Development of the national mass culture sector. Features of mass culture of the Russian province

Adapted to the tastes of the broad masses of people, it is technically replicated in the form of many copies and distributed using modern communication technologies.

The emergence and development of mass culture is associated with the rapid development of mass media, capable of exerting a powerful influence on the audience. IN media There are usually three components:

• mass media(newspapers, magazines, radio, television, Internet blogs, etc.) - replicate information, have a regular impact on the audience and are aimed at certain groups of people;
• means of mass influence(advertising, fashion, cinema, popular literature) - do not always regularly influence the audience, are aimed at the average consumer;
• technical means of communication(Internet, telephone) - determine the possibility of direct communication between a person and a person and can be used to transmit personal information.

Let us note that not only the media have an impact on society, but society also seriously influences the nature of the information transmitted in the media. Unfortunately, the demands of the public often turn out to be low culturally, which reduces the level of television programs, newspaper articles, variety shows, etc.

In recent decades, in the context of the development of means of communication, they talk about a special computer culture. If previously the main source of information was the book page, now it is the computer screen. A modern computer allows you to instantly receive information over the network, supplement the text with graphic images, videos, and sound, which ensures a holistic and multi-level perception of information. In this case, text on the Internet (for example, a web page) can be represented as hypertext. those. contain a system of references to other texts, fragments, non-textual information. The flexibility and versatility of computer information display tools greatly enhance the degree of its impact on humans.

At the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century. mass culture began to play an important role in ideology and economics. However, this role is ambiguous. On the one hand, mass culture made it possible to reach wide sections of the population and introduce them to cultural achievements, presenting them in simple, democratic and understandable images and concepts, but on the other hand, it created powerful mechanisms for manipulating public opinion and forming an average taste.

The main components of mass culture include:

• information industry- the press, television news, talk shows, etc., explaining current events in understandable language. Mass culture was initially formed in the sphere of the information industry - the “yellow press” of the 19th - early 20th centuries. Time has shown the high efficiency of mass communication in the process of manipulating public opinion;
• leisure industry- films, entertaining literature, pop humor with the most simplified content, pop music, etc.;
• formation system mass consumption, which centers on advertising and fashion. Consumption here is presented as a non-stop process and the most important goal of human existence;
• replicated mythology- from the myth of the “American Dream”, where beggars turn into millionaires, to the myths about “national exceptionalism” and the special virtues of one or another people compared to others.

National culture , as a system of unified national standards of social adequacy and unified ones emerges only in modern times during the processes of industrialization and urbanization, the formation of capitalism in its classical, postclassical and even alternative (socialist) forms.

The formation of a national culture is built as a unifying superstructure over society, setting certain universal standards for some sociocultural features of the nation. Of course, even before the formation of nations, the same kind of unifying different classes took place features of ethnic culture: first of all language, religion, folklore, some household rituals, elements of clothing, household items, etc. National culture sets fundamentally uniform benchmarks and standards implemented by publicly accessible specialized cultural institutions: universal education, the press, political organizations, mass forms of artistic culture and literature, etc.

Concepts “ethnic” And “national” culture are often used interchangeably. However, in cultural studies they have different contents.

Ethnic (folk) culture- is a culture of people connected by a common origin (blood relationship) and jointly carried out economic activities. It changes from one area to another. Local limitation, strict localization, isolation in a relatively narrow social space is one of the main features of this culture. Ethnic culture mainly covers the sphere of everyday life, customs, clothing, folk crafts, and folklore. Conservatism, continuity, and focus on preserving “roots” are characteristic features of ethnic culture. Some elements of it become symbols of the identity of the people and patriotic attachment to their historical past - “cabbage soup and porridge”, a samovar and a sundress for the Russians, a kimono for the Japanese, a plaid skirt for the Scots, a towel for the Ukrainians.

IN ethnic culture the power of tradition, habit, and customs, passed on from generation to generation at the family or neighborhood level, dominates. The defining mechanism of cultural communication here is direct communication between generations of people living nearby. Elements of folk culture - rituals, customs, myths, beliefs, legends, folklore - are preserved and transmitted within the boundaries of a given culture through the natural abilities of each person - his memory, oral speech and living language, natural musical ear, organic plasticity. This does not require any special training or special technical means of storage and recording.

The structure of national culture is more complex than ethnic. National culture includes, along with traditional everyday, professional and everyday culture, also specialized areas of culture. And since the nation embraces society, and society has stratification and social structure, the concept of national culture embraces the subcultures of all large groups, which an ethnic group may not have. Moreover, ethnic cultures are part of the national one. Take such young nations as the USA or Brazil, nicknamed ethnic cauldrons. American national culture is extremely heterogeneous, it includes Irish, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Russian, Jewish and other ethnic cultures. Most modern national cultures are multiethnic.

National culture cannot be reduced to a mechanical sum ethnic cultures. She has something beyond that. It has its own national cultural features, which arose when representatives of all ethnic groups realized that they belonged to a new nation. For example, both blacks and whites equally enthusiastically sing the US anthem and honor the American flag, respect its laws and national holidays, in particular Thanksgiving Day (US Independence Day). None of this exists in any ethnic culture or among any people who came to the United States. They appeared in new territory. Awareness by large social groups of their commitment to the territory of their settlement, the national literary language, national traditions and symbols constitutes the content of national culture.

Unlike ethnicnational culture unites people living over large areas and not necessarily related by blood. Experts believe that a new type of social communication associated with the invention of writing is a prerequisite for the emergence of a national culture. It is thanks to writing that the ideas necessary for national unification gain popularity among the literate part of the population.

However, the main difficulty in the dissemination of national culture is that modern knowledge, norms, cultural patterns and meanings are developed almost exclusively in the depths of highly specialized areas of social practice. They are more or less successfully understood and assimilated by relevant specialists; For the bulk of the population, the languages ​​of modern specialized culture (political, scientific, artistic, engineering, etc.) are almost incomprehensible. Society requires a system of means for semantic adaptation, “translation” of transmitted information from the language of highly specialized areas of culture to the level of everyday understanding of unprepared people, for “interpretation” of this information to its mass consumer, a certain “infantilization” of its figurative incarnations, as well as “control” of the consciousness of the masses. consumer in the interests of the manufacturer of this information, offered goods, services, etc.

This kind of adaptation has always been required for children when, in the processes of upbringing and general education, “adult” meanings were translated into the language of fairy tales, parables, entertaining stories, simplified examples, etc., more accessible to children’s consciousness. Now such interpretive practice has become necessary for a person throughout his life. A modern person, even being very educated, remains a narrow specialist in only one area, and the level of his specialization increases from century to century. In other areas, he requires a permanent “staff” of commentators, interpreters, teachers, journalists, advertising agents and other kinds of “guides” who lead him through the boundless sea of ​​information about goods, services, political events, artistic innovations, social conflicts, etc. It cannot be said that modern man has become more stupid or childish than his ancestors. It’s just that his psyche, apparently, cannot process such a quantity of information, conduct such a multifactorial analysis of such a number of simultaneously arising problems, use his social experience with due efficiency, etc. Let's not forget that the speed of information processing in computers is many times higher than the corresponding capabilities of the human brain.

This situation requires the emergence of new methods of intelligent search, scanning, selection and systematization of information, “pressing” it into larger blocks, the development of new technologies for forecasting and decision-making, as well as the mental preparedness of people to work with such voluminous information flows. After the current “information revolution”, i.e. increasing the efficiency of information transmission and processing, as well as management decision-making, humanity expects a “forecasting revolution” - a leapfrogging increase in the efficiency of forecasting, probabilistic calculation, factor analysis, etc.

In the meantime, people need some kind of remedy that relieves excess mental stress from the information flows that fall on them, reduces complex intellectual problems to primitive dual oppositions, and gives the individual the opportunity to “take a break” from social responsibility and personal choice. dissolve it in the crowd of soap opera viewers or mechanical consumers of advertised goods, ideas, slogans, etc. The implementer of this kind of needs was Mass culture. It cannot be said that mass culture generally frees a person from personal responsibility; rather, it is precisely about removing the problem of independent choice. The structure of existence (at least that part of it that directly concerns the individual) is given to a person as a set of more or less standard situations, where everything has already been chosen by those same “guides” in life: journalists, advertising agents, public politicians, etc. In mass culture, everything is already known in advance: the “correct” political system, the only correct doctrine, leaders, place in the ranks, sports and pop stars, the fashion for the image of a “class fighter” or “sexual symbol,” movies where “ours” are always right and always win, etc.

This begs the question: weren’t there problems in previous times with translating the meanings of a specialized culture to the level of everyday understanding? Why did mass culture appear only in the last one and a half to two centuries, and what cultural phenomena performed this function earlier? Apparently, the fact is that before the scientific and technological revolution of recent centuries there really was no such gap between specialized and everyday knowledge. The only obvious exception to this rule was religion. We know well how great was the intellectual gap between “professional” theology and the mass religiosity of the population. Here, a “translation” from one language to another was really necessary (and often in the literal sense: from Latin, Church Slavonic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. into the national languages ​​of believers). This task, both linguistically and in terms of content, was solved by preaching (both from the pulpit and missionary). It was the sermon, in contrast to the divine service, that was delivered in a language absolutely understandable to the congregation and was, to a greater or lesser extent, a reduction of religious dogma to publicly accessible images, concepts, parables, etc. Obviously, we can consider church sermons to be the historical predecessor of the phenomena of mass culture.

The relevance of the topic is determined by the fact that by the beginning of our century, mass culture had become the most important factor in public life. One of the results of the intense transformations experienced by Russian society at the turn of the century was the shock experienced by society from the collision with mass culture. Meanwhile, to this day, the phenomena of mass culture, mass society, mass consciousness, as well as the concepts that reflect them, remain little studied.

In Russian socio-philosophical literature, mass culture has not yet become the subject of systematic study. Fundamental scientific research into mass culture is rare. Most often, mass culture is viewed as a pseudoculture that does not have any positive ideological, educational, or aesthetic content.

Goal of the work
– identify the nature and social functions of mass culture.

Research objectives, the solution of which is necessary to achieve the goal:

– identify the specifics of mass culture, the sources of its origin and development factors;

– identify the social functions of mass culture that determine its place and role in modern society.

– systematize the forms of manifestation of mass culture characteristic of the post-industrial information society.

The object of the study is mass culture as a phenomenon of modern social life associated with its urbanization, mass production, deep marketization and media development.

1. THE CONCEPT AND ESSENCE OF MASS CULTURE AS A STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN SOCIETY

Mass culture is an objective and natural stage in the development of civilization, associated with the formation of a mass society based on a market economy, industrialization, urban lifestyle, the development of democratic institutions and mass media.

There are several stages in the dynamics of the tradition of studying mass society and mass culture. At the first stage (G. Lebon, J. Ortega y Gasset), mass society was viewed from openly conservative, even anti-democratic positions, in the context of concern about the emergence of the phenomenon itself. The masses were seen as a rioting mob, a power-hungry mob that threatened to overthrow the traditional elite and destroy civilization. At the second stage (A. Gramsci, E. Canetti, Z. Freud, H. Arendt) - in the period between the two world wars - the experience of totalitarian societies of the fascist type (USSR, Germany, Italy) is comprehended and the masses are already understood as some kind of dark and conservative a force recruited and manipulated by the elite. At the third stage (T. Adorno, G. Horkheimer, E. Fromm, G. Marcuse) - during and immediately after the Second World War - a democratic critique of mass society, understood as a product of the development of monopoly capitalism, takes shape. By the 1960s, a fourth approach had emerged (M. McLuhan, D. Bell, E. Shills) - an understanding of massification as an objective stage in the development of the lifestyle of modern civilization. Subsequently, this tendency to reduce critical pathos became the main one, and the study of mass society was closely intertwined with the analysis of the consequences of the development of new information technologies and the stylistics of postmodern artistic culture.

Within the nearly century-long tradition of analysis, several basic characteristics of mass have been identified with a wide range of applications. Thus, the Lebon-Canetti understanding of the mass as a crowd is applicable to the understanding of activist mass movements that unite the predominantly proletarianized part of the population. The model of the masses as consumers of products of mass culture and mass media turns them into a “public” - a very important category in the sociological analysis of the consumer audience. The ideal model of the public is radio listeners, television viewers and Internet users - isolated recipients, connected only by the unity of the consumed symbolic product and the homogeneity of needs. For modern analysts, the previous two characteristics of mass are not enough. Therefore, the understanding of the masses as a consequence of the formation of the middle class comes to the fore, when the masses are united by such lifestyle parameters as income level, education and type of consumption. In this understanding, the mass appears as a formation in which individuals and social groups do not fundamentally differ - it is a single homogeneous layer of a single culture.

In mass society, the place of organic communities (family, church, community), capable of helping an individual find his identity, is taken by mechanical communities (crowd, flow of passengers, buyers, spectators, etc.). There is a transition from an “inside” oriented personality to an “outside” oriented personality type.

Thus, the characteristics of the mass and the mass person are: anti-individuality, communitarianism, community, exceeding subjectivity; aggressive, anti-cultural energy, capable of destructive actions, subordinate to the leader-leader; affective spontaneity; general negativism; primitiveness of intentions; impenetrable to rational organization. Mass culture is not a culture for the masses and not a culture of the masses created and consumed by them. This is that part of culture that is created (but not created by the masses) by order and under the pressure of forces dominant in economics, politics, ideology, and morality. It is distinguished by its extreme closeness to elementary needs, orientation towards mass demand, natural (instinctive) sensuality and primitive emotionality, subordination to the dominant ideology, and simplicity in the production of a high-quality product of mass consumption.

The emergence and development of mass culture is due to the development market economy , focused on meeting the needs of a wide range of consumers - the more massive the demand, the more efficient the production of the corresponding goods and services will be. This problem was solved industrialization - highly organized industrial production based on the use of high-performance technologies. Mass culture is a form of cultural development in the conditions of industrial civilization. This is what determines its characteristics such as general accessibility, serial production, machine reproducibility, the ability to replace reality and be perceived as its full-fledged equivalent. Using the results scientific and technological progress created the preconditions for the rapid development of industrial production, which was able to maximize the commodity mass with minimal costs, thereby laying the foundations of a consumer society. Such production requires appropriate organization of the lifestyle of people engaged in specialized production. The formation and development of large-scale production required the unification of people into mass production teams and their compact living in limited areas. This problem is solved urbanization , urban habitat, when personalized connections are replaced by impersonal, anonymous and functional ones. Homogenization of working conditions and lifestyle, perceptions and needs, opportunities and prospects turns members of society into a fairly homogeneous mass, and the massification of social life from the sphere of production extends to spiritual consumption, everyday life, leisure, and forms living standards.

Mass communication usually refers to the relatively simultaneous exposure of large heterogeneous audiences to symbols transmitted by impersonal means from an organized source to which audience members are anonymous. The emergence of each new type of mass communication produced radical changes in socio-cultural systems; connections between people became less rigid and more anonymous, more and more “quantitative”. This process became one of the main lines of development that led to mass culture.

Modern information electronic and digital technologies combine text (even hypertext), graphics, photo and video images, animation, sound - almost all channels of information in an interactive mode - into one format. This opened up new possibilities for storing artifacts, broadcasting and reproducing information - artistic, reference, management, and the Internet created the information environment of modern civilization as a whole and can be considered the final and complete form of the triumph of mass culture, making the world accessible to millions of users.

A developed information society provides opportunities for communication - industrial and leisure - without the formation of crowds and transport problems inherent in an industrial-type society. It was the means of mass communication, primarily the media, that ensured the creation of a “crowd at home.” They massify people, while at the same time separating them, as they displace traditional direct contacts, meetings, meetings, replacing personal communication with television or a computer. Ultimately, everyone finds themselves part of a seemingly invisible, but omnipresent mass. Never before has a man of mass constituted such a large and such a homogeneous group in numbers. And never before have such communities been formed and maintained consciously and purposefully using special means not only for accumulating and processing the necessary information, but also for very effectively managing people and influencing their consciousness. Electronic synthesis of media and business is beginning to absorb politics and government, which need publicity, the formation of public opinion and become increasingly dependent on such networks, in fact, an attribute of entertainment.

Information becomes more significant than money, and information becomes a commodity not only and not so much as knowledge, but as an image, dream, emotion, myth, possibilities personal self-realization. The creation of certain images, myths that unite people, actually scattered and encapsulated, on the basis of not so much joint, but simultaneous and similar experiences, forms not just a mass personality, but even a serial one. In post-information mass culture, any cultural artifact, including the individual, and society as a whole, must be in demand and satisfy someone’s needs. In the 21st century national self-determination and the choice of a civilizational path lies precisely in the competitive aggregate social product that this society produces and offers. The conclusion is very instructive for modern Russia.

The mass man is the “natural man” of the Enlightenment turned inside out. There is a large-scale shift in the value vector of social existence. The focus on work (spiritual, intellectual, physical), tension, care, creation and equivalent (fair) exchange was replaced by an focus on gifts, carnivals, and a celebration of life organized by others.

A mass person is not able to hold a complete picture of what is happening, to trace and build cause-and-effect relationships. The consciousness of a mass person is not built rationally, but mosaically, reminiscent of a kaleidoscope in which rather random patterns are formed. It is irresponsible: because it has no rational motivation, and because it is irresponsible, due to the lack of free, that is, the responsible age of the masses is a special psychological type that first emerged precisely within the framework of European civilization. What makes a person a bearer of such consciousness is not the place he occupies in society, but a deep personal consumer attitude.

Mass culture itself is ambivalent. The overwhelming part of mass culture - household appliances and consumer services, transport and communications, media and, above all, electronic media, fashion, tourism and cafes - are hardly condemned by anyone, and are perceived simply as the main content of everyday experience, as the very structure of everyday life. However, from its very essence - to indulge human weaknesses - follows the main tendency of mass culture - “short game”. Therefore, society must have filters and mechanisms to counter and contain these negative trends. From this all the more follows the need for a deep understanding of the mechanisms of reproduction of modern mass culture.

As a form of accumulation and transmission of the value-semantic content of social experience, mass culture has both constructive and destructive features of its functioning.

Despite the obvious unifying and leveling tendencies, mass culture realizes the characteristics of national cultures, opening up new opportunities and prospects for their development.

Mass culture is a system of generating and transmitting the social experience of mass society in a market economy, industrial production, urban lifestyle, democratization and development of mass communication technologies.

Mass culture is a natural stage in the development of civilization, the embodiment of value systems dating back to the Renaissance and the ideals of the European Enlightenment: humanism, enlightenment, freedom, equality and justice. Implementation of the idea “Everything in the name of man, everything for the benefit of man!” has become the culture of a mass consumption society, sophisticated consumerism, when dreams, aspirations and hopes become the main goods. It has created unprecedented opportunities to satisfy a wide variety of needs and interests, and, at the same time, to manipulate consciousness and behavior.

A way to organize the value content of mass culture, ensuring its exceptional integrity and effectiveness, is the unification of social, economic, and interpersonal relations based on market demand and price. Almost all cultural artifacts become commodities, which turns the hierarchy of values ​​into sectors of the market economy, and the factors that ensure the efficiency of their production, broadcast and consumption come to the fore: social communication, opportunities for maximum replication and diversification.

2. SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF MASS CULTURE

Mass culture and its branches ensure the accumulation and transmission of basic values ​​that ensure the identity of the individual in mass society. On the one hand, it ensures the adaptation of new values ​​and meanings, as well as their reception by mass consciousness. On the other hand, it develops a general value-semantic context for understanding reality in various fields of activity, age, professional, and regional subcultures.

Mass culture mythologizes consciousness, real processes occurring in society and even in nature. Bringing all values ​​to the common denominator of need (demand), mass culture has a number of negative consequences: value relativism and universal accessibility, cultivation of infantilism, consumerism and irresponsibility. Therefore, society needs mechanisms and institutions to protect against these negative consequences. This task, first of all, must be carried out by the education system and the humanities that feed it, and the institutions of civil society.

Mass culture turns out to be not only a manifestation of destructive tendencies, but also a mechanism for protecting against them by including them in the universal information field of imitation, “simulacra” of the “society of the spectacle.” It creates a comfortable existence for the vast majority of members of society, transferring social regulation to a mode of self-organization, which ensures its ability for effective self-reproduction and expansion.

Mass culture provides a fundamentally new type of consolidation of society, based on replacing the ratio of elite (“high”) and folk (“low”) cultures with the reproduction of universal mass consciousness (mass man). In modern mass society, the elite ceases to be the creator and bearer of high examples of culture for other segments of society. She is part of the same mass, opposing it not in cultural terms, but in the possession of power, the ability to manage resources: financial, raw materials, information, human.

Mass culture ensures the stability of modern society. Thus, in the conditions of the virtual absence of the middle class and civil society, the consolidation of Russian society is carried out by mass culture and mass consciousness.

— inevitable, and perhaps the main and largest of the “fruits of the Enlightenment.” It is the literal embodiment of values ​​and orientations dating back to the Renaissance. We are talking about such values ​​as humanism, enlightenment, freedom, equality and justice. Mass culture is the literal implementation of the slogan “Everything in the name of man, everything for the benefit of man!” This is the culture of a society whose economic life is built on sophisticated consumerism, marketing and advertising. Mass society is a society of mass consumption, when deep segmentation of markets reaches the individual consumer, and the main product becomes his dreams and aspirations, embodied in brands. Mass culture is associated with the main development of human civilization, and in its axiological understanding it is impossible to limit oneself to emotional attacks.

Negative assessments of popular culture, among other things, are due to snobbery, dating back to the beginning of the Enlightenment with its paradigm of educating the people by an educated elite. At the same time, mass consciousness was conceived as a bearer of prejudices that can be easily dispelled through rational knowledge, technical means of their replication, and the growth of literacy of the masses. The twentieth century turned out to be a century of accomplishment and the deepest crisis of Enlightenment ideals and hopes. The growth of the general educational level, the increase in the amount of free time, the emergence of powerful means of broadcasting culture - such as the media and new information technologies in themselves have not led to the real enlightenment of the masses and their introduction to the heights of spiritual development. Moreover, these fruits of civilization contributed to the spread of old prejudices and the emergence of new ones, the breakdown of civilization into totalitarianism, violence and cynical manipulation.

However, it was mass culture that taught wide sections of society “good manners,” the teachings of which are cinema, advertising, and television. It has created unprecedented opportunities to satisfy the interests of lovers of classical art, folklore and the avant-garde, those who seek to experience thrills, and those who seek physical and mental comfort. Mass culture itself is an ambivalent phenomenon, associated with certain features of modern civilization, and in different societies it can perform different functions.

If in a traditional society the elite acted as the bearer and custodian of the best, most valuable (“high” culture), then in modern mass society it no longer opposes the masses in cultural terms, but only in the possession of power. She is part of the same mass, which has received the opportunity to manage resources: financial, raw materials, information. The current elite cannot serve as cultural models - at best, as models for presenting demo versions of new products and fashion. It ceases to be the customer, creator and bearer of high examples of culture, art, social relations, political and legal norms and values ​​- high standards to which society would be drawn up. The modern “elite” does not feel responsibility to the “people”, seeing in them only one of the management resources.

It is mass culture that ensures the consolidation and stability of modern society. A convincing example is the amazing stability of the Putin regime, inexplicable from the point of view of the “middle class theory.” In the conditions of the virtual absence of the middle class and civil society, the function of consolidating society is carried out by mass culture, the “bright” representative of which is the president himself. The function of the middle class in modern Russia is successfully performed by the mass consciousness of the masses, which was successfully formed back in Soviet times.

Mass culture turns out to be not only a manifestation of destructive tendencies, but also a mechanism of protection against them. The main requirements for artifacts of mass culture are totality, performativity and seriality. Each project diversifies, branches into a great variety of other events, each of which refers to others, refers to them, is reflected from them, receiving additional reinforcement of its own “reality”. A series is not only a collection of circulation copies, but rather a kind of through line on which a variety of reinforcements are strung is not only impossible, but also illegal: it exists only in this matrix and cannot exist under other conditions. But this event is devoid of its own identity; it does not exist anywhere “in full” and integrity. The main thing is a function within a certain integrity, the ability to integrate into this integrity, to dissolve in it. In mass culture, a situation of total and universal “non-existence” is emerging, which not only does not interfere with coherent social communication, but is also the only condition for its successful implementation.

The existence of mass culture unfolds, therefore, only in the field of imitation, in the field of fictions, simulacra. “Extreme” sports, equipped with reliably protective equipment and other safety measures, only imitate extreme. But the real thing is often shocking, because it doesn’t fit well into the format of mass culture. An example of the final victory of mass culture is its deconstruction of the events of September 11, 2001 in New York, which were perceived by millions of television viewers as another disaster film or a joke by hacker providers. The world did not have time to shudder when a grandiose real tragedy turned into another “simulacrum” of the “society of the spectacle.”

Modern mass culture is a complex system of highly technologically specialized areas of activity that can be traced following the stages of the life path: “childhood industry”, mass secondary school, mass media, publishing, libraries, system of state ideology and propaganda, m mainstream political movements, entertainment industry,
“health industry”, mass tourism industry, amateurism, fashion and advertising. Mass culture is realized not only in commercialized forms (musical variety, erotic and entertaining show business, intrusive advertising, tabloid “yellow” press, low-grade television programs), it is capable of self-expression by other means, in other image systems. Thus, in totalitarian societies, mass culture is characterized by a militaristic-psychopathic mindset, which orients people not towards individualistic-hedonistic, but towards collectivist forms of existence.

Mass culture and its branches are associated with the accumulation and transmission of basic values ​​that ensure personal identity and, on this basis, the culturally determined consolidation of society. On the one hand, it ensures the adaptation of new values ​​and meanings, as well as their reception by ordinary consciousness. On the other hand, it develops a certain value-semantic context for understanding reality in various fields of activity, the uniqueness of a specific national culture, as well as age, professional, and regional subcultures. It literally implements the meta-principle of ethics - the categorical imperative of I. Kant “act only in accordance with such a maxim, guided by which you can at the same time wish that it become a universal law.”

Popular culture presents not so much typical themes as the value-normative frames of modern civilization. Thus, the story about the inevitability of a fair reward that earned the personal happiness of a poor hardworking girl (“Cinderella”), the myth “who was nobody will become everything” as a result of selfless work and a righteous life are the most common in popular culture, reinforcing the belief in the ultimate justice of the world . Mass culture mythologizes consciousness, mystifies real processes occurring in society and even in nature. Products of mass culture literally turn into “magical artifacts” (such as a flying carpet, a magic wand, living water, a self-assembled tablecloth, an invisible hat), the possession of which opens the door to the world of dreams. The rational, cause-and-effect view of the world, which presupposes knowledge of the “madeness” of the world, has been replaced by “panoramic-eniclopedic” erudition, sufficient for solving crossword puzzles and participating in games like “Field of Miracles” and “How to Become a Millionaire.” In other practical cases, including professional activities, recipes from manuals and instructions are enough for him.

If totalitarian state-force control is similar to manual control, mass culture transforms social regulation into a mode of self-organization. This is associated not only with its amazing vitality and ability for self-reproduction and expansion, but also with its effectiveness. Despite all the instability of each individual fragment of mass culture and the corresponding social communities, the ease of their dispersion and liquidation, nothing in principle threatens the entire ensemble. A break in a single specific link does not entail the destruction of the entire “web”. Mass culture establishes a stable and safe, very comfortable existence for the vast majority of community members. In fact, replacing state institutions, mass culture acts as a manipulator and regulator of the mental and moral state of society.

Mass culture itself is neither good nor bad, since it is generated by a whole complex of features of modern human civilization. It performs a number of important socio-cultural functions, but also has a number of negative consequences. Therefore, society must develop mechanisms and institutions that correct and compensate for these negative consequences, developing protection and immunity from them. This function, first of all, should be performed by the education system and the humanities that feed it. But the solution to this problem presupposes a clear and intelligible understanding of the value content of mass culture, its phenomena and artifacts.

3. VALUE COMPLEX OF MASS CULTURE

Under the conditions of marketization of culture, it is not so much the content of values ​​that changes, but their very functioning. The value complex of mass culture is formed radically differently than traditional culture, which seeks a transcendental value basis for reality in the sacred. Mass culture is perhaps the first cultural formation in human history that is devoid of a transcendental dimension. She is not at all interested in immaterial, otherworldly existence, its other plane. If something supernatural appears in it, then, firstly, it is described like a description of the consumer qualities of a product, and secondly, it is used to satisfy earthly needs.

The value vertical of traditional culture in the context of mass culture is “flattened” into the corresponding market segments. Former values ​​turn into thematic rubrics: “about love”, “about knowledge”, “about faith”, “about goodness”, “how to become happy”, “how to succeed”, “how to become rich”. Mass culture, starting with the provision of ordinary comfort, draws into the orbit of ordinary consumption ever higher levels of the hierarchy of values ​​and needs - up to the levels of self-affirmation, sacred and transcendental, which also appear as market segments of certain services. The question of virtue is of little concern to a person in mass society, who is rather concerned about what is considered virtuous at the moment, is fashionable, prestigious, marketable, and profitable. Although sociality and conformism are practically identified in it, in mass culture, due to its omnivorous nature, special market zones are allocated for the manifestation (and satisfaction) of aggressiveness (sports, rock, extreme tourism).

In general, the structure of values ​​of mass culture includes:

super-values ​​of marketization:


super-values ​​of the form: eventfulness (attracting attention, fame, shocking); possibility of replication and distribution; seriality; diversification.


super-values ​​of the content (subject): “for needs”, “for humans”; personal success; pleasure.


Basic values ​​of mass culture, categorized by types and genres: sensory experiences; sexuality; power (strength); intellectual exclusivity; identity; failure of deviations.


specific values ​​of national-ethnic cultures: uniqueness and originality of cultural identity; potential for common humanity.


role values: professional, age, gender.


existential values: goodness; life; Love; faith.


This entire system is permeated by the main thing - marketization - to have consumer value. What is not in demand cannot exist. Mass culture and its artifacts are a very holistic and well-integrated system, capable of permanent self-reproduction. This is a self-reproducing mass personology or personalized mass.


Emerging in traditional society or penetrating into it, mass culture begins a gradual ascent along the vertical (pyramid) of values. If social institutions have developed in society that consolidate a hierarchy of values, then the vertical expansion carried out by mass culture is not dangerous: the form, the framework of socialization guidelines is preserved, and mass culture only supplies mass and high-quality products of material and spiritual consumption. Dangers lurk when there are no such institutions in a society and there is no elite - a trend that sets guidelines and pulls up the masses. In the case of the massification of the elite itself, the arrival of people with mass consciousness into it, society degenerates into increasing populism. Actually, populism is mass consciousness in politics, working to simplify and lower ideas and values.


It follows from this that mass culture, which in itself is neither good nor bad, plays a positive social role only when there are established institutions of civil society and when there is an elite that plays a role similar to the role of a market trend, pulling the rest of society along with it, and not dissolving in it or mimicking it. The problems begin not with mass culture, but with the loss of the creative potential of society.


A person appears not as a person who has some kind of inner world, and therefore independent value and significance, but as a certain image, ultimately a commodity, which, like other goods on the market, has its own price, which is determined by this market and only by it. and is determined. The mass man is becoming more and more empty, faceless, despite all the external pretentiousness and brightness of the design of his presence in the world. In a postmodern mass society, a “controlled mass” of people (in a factory, in a church, in the army, in a cinema, in a concentration camp, in a square) is replaced by a “controlled” mass, which is created with the help of the media, advertising, the Internet, without requiring obligatory personal contact . Providing greater personal freedom and avoiding direct violence, postmodern mass society influences people with the help of “soft temptation” (J. Baudrillard), “machines of desire” (J. Deleuze and F. Guatari).


Mass culture, with all the intense emotionality of its manifestations, is a “cold” society, a logical result of the development of a society that realizes liberal values, autonomy and independence of various normative value systems. Liberalism, with an emphasis on procedures and maintaining a balance of power, is possible only within the framework of a stable, sustainable society. In order to become sustainable, society needs to go through a stage of self-determination. Therefore, liberalism experiences serious problems in the stages of transition and transformation, when life calls for a search for a new attractor, a search for identity. Mass culture plays an ambiguous role in such a situation. It seems to consolidate society in universal equality and accessibility, but it does not provide identity, which is so important in this situation.


4. INDICATOR OF MASS CULTURE


It is simply unthinkable and reckless to talk about mass culture without referring to its main indicators. After all, it is by the result of this or that activity that we can talk about the usefulness or harm of this or that phenomenon.


And who, if not us, is the direct object of the influence of mass culture? How does it affect you and me? It is significant that a characteristic feature of the spiritual atmosphere in modern culture, which determines the type of flat modern perception and thinking, is pervasive humor. The superficial view not only goes deeper into what is fundamental, noticing only visible inconsistencies or inconsistencies, but also cynically ridicules reality, which, nevertheless, is accepted by him as it is: ultimately, a person satisfied with himself and life remains with the reality that he he himself ridiculed and humiliated. This deep-seated disrespect for oneself permeates a person’s entire relationship to the world and all forms of its manifestation in the world. Where there is laughter, as A. Bergson noted, there are no strong emotions. And if laughter is present everywhere, then this means that a person is no longer seriously present even in his own being, that in a certain sense he has virtualized himself.


Indeed, in order to destroy something in reality, you must first destroy it in your consciousness, bring it down, humiliate it, debunk it as a value. The confusion of value and non-value is not as harmless as it seems at first glance: it discredits value, just as the confusion of truth and lies turns everything into a lie, because in mathematics, “minus” for “plus” always gives “minus”. In fact, it has always been easier to destroy than to create, to bring order and harmony. This pessimistic observation was also made by M. Foucault, who wrote that to overthrow something is to sneak in, lower the bar of value, re-center the environment, remove the centering rod from the base of value.


A. Blok wrote about a similar spiritual atmosphere that prevailed in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century in his essay “Irony”. In the face of corrupting laughter, damned irony, he writes, everything turns out to be equal and equally possible: good and evil, Dante’s Beatrice and Sologub’s Nedotykomka, everything is mixed, as in a tavern and darkness: to kneel before Nedotykomka, to seduce Beatrice... Everything is equal in rights, everything is subject to ridicule, and there are no shrines or ideals that remain inviolable, nothing sacred that a person would protect from the invasion of “humorous perception.” About such a state, G. Heine says: “I no longer distinguish where irony ends and heaven begins.”


A. Blok calls this deadly irony a disease of the individual, affected by individualism, in which the spirit eternally blooms, but is eternally sterile. Individualism, however, does not at all mean the formation of individuality, personality; Against the background of massification processes, this means the birth of crowds consisting of human atoms, where everyone is alone, but in everything similar to others. Personality, as is known, is a systemic and holistic formation that cannot be reduced to any one aspect of a person’s manifestation or any specific form of his social behavior.


Mass culture, firstly, fragments the personality, depriving it of integrity, and, secondly, narrows it down to a limited set of stereotypical manifestations, which can be considered actions with less and less justification. In other words, a single core is knocked out from the foundation of the personality, integrating the total manifestations of the personality and constituting its identity; all that remains is a certain specific “reactivity” in a given direction, i.e. conformity develops. There is a paradoxical process of simultaneous massification of people and the disintegration of their community, which can be based on the interaction of individuals, but not on the isolation of individualism. About the destructive power of individualism, Vl. Soloviev wrote in the 19th century: “The excessive development of individualism in the modern West leads to its opposite - to general depersonalization and vulgarization.


The extreme tension of personal consciousness, not finding an appropriate object for itself, turns into empty and petty egoism, which equalizes everyone.” Individualism without individuality appears in its usual expression as mass philistine psychology. The very attitude towards a person, as well as his own self-esteem, is based not on the presence of any socially valuable abilities, merits and their manifestation in a person, but on the amount of demand that he or his abilities enjoy in the market. A person appears not as a person with independent value, but as a commodity that has its own price, like everything else on the market. A person begins to treat himself as a commodity that should be sold at the highest possible price. A sense of self-respect becomes insufficient for self-confidence, because a person begins to depend on the assessment of other people, on the fashion for his specialty or abilities. Market orientation, as E. Fromm argued, distorts the structure of a person’s character; alienating him from himself, she deprives the individual of his individuality. The Christian God of love is defeated by the market idol of profit.


Individualism as deindividuation is deliberately imposed, since modern society needs the most identical, similar people who are easier to manage. The market is as interested in standardizing personalities as it is standardizing products. Standard tastes are easier to direct, cheaper to satisfy, easier to shape and guess. At the same time, creativity is increasingly leaving the labor process; the creative personality is less and less in demand in the society of mass people. The mass man becomes more and more devastated with all the diversity and brightness of the external filling of his being, more and more internally faceless and colorless with all the external pretentiousness of the “design” of his presence in the world - his needs, demands, etc. With all the affirmation of entrepreneurship and initiative, a person in reality becomes less and less capable of solving problems on his own: how to relax is advised by the TV, how to dress is determined by fashion, who to work by - the market, how to get married - by an astrologer, how to live - by a psychoanalyst. Trips to the conservatory or art gallery are being replaced by shopping, which is increasingly becoming an independent form of relaxation and pastime.


A person has less and less real, real leisure, filled with reflection, communication with himself, the formation of his own soul, its awareness and education. It is not for nothing that in all religious systems that attached great importance to the spiritual perfection of man, such a significant place was allocated for this kind of spiritual “idleness,” for only then could a person work with himself, cultivate his personality. Leisure in modern society is practically consumed by forced entertainment through TV and various show programs. With the help of a widely staged and temptingly presented entertainment industry, a person escapes from life with its real problems, from himself, from others.


The market is showing a massive demand for a simple, understandable, albeit slightly stupid, but giving simple and understandable answers - a cheap ideology: it offers simple explanations and recipes, creates at least some kind of confidence and certainty. For example, Freudism has gained unprecedented popularity in modern culture, offering the illusion of a simple and easy interpretation of many complex problems of life; where there were no complexes initially, they are imposed, artificially created, because they promise the possibility of easy understanding of the situation or introducing it into the framework of the generally understandable “like everyone else” and “as usual.”


This statement is illustrated by numerous popular TV series in our country, for example, Brazilian series (in particular, the series “In the Name of Love”, where all the complexes derived by S. Freud are very straightforwardly and primitively interpreted) or cheap Western melodramas, where such a method is a sufficiently one-sided way of explanation the entire complex life is implicitly but constantly offered to the viewer.


At the same time, in modern society we are talking specifically about the use of Freud’s philosophy, but not at all about attention to it as a way of interpreting life and culture: if his philosophy was built on the assertion that culture suppresses and hides sexuality in society under cultural forms, free the manifestation of which threatens his peace, then in modern mass culture the sexual, on the contrary, is cultivated and provoked in every possible way. At the same time, however, the corresponding average person, who is more interested in the “Don Juan list” of A.S. Pushkin than his works themselves, is keenly concerned about the scandalous shade of the relationship between S. Parnok and M. Tsvetaeva, although he has never read the poems of these poetesses about love (traditionally, it is more pleasant for a tradesman not so much to know as to spy on them, convincing himself that they are not so great, these great ones).


Thus, the very problem of gender in popular culture is also subject to devaluation and fragmentation. Gender is no longer conceptualized as a form of biosocial rhythm in the organization of human cultural life, reflecting the fundamental cosmic rhythms of “yin-yang,” and its manifestations are not presented either as a riot of natural elements (as in romanticism) or as a courtly game. The very feeling of love has lost its high tragic intensity, which made it possible to see in its strength the effect of fate or a manifestation of the genius of the family (A. Schopenhauer), or a frantic destructive impulse of creation (M. Unamuno). And even more so, it has ceased to seem like a sacrament, like V. Solovyov or V. Rozanov (which sacraments can be discussed in the context of the program “About This”). Here, too, the bar is lowered to grounded profanity, to flat humor and all-pervasive and omnipresent, but impotent eroticism, for love is replaced by a simplified mechanized ritual of modular relationships in which it is not so much people who act as functions; since the functions are typical and temporary, then the partners are interchangeable, since they are tailored according to the standard patterns of impersonal mass people. The entire range of meanings - from cosmology to psychology - has been replaced by positioning. At the same time, the feminine principle itself is humiliated, the woman is increasingly transformed from a subject into an object of sexual interests, reduced to an object of consumption; in turn, the masculine principle is primitivized, and its image itself is reduced to several power functions. It is not without reason that in Western criticism of mass culture feminist motives for condemning the mass cult practice of stereotyping the image of a woman are clearly visible.


The replacement of human relationships with psychotechnological manipulations, a personality crisis, the phenomenon of spiritual and sensory insufficiency of a person, his atomization seem to be a dangerous symptom of the deformation of sociality.


In fact, culture is replaced by a set of social technologies, and the ongoing process essentially becomes a deeply cultureless process, because external civilization diverges further and further from the true meaning of culture as a phenomenon that is fundamentally social in nature and meaning and spiritual in content.


So, a powerful flow of scattered, chaotic, disorganized information literally clogs perception, depriving a person of the opportunity to normally think, compare, and analyze. The totality of information is constantly changing, transforming, composing, as in a kaleidoscope, now one pattern or another. This combined field draws a person into itself, envelops him, and instills in him the necessary ideas, ideas, and opinions. With modern informatization of society, writes G. Tarde, “one pen is enough to set millions of languages ​​in motion. Modern screen culture offers a person information - here and now. This, of course, contributes to the development of an idea of ​​the current, so to speak, moment, but a person, as it were, forgets how to keep a long-term perspective in mind and build it.


Almost the entire reality of the cultural life of modern mass society turns out to consist of myths of a socio-artistic nature. Indeed, the main plots of mass culture can more likely be attributed to social myths than to artistic reality. Myths act as a kind of simulators: political myths are simulators of political ideals, myths in art are simulators of life, which is presented not through artistic thinking, but through a system of conditional social schemes pumped up with commercial energy. Massivization corrodes all types of consciousness and all types of activities - from art to politics - calling into the arena of social life a special generation of amateurs by profession.


As R. Barthes believed, myth is always an alternative to reality, its “other.” And creating a new reality, which, as it were, bleeds the first one, the myth gradually replaces it. As a result, the existence of a real contradiction is not only not eliminated, but is reproduced in a different axiological context and accentuation and is psychologically justified.


A person begins to perceive real reality through a system of myths created by mass culture and the media, and already this system of myths seems to him a new value and true reality. The modern system of myths plays the role of an ideology adapted to modern mass thinking, which tries to convince people that the values ​​imposed on them are “more correct” than life, and the reflection of life is more valid, more truthful than life itself.


So, to summarize, we can say that the mentioned absence of vertical vectors of organization of sociocultural life, including the collapse of the former institution of the spiritual and cultural elite, the absence of a value hierarchy of being and its understanding of mania, clichéd perception according to evaluation standards imposed by the media, unification of the lifestyle in accordance with dominant social myths give rise to the process of homogenization of society, carried out everywhere, at all its levels, but by no means in the proper direction. Moreover, the process does not occur on the best grounds and on an undesirably wide scale.


CONCLUSION


Mass culture is a way of life of a mass society, generated by a market economy, industrial production, democratization and the development of mass communication technologies. It revealed previously unprecedented possibilities for realizing various needs and interests, and, at the same time, manipulating consciousness and behavior. Its exceptional integrity and effectiveness is ensured by the unification of social, economic, and interpersonal relations based on market demand and price. Factors that ensure the efficiency of production, broadcast and consumption of cultural artifacts come to the fore: social communication, opportunities for maximum replication and diversification. Bringing all values ​​to the common denominator of need (demand), mass culture has a number of negative consequences: value relativism and universal accessibility, cultivation of infantilism, consumerism and irresponsibility. Therefore, society needs mechanisms and institutions to protect against these negative consequences. This task, first of all, must be carried out by the education system, civil society institutions, and a full-fledged elite. Mass culture turns out to be not only a manifestation of destructive tendencies, but also a mechanism of protection against them. It creates a comfortable existence for the vast majority of members of society and ensures the stability of modern society. Thus, in the conditions of the virtual absence of the middle class and civil society, the consolidation of Russian society is carried out by mass culture and mass consciousness.
THE MAIN CONTENT OF THE CONCEPT OF “CULTURE” AND ITS PLACE IN THE SYSTEM OF HUMAN ACTIVITY

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

Federal state budget educational

institution of higher professional education

"Volgograd State Technical University"

Department of History, Culture and Sociology

Abstract on cultural studies

"Trends in the development of mass culture"

Completed:

student of group F-469

Senin I.P.

Teacher:

senior teacher Solovyova A.V.

_________________

Rating ___ b., __________

Volgograd 2012

1. Introduction………………………………………………………… ……..…...3
2. Historical conditions and stages of the formation of mass culture......4
3. Social functions of mass culture……………………...………..5
4. Negative influence of mass culture on society……...…………...6
5. Positive functions of mass culture…………………...……….7
6. Conclusion……………………………………………………..…………..8
7. Bibliography…………………...………………………. ..………….9

Introduction

Culture is the totality of industrial, social and spiritual achievements of people. Culture is a system of means of human activity, which is constantly being improved, and thanks to which human activity is stimulated and implemented. The concept of “culture” is very polysemantic, has different content and different meanings not only in everyday language, but also in different sciences and philosophical disciplines. It must be revealed in differential-dynamic aspects, which requires the use of the categories “social practice” and “activity”, connecting the categories “social being” and “social consciousness”, “objective” and “subjective” in the historical process.

If we recognize that one of the main signs of true culture is the heterogeneity and richness of its manifestations, based on national-ethnic and class-class differentiation, then in the 20th century it was not only Bolshevism that turned out to be the enemy of cultural “polyphony”. In the conditions of “industrial society” and scientific and technological revolution, humanity as a whole has discovered a clearly expressed tendency towards pattern and monotony to the detriment of any kind of originality and originality, whether we are talking about an individual or about certain social strata and groups.

The culture of modern society is a combination of the most diverse layers of culture, that is, it consists of the dominant culture, subcultures and even countercultures. In any society one can distinguish high culture (elite) and folk culture (folklore). The development of the media has led to the formation of the so-called mass culture, simplified in semantic and artistic terms, technologically accessible to everyone. Mass culture, especially with its strong commercialization, can displace both high and folk cultures. But in general, the attitude towards popular culture is not so clear.

The phenomenon of “mass culture” from the point of view of its role in the development of modern civilization is assessed by scientists far from unambiguously. A critical approach to “mass culture” boils down to its accusations of neglecting the classical heritage, of allegedly being an instrument of conscious manipulation of people; enslaves and unifies the main creator of any culture, the sovereign personality; contributes to her alienation from real life; distracts people from their main task - “the spiritual and practical development of the world” (K. Marx). The apologetic approach, on the contrary, is expressed in the fact that “mass culture” is proclaimed as a natural consequence of irreversible scientific and technological progress, that it contributes to the unity of people, especially young people, regardless of any ideologies and national-ethnic differences into a stable social system and not not only does it not reject the cultural heritage of the past, but also makes its best examples the property of the widest strata of the people by replicating them through print, radio, television and industrial reproduction. The debate about the harm or benefit of “mass culture” has a purely political aspect: both democrats and supporters of authoritarian power, not without reason, strive to use this objective and very important phenomenon of our time in their interests. During the Second World War and in the post-war period, the problems of "mass culture", especially its most important element - mass information, were studied with equal attention in both democratic and totalitarian states.

Historical conditions and stages of the formation of mass culture

The peculiarities of the production and consumption of cultural values ​​have allowed culturologists to identify two social forms of cultural existence: mass culture and elite culture. Mass culture is a type of cultural product that is produced in large volumes every day. It is assumed that mass culture is consumed by all people, regardless of place and country of residence. It is the culture of everyday life, presented to the widest audience through various channels, including the media and communications.

When and how did mass culture appear? There are a number of points of view regarding the origins of mass culture in cultural studies.

Let us give as an example the most frequently found in the scientific literature:

1. The prerequisites for mass culture have been formed since the birth of humanity, and, in any case, at the dawn of Christian civilization.

2. The origins of mass culture are associated with the appearance in European literature of the 1988th centuries of the adventure, detective, and adventurous novel, which significantly expanded the readership due to huge circulations. Here, as a rule, they cite as an example the work of two writers: the Englishman Daniel Defoe, author of the well-known novel “Robinson Crusoe” and 481 other biographies of people in so-called risky professions: investigators, military men, thieves, etc., and our compatriot Matvey Komarov .

3. The law on compulsory universal literacy adopted in Great Britain in 1870 had a great influence on the development of mass culture, which allowed many to master the main form of artistic creativity of the 19th century - the novel.

And yet, all of the above is the prehistory of mass culture. And in the proper sense, mass culture manifested itself for the first time in the United States. The famous American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski liked to repeat a phrase that became commonplace over time: “If Rome gave the world the right, England - parliamentary activity, France - culture and republican nationalism, then the modern USA gave the world a scientific and technological revolution and mass culture.”

The phenomenon of the emergence of mass culture is presented as follows. The turn of the 19th century was characterized by a comprehensive massification of life. It affected all its spheres: economics and politics, management and communication between people. The active role of the human masses in various social spheres was analyzed in a number of philosophical works of the 20th century.

X. Ortega y Gasset in his work “The Revolt of the Masses” derives the very concept of “mass” from the definition of “crowd”. A crowd, in quantitative and visual terms, is a multitude, and a multitude, from a sociological point of view, is a mass,” explains Ortega. And further he writes: “Society has always been a mobile unity of the minority and the masses. A minority is a set of persons who are specially singled out; the mass is a group of people who are not singled out in any way. The mass is the average person. Thus, a purely quantitative definition turns into a qualitative one.”

The book by the American sociologist, Columbia University professor D. Bell, “The End of Ideology,” in which the features of modern society are determined by the emergence of mass production and mass consumption, is very informative for analyzing our problem. Here the author formulates five meanings of the concept “mass”:

1. Mass - as an undifferentiated set (i.e., the opposite of the concept of class).

2. Mass - as a synonym for ignorance (as X. Ortega y Gasset also wrote about this).

3. The masses - as a mechanized society (i.e., a person is perceived as an appendage of technology).

4. The masses - as a bureaucratized society (i.e., in a mass society, the individual loses his individuality in favor of the herd). 5. The masses are like a crowd. There is a psychological meaning here. The crowd does not reason, but obeys passions. A person may be cultured by himself, but in a crowd he is a barbarian.

And D. Bell concludes: the masses are the embodiment of herdism, uniformity, and stereotypes.

An even more in-depth analysis of “mass culture” was made by the Canadian sociologist M. McLuhan. He, like D. Bell, comes to the conclusion that mass communications give rise to a new type of culture. McLuhan emphasizes that the starting point of the era of “industrial and typographical man” was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. McLuhan, defining art as the leading element of spiritual culture, emphasized the escapist (i.e., leading away from reality) function of artistic culture.

Of course, these days the mass has changed significantly. The masses have become educated and informed. In addition, the subjects of mass culture today are not just the masses, but also individuals united by various connections. In turn, the concept of “mass culture” characterizes the features of the production of cultural values ​​in modern industrial society, designed for mass consumption of this culture.

Social functions of mass culture

Socially, mass culture forms a new social stratum, called the “middle class”. The processes of its formation and functioning in the field of culture are most concretely described in the book of the French philosopher and sociologist E. Morin “The Zeitgeist”. The concept of “middle class” has become fundamental in Western culture and philosophy. This “middle class” also became the core of life in industrial society. He also made mass culture so popular.

Mass culture mythologizes human consciousness, mystifies real processes occurring in nature and in human society. There is a rejection of the rational principle in consciousness. The purpose of mass culture is not so much to fill leisure time and relieve tension and stress in a person of industrial and post-industrial society, but to stimulate consumer consciousness in the recipient (i.e., viewer, listener, reader), which in turn forms a special type - passive, uncritical person's perception of this culture. All this creates a personality that is quite easy to manipulate. In other words, the human psyche is manipulated and the emotions and instincts of the subconscious sphere of human feelings are exploited, and above all the feelings of loneliness, guilt, hostility, fear, and self-preservation.

The mass consciousness formed by mass culture is diverse in its manifestation. However, it is characterized by conservatism, inertia, and limitations. It cannot cover all processes in development, in all the complexity of their interaction. In the practice of mass culture, mass consciousness has specific means of expression. Mass culture is more focused not on realistic images, but on artificially created images (image) and stereotypes. In popular culture, the formula is the main thing.

Mass culture in artistic creativity performs specific social functions. Among them, the main one is illusory-compensatory: introducing a person to the world of illusory experience and unrealistic dreams. And all this is combined with open or hidden propaganda of the dominant way of life, which has its ultimate goal of distracting the masses from social activity, adapting people to existing conditions, and conformism.

Hence the use in popular culture of such genres of art as detective, melodrama, musicals, and comics.

The negative impact of mass culture on society

The culture of modern society is a combination of the most diverse layers of culture, that is, it consists of the dominant culture, subcultures and even countercultures.

34% of Russians believe that mass culture has a negative impact on society and undermines its moral and moral health. The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) came to this result as a result of a study conducted in 2003. survey.

The positive influence of mass culture on society was stated by 29% of Russians surveyed, who believe that mass culture helps people relax and have fun. 24% of respondents believe the role of show business and mass culture is greatly exaggerated and are convinced that they do not have a serious impact on society.

80% of respondents are extremely negative towards the use of profanity in public speeches of show business stars, considering the use of obscene expressions an unacceptable manifestation of promiscuity and lack of talent.

13% of respondents allow the use of profanity in cases where it is used as a necessary artistic means, and 3% believe that if it is often used in communication between people, then attempts to ban it on the stage, in cinema, on television are simply hypocrisy .

A negative attitude towards the use of profanity is also reflected in Russians’ assessments of the situation surrounding the conflict between journalist Irina Aroyan and Philip Kirkorov. 47% of respondents sided with Irina Aroyan, while only 6% supported the pop star. 39% of respondents showed no interest in this process at all.

at the same time, it is necessary to take into account that in KHUL-XIX centuries. none of the designated social subcultures or their mechanical sum (on the scale of one ethnic group or state) can be called the national culture of the state. At that time, there were no unified national standards of social adequacy and mechanisms for individual socialization unified for the entire culture. All this arises only in modern times in connection with the processes of industrialization and urbanization, the formation of capitalism in its classical, post-classical and even alternative (socialist) forms, the transformation of class societies into national ones and the erosion of class barriers separating people, the spread of universal literacy of the population, the degradation of many forms of traditional everyday culture of the pre-industrial type, the development of technical means of reproducing and broadcasting information, the liberalization of the way of life of society, the growing dependence of political elites on the state of public opinion, and the production of mass consumption products on the stability of consumer demand regulated by fashion, advertising, etc.

Under these conditions, the tasks of standardizing sociocultural attitudes, interests and needs of the bulk of the population, intensifying the processes of manipulating the human personality, its social aspirations, political behavior, ideological orientations, consumer demand for goods, services, ideas, one’s own image, etc., have become equally relevant. P. In previous eras, the monopoly on such control of consciousness on a more or less mass scale belonged to the church and political authorities. In modern times, private producers of information, consumer goods and services also entered into competition for people’s consciousness. All this has led to the need to change the mechanisms of general socialization and inculturation of a person, which prepare the individual for the free realization of not only his productive labor, but also his sociocultural interests.

If in traditional communities the problems of general socialization of the individual were solved primarily by means of personal transmission of knowledge, norms and patterns of consciousness and behavior (activity) from parents to children, from a teacher (master) to a student, from a priest to a neighbor, etc. (and in the content of the transmitted social experience, a special place belonged to the personal life experience of the educator and his personal sociocultural orientation and preferences), then at the stage of formation of national cultures, such mechanisms of social and cultural reproduction of the individual begin to lose their effectiveness. There is a need for greater universalization of the transmitted experience, value orientations, patterns of consciousness and behavior; the formation of national norms and standards of social and cultural adequacy of a person, the initiation of his interest and demand for standardized forms of social benefits; increasing the efficiency of the mechanisms of social regulation due to a unifying effect on the motivation of human behavior, social claims, images of prestige, etc. This, in turn, necessitated the creation of a channel for transmitting knowledge, concepts, sociocultural norms and other socially significant information to the broad masses of the population, a channel , covers the entire nation, and not just its individual educated strata. The first steps in this direction were the introduction of universal and compulsory primary and later secondary education, and then the development of the mass media, democratic political procedures covering ever larger masses of people, and In.1 The formation of a national culture does not negate its distribution to the social subcultures described above. National culture complements the system of social subcultures, turning into a unifying superstructure over them, which reduces the severity of social and value tension between different groups of people, and determines the universal standards of some sociocultural characteristics of the nation. Of course, even before the creation of nations, there were the same unifying features of ethnic culture for various states, primarily language, religion, folklore, some household rituals, elements of clothing, household items, etc. At the same time, ethnographic cultural features are inferior to national culture primarily in terms of universality (due to overwhelming non-institutionalization). The forms of ethnic culture are very flexible and variable in the practice of different population groups. Often even the language and religion of the aristocracy and the plebs of that same ethnic group are far from identical. National culture sets fundamentally identical benchmarks and standards, which are introduced by publicly accessible specialized cultural institutions: general education, the press, political organizations, mass forms of artistic culture, etc. For example, certain forms of fiction exist among all peoples who have a written language, but to historical transformation ethnic group into a nation, he does not face the problem of forming a national literary language from the language of one that exists in different regions in the form of local dialects. One of the essential characteristics of national culture is that, unlike ethnic culture, which is predominantly memorial, it reproduces the historical tradition of the collective forms of life of the people, national culture is primarily prognostic. It produces goals rather than results of development, knowledge, norms, composition and content of modernization orientation, filled with the pathos of intensification of all aspects of social life.

However, the main difficulty in the dissemination of national culture is that modern knowledge, norms, cultural patterns and content are produced almost exclusively in the bowels of highly specialized branches of social practice. They are more or less successfully understood and assimilated by relevant specialists; For the bulk of the population, the language of modern specialized culture (political, scientific, artistic, engineering, etc.) is almost inaccessible to understanding. Society needs a system of means for adapting the content, “translating” the transmitted information from the language of highly specialized areas of culture to the level of everyday understanding of unprepared people, means for “interpreting” this information to the mass consumer, a certain “infantilization” of its figurative incarnations, as well as “managing” the consciousness of the mass consumer in the interests of the manufacturer of this information, offered goods, services, etc.

Such adaptation has always been required for children when, in the processes of upbringing and general education, “adult” content was translated into the language of fairy tales, parables, entertaining stories, simplified examples, etc., more accessible to children’s consciousness. Now such interpretive practice has become necessary for a person throughout his life. A modern person, even a very educated one, remains a narrow specialist, and the level of her specialization (at least in the elite and bourgeois subcultures) is increasing from century to century. In other areas, she needs a permanent “staff” of commentators, interpreters, teachers, journalists, advertising agents and other “guides”, whose task is to guide her through the boundless sea of ​​information about goods, services, political events, artistic innovations, social conflicts, economic problems etc. It cannot be argued that modern man has become less intelligent or more infantile than her ancestors. It’s just that his psyche obviously cannot process such an amount of information, conduct such a multifactorial analysis of so many simultaneously arising problems, use his social experience with the necessary efficiency, etc. Let’s not forget that the speed of information processing in computers is many times greater than the capabilities of the human brain .

This situation requires the introduction of new methods of intelligent search, scanning, selection and systematization of information, “pressing” IT into large blocks, the development of new technologies for forecasting and decision-making, as well as the mental preparation of people to work with such voluminous information flows. After the current “information revolution”, that is, an increase in the efficiency of transmitting and processing information, as well as making management decisions with the help of computers, humanity is likely to expect a “prediction revolution” - a sudden increase in the efficiency of forecasting, calculating probable, factor analysis, etc. , however, we will not predict with the help of what technical means (or methods of artificial stimulation of brain activity) this can happen.

In the meantime, people need a way that would neutralize excess mental stress from information flows, turn complex intellectual problems into primitive dual oppositions ("good - bad", "ours - strangers", etc.), and also provide an opportunity to "take a break" from social responsibility, personal choice, dissolved him in the crowd of soap opera viewers or mechanical consumers of advertised goods, ideas, slogans, etc.

Mass culture became the implementer of such needs. It cannot be said that it completely frees a person from personal responsibility; rather, it is precisely about removing the problem of independent choice. The structure of existence (at least that part of it that directly concerns the individual) is given to a person as a set of more or less standard situations, where everything is already planned by those same “guides” - journalists, advertising agents, public politicians, show business stars, etc. In popular culture, everything is already known in advance: the “correct” political system, the only true doctrine, leaders, sports and pop stars, the fashion for the image of a “class fighter” or “sexual symbol,” movies where “ours” are always right and certainly win , etc.