Mar
25
Pop Culture as Mass Culture
Posted by: Brian | March 25, 2009 | Comments Off on Pop Culture as Mass Culture
The first article regarding popular culture as mass culture is “The Fateful Final” about the world cup final between Brazil and Uruguay in 1950 in which Uruguay beats Brazil in the final 12 minutes of the game. Football in Brazil is a major/mass pastime that acts almost as a national religion. When I was younger I played soccer for 13 years and my team won the BC provincials one year. Throughout this article I could really imagine this fate full game and the emotions that came with it. To some extent at least I can identify with the change in mentality that you have when playing as well as when you’re watching a game from the sidelines. The strong connections between team players and their desire to win can bring everyone into the present, forgetting past and future and simply being in the now. This is an amazing power of sports, and extremely difficult to do when you are in your daily life. Anyways, I guess I can say that if you have never played in team sports and the amount of emotion and intensity that is written about in this article might seem weird and excessive (which it very well might be). But there is something to be said for experiencing the act of being in team sports or even just watching. I feel like it does bring people together creating a sense of community whether that is in a small town and a group of children, or on the national level. I guess what the author of this article exemplifies how nations as big as Brazil can come together as an imagined community, all intimately connected. In the article I became aware of the extent of the emotions that were on high at the Maracana. The emotions could be defined as almost scary or fanatical with a sort of mob mentality that I would probably want to stay away from. However I did think it was interesting to learn that only one person got knocked over when leaving the Maracana after the game and that violence was minimal.
In the second article, “Big Snakes on the Streets and Never Ending Stories” we learn of Venezuelan Telenovelas, another form of popular culture as mass culture.
The telenovela is popular all around Latin America and “is the main source of support for several television channels in Latin America”. We learn about novellas on the radio in the 1900s and their influence on telenovelas of today. You can go back farther and trace the telenovela to “popular forms, beginning with the folletin, or newspaper serioal, itself transitiona…”(pg67) It continues to evolve as a genre, acquiring different nuances in different countries. Most of them however are organized and produced in a similar way… “a story in which a man and a woman fall madly in love, but before they can live happily ever after, they have to overcome a series of obstacles.”(pg69)
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