Theories of popular culture From Hegemony to Semiotics

Abstract

Theories concerning the hegemony of mass culture and the cultural industry as the product of infantile regression and standardization identify popular culture with mass culture and assign to it a negative meaning. However, the appearance of semiotics has enabled a neutral conceptualization of popular culture in the sense of the contents which are being disseminated through the mass media. Insisting on its explanation that objects of culture mean different things to different social groups, the semiotic approach modifies the concept of hegemony as it has been conceived within the critiques of mass culture and enables an analysis of the products of popular culture in relation to people and events in the same manner that objects relate to their content.