Commodities
• Much of the internationally circulated popular culture is U.S. popular culture. U.S.-
o Much popular culture that is expressed in non-English languages has a difficult
time on the global scene.
B. Cultural Imperialism
• It is difficult to measure the impact of the U.S. and Western media and popular culture
imperialism, which began in the 1920s, continue today.
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
o Media Imperialism–domination or control through media
o Electronic Colonialism–domination or exploitation using technological forms
o Cultural Imperialism–domination through the spread of cultural products
• In his survey of the cultural imperialism debates, scholar John Tomlinson (1991)
o As a critique of modernity
• Tomlinson’s analysis underscores the interrelatedness of issues of ethnicity, culture, and
nationalism in the context of economics, technology, and capitalism—resources that are
distributed unevenly throughout the world.
• Some governments have become concerned about the amount of popular culture coming
o He then noted, “Foreign television is often thought to be harmful because it
separates people from their national communities,” but he warned that one should
not so easily view foreign television in this way.
• Sometimes Western images are imported and welcomed by the ruling interests in other
countries.
maintaining their national identities.
• In all of these examples, popular culture plays an enormous role in explaining relations
around the globe. It is through popular culture that people try to understand the
dynamics of other cultures and nations.
Discussion Questions
1. Why do people select some popular culture forms over others?
2. How do the choices you make about what forms of popular culture to consume influence
the formation of your cultural identity?
3. What factors influence culture industries to portray cultural groups as they do?
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
4. How does the portrayal of different cultural groups by the media influence intercultural
interactions with those groups?
5. What stereotypes are perpetuated by U.S. popular culture and exported to other countries?
6. How do our social roles affect our consumption of popular culture?
7. What strategies can people apply to resist popular culture?
Classroom Exercises and Chapter Activities
1. Cultural Perceptions Exercise: This exercise is designed to encourage students to think
about the information they receive about other cultures from different forms of print media.
Prior to class, collect examples from the U.S. media portraying people from other cultures
2. Defining “Popular” Exercise: The purpose of this class discussion is to explore with
students the notion of what popular is. To do so, instructors might ask students the
3. Video Assignment: This project is designed to encourage students to explore how popular
culture provides us with information about other cultures. Instruct students to pick a video
that portrays a specific cultural group or interactions between two cultural groups. Have
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
group, how might watching the video affect their communication with the person?
4. Exported Popular Culture Assignment: Identify for students examples of television
programs that are popular exports to other countries. Ask students to watch one of them
and write a critique addressing the following ideas:
5. Consuming Pop Culture Journal Assignment: This exercise will help students clarify their
relationship with popular culture and help them determine the extent to which they are
1950s and 1960s), and the magazines and newspapers they buy. In their journal entries,
students should identify the items they believe are examples of pop culture. Then, they
6. Alternative to Consuming Pop Culture Journal Assignment: Instead of asking students to
write a paper, have them bring to class at least one item from their home that they consider
to be representative of pop culture. In small groups, ask students to share their items and
discuss the questions posed in the previous assignment.
Suggested Videos
1. Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women (Produced by Jean Kilbourne and
Cambridge Documentary Films, Cambridge, MA, 1987, 32 minutes)
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Chapter 9: Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication
this portrayal of women affects the images men and women form of themselves.
2. Super Size Me! (Produced by Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2004, 98 minutes)
Director Morgan Spurlock decided to conduct an experiment in which he would subject
3. Bowling for Columbine (Directed by Michael Moore, MGM/UA, 2002, 125 minutes)
Filmmaker and leftist activist Michael Moore poses some serious questions as he probes
