Prerequisites for the emergence of mass culture. The causes of the emergence of mass culture, its essence and nature

Mass culture V modern society plays an important role. On the one hand, it facilitates and on the other, it simplifies the understanding of their elements. This is a contradictory and complex phenomenon, despite the characteristic simplicity that mass culture products possess.

Mass culture: history of origin

Historians have not found a common point on which their opinions could agree on the exact time of the occurrence of this phenomenon. However, there are the most popular provisions that are able to explain the approximate period of the emergence of this type of culture.

A. Radugin believes that the prerequisites for mass culture existed, if not at the dawn of the emergence of mankind, then certainly at the time when the book “The Bible for the Poor” was massively distributed, which was designed for a wide audience.
Another provision implies a later emergence of mass culture, where its origins are connected with European. At this time, detective, adventure and adventure novels became widespread due to their large circulation.
IN literally, according to A. Radugin, it originated in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He explains this by the occurrence new form arrangement of life - massovization, which was reflected in almost all areas: from political and economic to everyday life.

Based on this, it can be assumed that the impetus for the emergence of mass culture was the capitalist view and mass production, which was supposed to be implemented on the same scale. In this regard, the phenomenon of stereotyping has become widespread. Sameness and stereotypedness are the bright main characteristics of mass culture, which spread not only to household items, but also to views.

Mass culture is closely connected with the process of globalization, which is carried out mainly through the media. This is especially evident in present stage. One of clear examples- yoga. Yogic practices arose in antiquity, and Western countries had nothing to do with it. However, with the development of communication, an international exchange of experience began to take place, and yoga was accepted by Western people, starting to take root in their culture. This has negative characteristics because the Westerner is not able to understand the full depth and meaning that the Indians understand by doing yoga. Thus, a simplified understanding of a foreign culture takes place, and phenomena that require deep understanding are simplified, losing their value.

Mass culture: signs and main characteristics

It implies a superficial understanding that does not require specific knowledge and is therefore accessible to most.
Stereotyping is the main feature of the perception of the products of this culture.
Its elements are based on emotional unconscious perception.
It operates with average linguistic semiotic norms.
It has an entertaining focus and manifests itself, to a greater extent in an entertaining form.

Modern mass culture: "pros" and "cons"

IN currently it has a number of disadvantages and positive features.

For example, this one allows you to closely interact large group members of society, which improves the quality of their communication.

Stereotypes generated by mass culture, if they are based on a true classification, help a person to perceive a large flow of information.

Among the shortcomings, the simplification of cultural elements, the profanation of foreign cultures and the tendency to remakes (alteration of once created and recognized elements of art into new way). The latter leads to the assumption that mass culture is not able to create something new, or is capable, but in small quantities.

Features of production and consumption cultural property allowed culturologists to single out two social forms of existence of culture: mass culture and elite culture. Mass culture is a type of cultural production that is produced daily in large volumes. It is assumed that mass culture is consumed by all people, regardless of place and country of residence. It's a culture Everyday life, presented by wide audience through various channels, including the media and communications.

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

Let us give as an example, the most common in the scientific literature:

1. The prerequisites for mass culture are formed from the moment of the birth of mankind, and, in any case, at the dawn of Christian civilization.
2. The origins of mass culture are associated with the appearance in the European Literature XVII-XVIII centuries of adventure, detective, adventure novel, which significantly expanded the audience of readers due to huge circulations. Here, as a rule, the work of two writers is cited as an example: the Englishman Daniel Defoe, the author of widely famous novel“Robinson Crusoe” and 481 more biographies of people in the so-called risky professions: investigators, military men, thieves, etc. and our compatriot Matvey Komarov.
3. The law on compulsory universal literacy adopted in 1870 in Great Britain had a great influence on the development of mass culture, which allowed many to master main view artistic creativity 19th century 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 phenomenon of the emergence of mass culture is presented as follows. At the turn of the 19th century, a comprehensive massification of life became characteristic. It affected all its spheres: economics and politics, management and communication of people. The active role of the 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”. The crowd in quantitative and visual terms is the multitude, and the multitude from the point of view of sociology is the mass, explains Ortega. And further he writes: “Society has always been a mobile unity of the minority and the masses. The minority is a collection of persons singled out especially, the mass - not singled out in any way. Mass is average person. Thus, a purely quantitative definition turns into a qualitative one”

An even deeper analysis of "mass culture" was made by the Canadian sociologist M. McLuhan. He, like D. Bell, comes to the conclusion that the means mass communication generate and new type 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 (that is, leading away from reality) function artistic culture.

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

In contact with

Classmates

The concepts of mass and elite culture define two types of culture of modern society, which are associated with the peculiarities of the way culture exists in society: the methods of its production, reproduction and distribution in society, the position that culture occupies in the social structure of society, the attitude of culture and its creators to everyday life. people's lives and socio-political problems of society. Elite culture arises before mass culture, but in modern society they coexist and are in complex interaction.

Mass culture

Concept definition

In modern scientific literature there are various definitions of mass culture. In some, mass culture is associated with the development of new communication and reproductive systems in the 20th century (mass press and book publishing, audio and video recording, radio and television, xerography, telex and telefax, satellite communications, computer technology) and the global information exchange that arose due to the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution. Other definitions of mass culture emphasize its connection with the development of a new type social structure industrial and fast industrial society, which led to the creation of a new way of organizing the production and transmission of culture. The second understanding of mass culture is more complete and comprehensive, because it not only includes the changed technical and technological basis of cultural creativity, but also considers the socio-historical context and trends in the transformation of the culture of modern society.

mass culture This is a type of product that is produced daily in large volumes. This is a set of cultural phenomena of the 20th century and features of the production of cultural values in a modern industrial society, designed for mass consumption. In other words, this is a production line production through various channels, including the media and communications.

It is assumed that mass culture is consumed by all people, regardless of place and country of residence. This is the culture of everyday life, presented on the widest channels, including TV.

The emergence of popular culture

Relatively prerequisites for the emergence of mass culture there are several points of view:

Mass culture originated at the dawn of Christian civilization. As an example, simplified versions of the Bible (for children, for the poor), designed for a mass audience, are called.
IN XVII-XVIII centuries in Western Europe, a genre of adventure, adventure novel appears, which significantly expanded the audience of readers due to huge circulations. (Example: Daniel Defoe - the novel "Robinson Crusoe" and another 481 biographies of people in risky professions: investigators, military, thieves, prostitutes, etc.).
In 1870, a law on universal literacy was passed in Great Britain, which allowed many to master the main form of artistic creativity of the 19th century - the novel. But this is only the prehistory of mass culture. In its proper sense, mass culture manifested itself for the first time in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The emergence of mass culture is associated with the massization of life at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At this time, the role of the human masses in various areas of life increased: economics, politics, management and communication between people. Ortega y Gasset defines the concept of masses as follows:

The mass is the crowd. The crowd in quantitative and visual terms is the set, and the set from the point of view of sociology is the mass. The mass is the average person. Society has always been a mobile unity of the minority and the masses. The minority is a collection of persons singled out especially, the mass - not singled out in any way. Ortega sees the reason for the advancement of the masses to the forefront of history in the low quality of culture, when a person of this culture "does not differ from the rest and repeats the general type."

Among the prerequisites of mass culture can also be attributed the emergence of a system of mass communications during the formation of a bourgeois society(press, mass book publishing, then radio, television, cinema) and the development of transport, which made it possible to reduce the space and time required for the transmission and dissemination of cultural values in society. Culture emerges from local, local existence and begins to function on the scale of the nation state (a national culture arises that overcomes ethnic restrictions), and then enters the system of interethnic communication.

Among the prerequisites for mass culture should also be the creation within the framework of bourgeois society of a special structure of institutions for the production and dissemination of cultural values:

The emergence of public educational institutions ( comprehensive schools, vocational school, higher educational institutions);
Creation of institutions producing scientific knowledge;
The emergence of professional art (academies visual arts, theater, opera, ballet, conservatory, literary magazines, publishing houses and associations, exhibitions, public museums, exhibition galleries, libraries), which also included the emergence of the institution of art criticism as a means of popularizing and developing his works.

Features and significance of mass culture

Mass culture in the most concentrated form is manifested in artistic culture, as well as in the field of leisure, communication, management and economics. The term "mass culture" was first introduced by the German professor M. Horkheimer in 1941 and the American scientist D. McDonald in 1944. The meaning of this term is rather contradictory. On the one hand, popular culture "culture for all", on the other hand, this "not quite culture". The definition of mass culture emphasizes widespreadwoundedness and general accessibility of spiritual values, as well as the ease of their assimilation, which does not require a special developed taste and perception.

The existence of mass culture is based on the activities of the media, the so-called technical arts (film, television, video). Mass culture exists not only in democratic social systems, but also in totalitarian regimes, where everyone is a "cog" and everyone is equalized.

At present, some researchers are abandoning the view of "mass culture" as an area of "bad taste" and do not consider it anti-cultural. Many people realize that mass culture has not only negative traits. It influences:

the ability of people to adapt to the conditions of a market economy;
adequately respond to sudden situational social changes.

Besides, popular culture is capable:

compensate for the lack of personal communication and dissatisfaction with life;
increase the involvement of the population in political events;
raise psychological stability population in difficult social situations;
make the achievements of science and technology accessible to many.

It should be recognized that mass culture is an objective indicator of the state of society, its delusions, typical forms of behavior, cultural stereotypes and real value system.

In the field of artistic culture, she calls on a person not to rebel against public system, but to fit into it, to find and take their place in an industrial society of a market type.

TO the negative effects of mass culture refers to its ability to mythologize human consciousness, to mystify the real processes occurring in nature and society. There is a rejection of the rational principle in consciousness.

Were once beautiful poetic images. They spoke about the richness of the imagination of people who could not yet correctly understand and explain the action of the forces of nature. Nowadays myths serve the poverty of thinking.

On the one hand, one might think that the purpose of mass culture is to relieve tension and stress from a person in an industrial society - after all, it is entertaining. But in fact, this culture does not so much fill leisure as it stimulates the consumer consciousness of the viewer, listener, reader. There is a type of passive, uncritical perception of this culture in humans. And if so, a personality is created, whose consciousness easy manipulate, whose emotions are easy to direct to the desiredside.

In other words, mass culture exploits the instincts of the subconscious sphere of human feelings and, above all, feelings of loneliness, guilt, hostility, fear, self-preservation.

In the practice of mass culture mass consciousness has a specific means of expression. Mass culture is more focused not on realistic images, but on artificially created images - images and stereotypes.

Popular culture creates a hero formula, repetitive image, stereotype. This situation creates idolatry. An artificial "Olympus" is created, the gods are "stars" and a crowd of fanatical admirers and admirers arises. In this regard, mass artistic culture successfully embodies the most desirable human myth - the myth of a happy world. At the same time, she does not call her listener, viewer, reader to build such a world - her task is to offer a person a refuge from reality.

The origins of the widespread dissemination of mass culture in modern world lie in the commercial nature of all public relations. The concept of "product" defines all the diversity social relations in society.

Spiritual activity: cinema, books, music, etc., in connection with the development of mass media, become a commodity in the conditions of conveyor production. The commercial setting is transferred to the sphere of artistic culture. And this determines the entertaining nature of works of art. It is necessary that the video pays off, the money spent on the production of the film, gave a profit.

Mass culture forms a social stratum in society, called " middle class» . This class has become the core of the life of industrial society. For modern representative"middle class" is characterized by:

Striving for Success. Achievement and success are the values that culture in such a society is guided by. It is no coincidence that stories are so popular in it, how someone escaped from the poor to the rich, from a poor immigrant family to a highly paid "star" of mass culture.
Second distinguishing feature"middle class" person possession of private property . Prestigious car, a castle in England, a house on Cote d'Azur, apartments in Monaco ... As a result, relations between people are replaced by relations of capital, income, that is, they are impersonal and formal. A person must be in constant tension, survive in conditions of fierce competition. And the strongest survive, that is, those who succeed in the pursuit of profit.
The third value inherent in a person of the "middle class" is individualism . This is the recognition of the rights of the individual, his freedom and independence from society and the state. The energy of a free individual is channeled into the sphere of economic and political activity. This contributes to the accelerated development of productive forces. Equality is possible stay, competition, personal success - on the one hand, it's good. But, on the other hand, this leads to a contradiction between the ideals of a free individual and reality. In other words, as the principle of the relationship of man to man individualism is inhumane, but as a norm of the relationship of a person to society - antisocial .

In art, artistic creativity, mass culture performs the following social functions:

introduces a person to the world of illusory experience and unrealizable dreams;
promotes the dominant way of life;
distracts the broad masses of people from social activity, makes them adapt.

Hence the use in art of such genres as detective, western, melodrama, musicals, comics, advertising, etc.

Elite culture

Concept definition

Elite culture (from the French elite - selective, best) can be defined as a subculture of privileged groups in society(while sometimes their only privilege may be the right to cultural creativity or to preserve cultural heritage), which is characterized by value-semantic isolation, closeness; elite culture asserts itself as the work of a narrow circle of "highest professionals", the understanding of which is accessible to an equally narrow circle of highly educated connoisseurs. Elite culture claims to stand high above the "routine" of everyday life and take the position of the "highest court" in relation to the socio-political problems of society.

Elite culture is considered by many culturologists as the antipode of mass culture. From this point of view, the highest, privileged stratum of society is the producer and consumer of elite cultural elite . In modern cultural studies, the understanding of the elite as a special stratum of society, endowed with specific spiritual abilities, has been established.

The elite is not just the upper stratum of society, the ruling elite. There is an elite in every social class.

Elite- it is the part of society that is most capable of doingspiritual activity, gifted with high moral and aesthetic inclinations. It is she who ensures social progress, therefore art should be oriented towards meeting her needs and needs. The main elements of the elite concept of culture are contained in philosophical writings A. Schopenhauer (“The World as Will and Representation”) and F. Nietzsche (“Human, Too Human”, “Merry Science”, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”).

A. Schopenhauer divides humanity into two parts: "people of genius" and "people of benefit." The former are capable of aesthetic contemplation and artistic activity, while the latter are focused only on purely practical, utilitarian activities.

The demarcation of elite and mass culture is associated with the development of cities, book printing, the emergence of a customer and a performer in the field. Elite - for sophisticated connoisseurs, mass - for the ordinary, ordinary reader, viewer, listener. Works that serve as a standard of mass art, as a rule, find a connection with folklore, mythological, popular prints that existed before. In the 20th century, the elitist concept of culture was summarized by Ortega y Gaset. In the work of this Spanish philosopher "The Dehumanization of Art", it is argued that the new art is addressed to the elite of society, and not to its mass. Therefore, art does not necessarily have to be popular, generally understandable, universal. The new art must alienate people from real life. "Dehumanization" - and is the basis of the new art of the twentieth century. There are polar classes in society - majority (masses) and minority (elite) . The new art, according to Ortega, divides the public into two classes - those who understand it, and those who do not understand it, that is, artists and those who are not artists.

Elite , according to Ortega, this is not a tribal aristocracy and not privileged strata of society, but that part of it that has a "special organ of perception" . It is this part that contributes to social progress. And it is to her that artists should turn their works. The new art should also contribute to the fact that "... The best know themselves, learn to understand their destiny: to be in the minority and fight the majority."

A typical manifestation of an elitist culture is theory and practice of "pure art" or "art for art's sake" , which found its embodiment in Western European and Russian culture at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So, for example, in Russia the ideas of elite culture were actively developed by artistic association"The World of Art" (artist A. Benois, editor of the magazine S. Diaghilev, etc.).

The Emergence of an Elite Culture

Elite culture, as a rule, arises in an era of cultural crisis, the breaking of the old and the birth of new ones. cultural traditions, ways of producing and reproducing spiritual values, changing cultural and historical paradigms. Therefore, representatives of the elite culture are aware of themselves either as "creators of the new", towering above their time, and therefore not understood by their contemporaries (the majority of these are romantics and modernists - figures of the artistic avant-garde, making a cultural revolution), or "custodians of the fundamental foundations", who should be protected from destruction and the meaning of which is not understood by the "mass".

In such a situation, elite culture acquires esoteric traits- closed, hidden knowledge, which is not intended for wide, general use. In the history of carriers various forms elite culture were priests, religious sects, monastic and spiritual-knightly orders, Masonic lodges, craft workshops, literary, artistic and intellectual circles, underground organizations. Such a narrowing of the potential recipients of cultural creativity gives rise to its bearers awareness of one's creativity as exceptional: "true religion", "pure science", "pure art" or "art for art's sake".

The concept of "elitist" as opposed to "mass" was put into circulation at the end of the 18th century. The division of artistic creativity into elite and mass was manifested in the concepts of the romantics. Initially, among the romantics, the elitist carries the semantic meaning of being chosen, exemplary. The concept of exemplary, in turn, was understood as identical to the classical one. The concept of the classical was especially actively developed in. Then the normative core was the art of antiquity. In this understanding, the classical was personified with the elite and exemplary.

Romantics sought to focus on innovation in the field of art. Thus, they separated their art from the usual adapted art forms. The triad: "elitist - exemplary - classical" began to crumble - the elite was no longer identical to the classical.

Features and significance of elite culture

A feature of the elite culture is the interest of its representatives in the creation of new forms, demonstrative opposition to harmonic forms classical art, as well as an emphasis on the subjectivity of the worldview.

The characteristic features of an elite culture are:

striving for cultural development objects (phenomena of natural and social peace, spiritual realities), which stand out sharply from the totality of what is included in the field of subject development of the "ordinary", "profane" culture of a given time;
inclusion of one's subject in unexpected value-semantic contexts, creation of its new interpretation, unique or exclusive meaning;
creation of a new cultural language (language of symbols, images), accessible to a narrow circle of connoisseurs, the deciphering of which requires special efforts and a broad cultural outlook from the uninitiated.

Elite culture is dual, contradictory in nature. On the one hand, elite culture acts as an innovative ferment of the sociocultural process. The works of elite culture contribute to the renewal of the culture of society, introduce new issues, language, and methods of cultural creativity into it. Initially, within the boundaries of the elite culture, new genres and types of art are born, a cultural, literary language societies, extraordinary scientific theories, philosophical concepts and religious teachings, which, as it were, “break out” beyond the established boundaries of culture, but then can enter the cultural heritage of the whole society. That is why, for example, it is said that truth is born as heresy and dies as banality.

On the other hand, the position of an elitist culture that opposes itself to the culture of society can mean a conservative departure from social reality and its topical problems to the idealized world of "art for art's sake", religious-philosophical and socio-political utopias. Such a demonstrative form of rejection of the existing world can be both a form of passive protest against it, and a form of reconciliation with it, recognizing the powerlessness of the elite culture, its inability to influence the cultural life of society.

This duality of elitist culture also determines the existence of opposite - critical and apologetic - theories of elitist culture. Democratic thinkers (Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Plekhanov, Morris, etc.) were critical of elite culture, emphasizing her separation from the life of the people, her incomprehensibility to the people, her service to the needs of rich, jaded people. At the same time, such criticism sometimes went beyond the limits of reason, turning, for example, from criticism elite art in criticism of all art. Pisarev, for example, declared that "boots are higher than art." L. Tolstoy, who created high examples of the novel of the New Age (“War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina”, “Sunday”), in late period of his work, when he switched to the positions of peasant democracy, he considered all these works of his to be unnecessary to the people and began to compose popular print stories from peasant life.

Another direction of the theories of elite culture (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Ortega y Gasset, Heidegger and Ellul) defended it, emphasizing its content, formal perfection, creative search and novelty, the desire to resist the stereotyped and lack of spirituality of everyday culture, considered it as a haven for the creative freedom of the individual.

A variety of elite art in our time is modernism and postmodernism.

References:

1. Afonin V. A., Afonin Yu. V. Theory and history of culture. Tutorial for independent work of students. - Lugansk: Elton-2, 2008. - 296 p.

2. Culturology in questions and answers. Toolkit to prepare for tests and exams on the course "Ukrainian and foreign culture" for students of all specialties and forms of education. / Rev. Editor Ragozin N. P. - Donetsk, 2008, - 170 p.

There are rather contradictory points of view on the question of the time of the emergence of “mass culture”. Some consider it an eternal by-product of culture and therefore discover it already in ancient times. There are much more grounds for attempts to link the emergence of "mass culture" with the scientific and technological revolution, which gave rise to new ways of producing, distributing and consuming culture. Bourgeois "mass culture" was first formed in the United States. On the one hand, this democratized the sphere of culture, on the other hand, it contributed to the penetration of commercial, political interests, chase profit.

The American sociologist D. White believes that the first elements of mass culture include, for example, Roman gladiator fights, which attracted numerous spectators. According to A. Adorno, the forms of culture that appeared during the formation of capitalism in England, that is, at the turn of the 17th-18th centuries, should be considered the prototypes of modern mass culture. He is convinced that the novels written during this period (Defoe, Richardson) were intended for the market and had a clear commercial focus. Consequently, they gravitated towards "mass" rather than "elitist" culture. However, Russian opponents (E. P. Smolskaya and others) point out that these works did not contain the well-known patterns that are typical for works of mass culture.

Probably, the starting point in the emergence and development of mass culture should still be considered late XIX- the beginning of the XX century.

In Europe, "mass culture" (folk entertainment, the art of jugglers, mimes) has always been opposed to the official culture, which was controlled by the state and the church. In the US, "mass culture" initially propagated the stereotypes and ideas of official culture, the main regulator of which was advertising. "Mass culture" has become such an integral part of the culture of American society, its cultural consciousness, that its study exceeds, for example, the system of American higher education. 56% of training courses in the US are devoted to the study of "popular" types of culture (courses on television, cinema, advertising, journalism). In England, the system of university education includes special courses that include materials from the culture of cinema, music, science fiction and even football. In America, "popular culture" has acquired a dual character: the American mind, which is not occupied with practical concerns, remains at rest, while the other part of it is occupied with discoveries, production and social organization. The American will is embodied in the skyscraper, the American intellect in the colonial buildings.

What is "mass culture"? As in the case of traditional culture, there is still no universal definition of mass culture. This situation has its own rational explanation. The fact is that as a scientific and philosophical category, "mass culture" includes three concepts. First, "culture" as a special character of the product. Secondly, "mass" as the degree of distribution of the product. Thirdly, "culture" as a spiritual value.

One of the most interesting and productive is the approach to the definition of "mass culture" by D. Bell, according to which mass culture is a kind of organization of ordinary consciousness in the information society, a special sign system or special language, on which members of the information society reach mutual understanding.

Now mass culture penetrates almost all spheres of society and forms its own single semiotic space.

Obviously, mass culture is far from a homogeneous phenomenon. It has its own structure and levels. In modern cultural studies, as a rule, there are three main levels of mass culture:

* kitsch culture (i.e. base, even vulgar culture);

* mid-culture (so to speak, the culture of the "middle hand");

* art culture (mas-culture, not devoid of a certain, sometimes even high, artistic content and aesthetic expression).

Analyzing mass culture as a special socio-cultural phenomenon, it is necessary to indicate its main characteristics. Those features, in my opinion, are:

* focus on a homogeneous audience;

* reliance on the emotional, irrational, collective, unconscious;

* escapism;

* quick availability;

* quick forgetting;

* traditionalism and conservatism;

* operating the average linguistic semiotic norm;

* entertainment.

"Mass culture" pays special attention to the theme of aggression. The brutality of the scenes of violence on the screen impresses the presentation both in quantity and in its naturalness. The merits of this or that militant are often estimated in proportion to the number of corpses - in the form of false violence attracts like a drug. The explanation for this fact is given on the basis of the philosophy of Z. Freud. Since culture oppresses the natural principle in a person, instincts, he is forced to look for the illusory realization of his unsatisfied passions in art. That is why there is so much sex and aggression in "mass culture". Another favorite topic is fear: popular culture genres such as thriller, horror film, disaster film, etc. exploit this topic very actively. As a result, the human psyche, "hardened" by modern mass culture, becomes less sensitive to what is happening in reality. Man gets used to murder and violence. Mental indifference today is becoming the rule rather than the exception.

Before the emergence of a technological society, a person was connected with nature, thanks to religion he felt himself an organic part of the world and, in constant communication with others, drew vital energy. In the modern artificial world, surrounded by concrete, steel and glass of industrial civilization, the connection of a person with higher forces, with the organics of nature and with other people was narrowed to an absolute minimum and, left in the vacuum of his loneliness, a person began to need "drugs" much more, than ever before. Moreover, the world has become so overcomplicated that it has become pointless to try to understand it. But the need to fill the inner world persisted, and traditional forms of escape from reality - alcoholism, drugs, the sexual sphere - could not answer this request, especially since these forms of escapism (escape from reality) are considered an anomaly, and the only acceptable form of escapism was art that transforms reality into an aesthetically acceptable form.

When the masses came to the forefront of history, the entire civilized world, regardless of political system each country, faced the question of how to control these millions and direct their energy into a safe channel for power.

The culture of previous centuries could not be used, the ideas that it contained contradicted the tasks that the government set itself, and was too complex, it required many years of education.

Culture, like science, cannot exist without a customer, according to Scott Fitzgerald, "culture follows money." The new masters of life ordered music from performers, armed them with new technical means.

New technologies made it possible to simplify culture and make it available for general consumption. As one of the customers, Lenin, said, “The most important of all the arts for us is cinema, because our population is mostly illiterate.”

Radio, cinema, and then television, the very nature of these new technical means made the simplification of ideas, images traditional culture, and gave innumerable opportunities for the gradual replacement of a broad vision of the world with that flat, one-dimensional world that is understandable to the viewer and necessary for the customer.

A film lens pulls out a fragment determined by the director from real life, separates it from everything else with a frame, and as a result of editing images, a picture of the world is created that corresponds to the tasks that its creator sets for himself.

The television screen creates a window into the vast world, narrowing its multidimensionality to a few tens of centimeters of a flat image, and this is no longer a three-dimensional reality of the world, but its pale, simplified copy, devoid of the broad content of the original.

Another Soviet ideologist, Arbatov, thus defined the tasks for the creators of proletarian mass culture - ".... the artist is imbued with the idea of expediency, processing the material not for the sake of subjective tastes, but in accordance with the objective tasks of production, ... artists become employees of engineers, scientists , administrators. To organize a common product guided not by personal motives, but by the objective needs of production, performing class assignments ... "

"Objective needs of production" - to distract the masses from the real problems of their lives and make them see the world the way the customer wants it.

"Mass culture, compensating for the feeling of helplessness of the average person, creates images of supermen who overcome those obstacles that are insurmountable in practice, winning where the average person inevitably faces defeat. Supermen do not go to work from nine to five, do not tremble in front of their superiors, are not afraid, that tomorrow they will be fired without any explanation... They have no problem how to pay monthly bills Supermen alone decide everything social problems, in a simple and understandable form - more often physical strength. These fairy tales do not reduce stress, but at least for a while, before going to sleep, they bring a state of sweet slumber. Alexander Zinoviev.

The Nazis burned books in the streets and squares, Soviet authority rotted books in the library archives, which aroused public interest to forbidden knowledge. The market makes it more effective way- it instills indifference to knowledge.

Ray Bradbury was afraid that the state would ban the reading of books. Aldous Huxley was afraid of another, that conditions would be created in which people would no longer want to read books. But they were both wrong, today they read much more than before.

Today there are 1,500 daily newspapers and 7,000 weeklies. 75,000 new books are published annually. This is primarily entertainment literature, and mass demand exists only for it, for "hamburger" type literature, for informational chewing gum simplified to the level of mass taste, "literature for the poor."

And, at the same time, serious literature that poses acute social problems never reaches even 10,000 copies. They are mainly acquired only by universities, they are included in learning programs many colleges, thousands of students have read these books, but this does not change anything in their attitude to the existing status quo.

According to the first point, we can conclude that the essence of "mass culture" lies in the influence of "mass culture" on the consciousness of a person, his attitude to reality and spiritual sensuality. The reason for the emergence of "mass culture" was the need of the authorities to control millions of masses and direct their energy into a safe channel for the authorities. Now mass culture penetrates almost all spheres of society and forms its own single semiotic space.