1 Introduction: The Real World

In May 1992, MTV changed the way we think about popular culture with the phrase, “When people stop being polite and start getting real.”^[1] The first season declared itself as a “true story,” and at times it felt like the kind of on-going saga we experience in our everyday lives when we live with roommates. This is what it means to be “real.” But what is real or reality when we discuss popular culture?

The “real world” is also a phrase people use to scare college students—“in the real world, you will have to…”—as if existence in colleges and universities somehow ceases being real. Of course, we all live in the real world, and the rules in college are usually more stringent than the “working world.” It is specifically this real/fake binary that allows people to separate popular culture from the reality of their everyday lives. A binary is a choice or condition that involves only two options. Binaries shrink our world into false dichotomies that eliminate shades of gray. In this binary, what separates the real from the fake? What is real or reality? Viewed from this perspective, college isn’t a “fake” world, so it must be real.

The namesake of this book, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, is a reality TV show aimed at showing the real-life existence of the Kardashian-Jenner family. However, many of the moments have been demonstrated to be entirely scripted,^[2] and Rob Kardashian is written out of most episodes. Real or not, the show allows the Kardashian-Jenner clan to be ubiquitous in our everyday lives. The show provides opportunities for people to discuss and judge situations the family face.

The fact is popular culture is far more real for the lives of people than the consecrated culture found in museums, theaters, and concert halls. Popular culture is consequential because it holds so much meaning for the people who consume it. While people may not die recording Squid Game, it illustrates the horrors of 21^st century capitalism. We may never know what it is like to be Taylor Swift, but we can all comment on her love life. #MeToo showed us not only how terrible famous men such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey are, but also helped to open a broader look at sexual assault, sexual misconduct, and sexual harassment throughout society.

Popular culture allows us to make sense of the world around us.

Culture

At its core, popular culture is everyday culture. But “popular” gets thrown in because the term culture has so many different definitions and so much baggage associated with it. “Popular” helps distinguish a specific type of culture from these other terms. Before we get to the “popular” part, I want to establish the context of culture apart from what lends confusion to the term.

Culture is the process through which people make symbolic meaning out of everyday things.^[3] We make meaning through a shared understanding of signs. These signs can be words, symbols, or objects. We interpret these signs within a social context. Signs come to possess meaning only because we exist within communities at a specific historical moment.

In one sense of the term culture, these communities are cultures. These communities as cultures are what Anthropologists study. In other words, a culture. This is where you often hear people talk about my culture or their culture. Culture, in this sense, has tight boundaries around a specific group of people. Within this context, cultures have specific norms and may be part of one ethnic group. Anthropologists would go study the culture of a group of people.

But even the anthropological concept of culture became a problem in the 1970s. Clifford Geertz saw the role of the anthropologist as not just identifying the symbolic aspects of objects, but of every form of communication among a group as well.^[4] Geertz developed a way to describe these symbolic acts as “thick description.” Thick description involves looking closely at every cultural symbol and describing them. However, in this description, Geertz also thought it was important for anthropologists not to project absolute meaning onto these symbols. In fact, understanding culture is a series of interpretations of interpretations. Furthermore, people making a symbolic gesture are rarely asked to interpret their own action and even their interpretation is context specific. If everyone’s interpretation varies depending on context, then culture must be a process.

One symbolic meaning Geertz emphasizes is a wink. He says a wink could be an act of conspiracy, flirting, greeting, imitating someone else, mocking someone else’s wink, practice, or an involuntary motion. Here, an episode of Seinfeld (Season 7 Episode 4) illustrates this when George Costanza gets grapefruit juice in his eye. (See Box 1)

Since this book’s definition of culture emphasizes process, it is important to think about the way culture changes. Through our interactions with other people, our understanding of a given symbol can change over time and in specific contexts. The communities themselves remain fluid. As a member of one community, I may see something one way, but as a member of a parallel community, I can shift my perspective to understand the sign in a different way. We have no direct control over the changing meanings of symbols. Culture is not static, and as we interact with others, meanings change.

Furthermore, as literary theorist Raymond Williams states: “Culture is ordinary.”^[5] We do not need to go to a special place (museum, concert hall, theater, etc.) to experience culture. Culture is everywhere. This declaration that culture is ordinary distinguishes it from the notion of “high” culture in which classical conception of culture is that it must be learned. Thinking about culture as learned means that only the wealthy have access to it—to be cultured. People need a special education to appreciate opera or abstract art. But if culture is ordinary, it is part of our everyday lives. In the role that different cultural objects play in our lives, no difference exists between orchestral music and someone singing at a bar, Vincent van Gogh and graffiti art, or Shakespeare and MrBeast. It may seem that the first term in each pairing in the previous sentence is qualitatively better than the second term, but this is a social judgment imbued with race, class, gender, religious, and ethnic inflections. And only time will tell if MrBeast becomes as canonical as William Shakespeare, both creators produce boisterous comedy of their respective time. The point is that these cultural artifacts help us to make meaning out of the world around us, and everyone has access to it.

This distinction runs counter to Williams’ own experience with culture. Williams describes how he grew up the descendant of farmers whose dad left the farm to go work in a factory.^[6] He grew up decidedly working class, but due to some good fortune, Williams attended Cambridge University. It was in the teashop at Cambridge where Williams ran into antagonisms about culture. For his peers at the teashop, culture meant to be cultivated – i.e., learned in the ways of culture.

In this sense, I had a similar experience attending college. I went to Virginia Tech, a land-grant university in Blacksburg, Virginia with a heavy historical emphasis on educating farmers. Our chief rival was the University of Virginia (UVA), the university founded, designed, and built by Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Virginia. On my 21^st birthday, I travelled to Charlottesville to see Virginia Tech play UVA in football. At the game, UVA students held signs that read, “Culture vs. Agriculture.” The implication was UVA cultures students, Virginia Tech teaches students to be farmers. As a political science major with no background in anything to do with farming, it struck me as odd, but the rhetorical cruelty was on full display. Both the bourgeois and farmers (and everyone in between) have culture!

In the high culture/low culture binary, high culture points to the culture of the wealthy upper-class (bourgeois), while low culture is the culture of the poor masses. The elevation of high culture as important culture reinforces economic inequality. High culture requires an education to understand and money to attend. These include things like opera, orchestral music, art at museums. Low culture is everywhere and doesn’t require a special education to understand. To experience low culture, it may be a person playing guitar and singing on the street, a movie in a theater, or a graphic on a commercial product. This distinction reinforces a class preference for the culture of the wealthy.

A further distinction frequently used is highbrow/lowbrow. This is a vestige of the pseudoscience known as phrenology that measured someone’s intelligence by the size of their forehead. People with low eyebrows were thought to be less intelligent and prone to criminality, while people with high eyebrows were thought to be smarter and more refined in the arts. This translated to physical differences between people of African descent and European descent, respectively. As a result, music like jazz and rock were coded as lowbrow (and low culture), while music such as baroque became coded as highbrow (and high culture). When people makes these distinctions, they embed them in racist notions about culture.

Instead of a high/low distinction, other people discuss popular culture. Popular culture means it is for the people—easily accessible, cheap, and doesn’t require a special education. There are five senses of the term popular: well-liked, mass culture, folk culture, media events and ubiquitous. When we think of popular culture as well-liked, it is a quantitative approach—a streamer with 10 million subscribers, a song with one billion listens, or the top-selling movie on any given weekend. Mass culture is popular culture produced through industrial processes for large numbers of consumers. Folk culture is created by the people. Media events are big popular culture moments that only work through television. Ubiquitous means that a piece of popular culture is everywhere.

Our focus here is on popular as accessible to everyone. A popular song doesn’t have to be in the top 20 nor does a movie have to be a blockbuster success at the box office. Instead, popular music could be better determined by genre (Hip-Hop, Punk, R&B, Rock, etc.), most movies available at a theater would be popular culture, and visual art in comics or on t-shirts.

Some cultural theorists popularized the concept of the circuit of culture.^[7] The idea is that there is a constant relationship between cultural consumption, production, representation, identity, and regulation. These unique sites of culture happen together without us thinking much about them. When a television writer works on a script, their identity influences how they construct representations and how they perceive audiences will consume their product. At the same time, the available technologies, dominant media, and policies change what the writer will produce.

For instance, a television producer may want to produce a show in 4k Ultra HD. However, they come to find out that most of their audience members continue to use regular HD. As a result, they shoot the show in regular HD. After a few years, imagine that there is a huge move to 4k Ultra HD, but the show cannot be reshot. On the one hand, the technology of what people use to consume the television show affects the way that the show exists in the world. On the other hand, the decisions about the technology to use reflects underlying social conditions.

By way of another example, a trans scriptwriter wants to show positive images of transpeople in the 1980s and creates a transwoman character in a show. The casting director hires a cisgender woman (someone who was assigned female at birth and who identifies as a woman) as the transwoman character because they fear the show won’t air with a transwoman playing the role. At the time, this is viewed as socially progressive. However, in 2025 the show would be considered cringe with a cisgender woman playing a transwoman in a television show. Here all aspects of the circuit of culture influence the meaning of the show in different circumstances.

Since the emphasis in this book is that culture is a process, we must take the interaction between elements of the circuit of culture into consideration to think about what a text means. Culture is not static: it is always changing; it is interpretative; it is contextual.

Cultural Studies

In this book, I use a “cultural studies” approach to the popular culture. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that looks at the role of culture in society. Scholars who do cultural studies think that culture can be studied the same way we study texts—i.e., culture is a text. If culture is the process through which we make symbolic meaning out of everyday things, then by extension, these processes can be read as a text. Whether that is the meaning of punk haircuts (i.e., mohawks) or the way media ownership impacts messages, cultural studies uses interpretive research methods to understand culture.

Cultural studies began in England. Many people point to the work of Raymond Williams to understand culture as the emergence of the field of study. Williams’ prominent article “Culture is Ordinary” disrupted typical notions of culture.^[8] As he discussed his experience at Cambridge University as a first-generation college student from a working-class family, he was bothered by notions of culture. His position as an outsider to the consecrated culture of high society showed him the way culture was used as a tool of oppression. Not understanding the world of the Cambridge teashop meant exclusion for those who didn’t grow up exposed to high culture. Of course, since culture is a process, the norms and codes of the teashop could be learned by those exposed to it.

The work of Williams influenced a group of scholars at the University of Birmingham. Birmingham, England was an industrial city with a working-class reputation similar to Detroit, Michigan in the United States. They founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham; a group of scholars regularly called the Birmingham School. Stuart Hall was the long-term director and intellectual leader of the Birmingham School. His work looked at the construction, dissemination, and reception/interpretation of meaning in culture.

A major theme of the research in cultural studies is subcultural analysis, which emphasizes the ways that subcultures use “commodities as signifiers in an active process of constructing ‘oppositional’ identities.”^[9] The study of subculture emerged from the study of youth. Following World War II, a new category called youth culture emerged. After the war, the baby boomers were born and developed their own recognizable culture that embodied the Rock & Roll ethic with multiple groups emerging at the time. The Birmingham School took these groups seriously and scholars such as Dick Hebdige^[10] and Paul Willis^[11] developed ways to read their culture. One collection by the Birmingham School, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, included analyses of girls in subcultures, Rastafari, skinheads, class, and more.^[12]

As cultural studies grew, it began to be used as the primary tool to understand popular culture. To take popular culture seriously. And to recognize that any practice that creates meaning is worthy of scholarly study.

The Book

This book demonstrates to students the overall importance of popular culture in our lives. It explores the ways that language is used (and the way that we use language) to construct the world around us through popular culture. While the book discusses popular media texts, it uses a scholarly approach to popular culture in the critical theoretical tradition to understand the uses and abuses of popular culture. The book examines how ideas, values, and beliefs, are constructed through and are reflected by popular culture.

Bibliography

Gay, Paul du, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh McKay, and Keith Negus. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2013

Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30. New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 1973.

Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, eds. Representation. 2nd ed. London: Sage: The Open University, 2013.

Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture, the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.

Roy, Ujjainee. “13 Most Obviously Scripted Moments On Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” ScreenRant, April 30, 2020. https://screenrant.com/keeping-up-with-kardashians-obviously-scripted-moments/.

The Real World. Drama, Reality-TV. Bunim-Murray Productions (BMP), MTV Studios, MTV Studios, 1992.

Williams, Raymond. “‘Culture Is Ordinary’ (1958).” In Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, 3–14. Verso Books, 1989.

Willis, Paul E. Learning to Labor : How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Vol. Morningside. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.