Culture (E-Tracker 2)
Mass culture reflects a culture of mass production for mass consumption promoted by mass media such as radio, television and magazines in modern capitalist societies. The culture industry is a global, multibillion dollar enterprise, driven, primarily, by the pursuit of profit. It is the culture for the proletariat that has been allowed to exist by the bourgeoisie and it is often argued that it is a means of control and lacks intellectual or artistic value. An example of modern day exploitation would be the genre of hip-hop, the genre’s cultural origins date back to the Griot speakers of Africa but today is used in mainstream media to promote materialism, misogamy and consumerism amongst other things. Traditionally a folk culture the ruling class have adapted the genre to fit the ideology they want to promote, it has been used as a tool in presidential campaigns and promotes the latest fashion to consume. Mass culture is unavoidable, it’s in your Coca-Cola, in your Nike shoes and it’s playing in cinema’s nationwide, but why is their ‘mass culture’?

“The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” - Karl Marx: The German Ideology (1845)
Marx suggests that those who control the production of the materials we consume also control our ideas; if an individual lacks an expression of self they simply take the creativity of others and apply it to themselves. A Simple example of mass consumerism and how we identify ourselves can be seen in the development of mass marketing over the last century – every day thousands of advertising images are registered in the sub conscious of an individual (most likely through mass media), each one of them