Concept
fear of mass culture
The worry that culture, shaped by numbers and the average, will become shallow, that elite standards will collapse, or that the masses will be distracted and numbed.
The fear of mass culture is the worry that culture will grow shallow because it is shaped by quantity and the average. According to Kornhauser, in mass society the measure of success is numbers: votes in politics, sales in the economy, audience size in culture. In the aristocratic strand this is the fear that elite standards will collapse: Ortega writes that whoever is not like everybody is crushed, and that the mass is a mentality that tries to impose its own opinion without appeal to any standard.
In the left variant the fear looks the other way: according to Hamilton, in this version the rulers control the media, making news ideological, entertainment diverting and advertising a maker of artificial needs; the audience is “narcotised”. The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology says that the Frankfurt School and Marcuse concentrated on the narrowly ideological nature of “mass culture”.
Kornhauser also notes that this “mass equalitarianism” stresses the similarities of individuals rather than the uniqueness of persons.
This lesson looks only at the root of the mass-culture debate; for the details see the lesson The Mass Culture and Popular Culture Debates.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) When someone says ‘so many people watch that series, so it must be good’, the measure of success has become numbers; that is what the theory fears.