Popular Culture I Consume
The most popular culture form I consume is the TV news bulletin, specifically SBS World News. I believe its intrinsic characteristics of content and format, if not its individual broadcaster’s manifestation, ascribe its form to popular culture. The TV news bulletin has an ubiquitous existence the world over and, especially in its sub-genre of “world” or “international” news, it constitutes one of the strongest contributors to the public’s sense of living within what McLuhan famously depicted as the Global Village.
The SBS bulletin and the TV news in general have an established domain within the “signifying practices” (p. 2) that define contemporary global culture. The TV news can be described as a genre in virtue of the features, mainly dependent on and shared with its medium, that distinguish it from the bigger domain of journalism. It is these very features that fall within many of the definitions John Storey (2015) outlines to describe ‘popular culture’(pp 5-12).
Considering the discrimination between ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture (Storey pp.5-6), it can be argued that the TV news belongs to the former when compared to the wider field of journalism it feeds from. Investigative reporting, in-depth analysis of politics, social issues and current affairs do not have a place in the quick-delivery format of the TV bulletin. Ranging from politics to lifestyle, from simplified finances to social gossip, the TV news dispenses easy-to-swallow, short and unrelated “pills” of information.
The coexistence of such juxtapositions is by design. It both mitigates the impact of harsh news for a typical dinner time slot and offers a wide spectrum of topics to cater for the equally wide demographic of the audience it targets. This type of broadcasted content’s strategies reflects a common feature of popular culture as “mass produced for mass consumption, for non-discriminating customers” (Storey p. 8)
The TV news also matches the postmodern understanding of popular by typically mixing the ‘authentic’ and the ‘commercial’ (Storey 2015 pp 9-10) to manufacture its content. Its authenticity resides in the usefulness of the service and in the legacy trustworthiness of the professional journalism it is sourced from. It is also complemented with the veracity of the accompanying audio-visual documentation. Simultaneously though, such documentation and the selection of the topics is often employed to create sensationalism with the result of blurring factuality with interested motivations of audiences reaching capacity (Arbaoui, De Swert, van der Brug 2016)
The TV bulletin thus participates in its medium’s market strategies and is therefore, along with other popular culture, “deliberately set out to win favour with the people” (William 1983 p.237 in Storey p. 5). As Bill Guttentag (2018) stresses in his public lecture about Reality Shows, “television […] basically is about one thing only: it provides a life support system for the commercials”.
The recent pandemic forced me at home and brought routine to my otherwise irregular calendar that never included a set time for dinner or the TV news. Through a daily dose of SBS World News, my sense of belonging to a global community sharing the same predicament of the pandemic, was strengthened by its overlapping with the real administrative community that legally required me to stay updated on daily changing regulations. It takes some effort to remind myself that vast proportions of such imagined community fall within the digital divide and never get to see images of me as I do of them, from my comfy couch.
Reference list
Arbaoui, B, De Swert, K & van der Brug, W 2016 “Sensationalism in News Coverage: A Comparative Study in 14 Television Systems”, re-published in Sage Journal, Volume: 47 issue: 2, page(s): 299-320
<https://doi-org.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/10.1177/0093650216663364>, visited August 14 2020
Guttentag, B 2008, Why are Reality TV Shows So Popular?, online video, 13 February, Fora.tv, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAnAoM96wxE&feature=youtu.be >, viewed August 14 2020
Storey, J. 2015, ‘Cultural Theory and Popular Culture : An Introduction’ 7th ed., Routledge, New York.