Popular Culture in a Digital Society: Nine Paradoxes

Popular Culture in a Digital Society: Nine Paradoxes: Comparison

Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Abigail Zou and Version 1 by Sue Spaid.

This entry, which identifies nine paradoxes particular to popular culture in a digital society, begins by distinguishing art and culture, since scholars have historically relied on these terms to differentiate popular culture, mass culture, and mass art. Digital societies, which exist both online and offline, are awash in digital products such as LED signs, digital imagery, video games, film, podcasts, and social media. In a digital society, popular culture is effectively “mass art,” which exhibits five properties: (1) digital media’s low-cost products and low-skill tools are (2) created and distributed to appeal to as broad a cultural sector as possible (qualitative) and thus aim to (3) attract consumers (quantitative) who capably enjoy and deploy cultural content both (4) offline and online, yet “popularity” ultimately depends on (5) efforts to maximize unity and minimize fragmentation. Except for localized events, popular culture has largely disappeared, while mass art will likely flourish until human beings clamor once again for firsthand experiences or go extinct. The next frontier will be finding ways to prevent artificial intelligence from producing cultural products, not because they will be terrible, undesirable, or fake, but because the culture-making process itself engenders human wellbeing.

popular culture
mass culture
mass art
digital imagery
video games
TikTok
social media
attention economy
creatives

Every historical era has exhibited an appreciable approach to popular culture. Popular culture includes activities, whether festivals, sports, dress, food-ways, street art, or entertainment that attract broad audiences because people deem them accessible and self-concordant, if not customizable. By contrast, folk culture is “the product of ‘a comparatively stable, traditional social order’,” which reflects “shared values (rather than embodying conflict), originates [from the] bottom-up, and enjoys relative stability over time” ^[1] (p. xxviii). Few popular culture scholars consider societies stable. Popular culture rather makes do with what is available. However, a popular culture associated with a generation, region, or ethnic group that lends practitioners their cultural identity effectively doubles as a folk culture.

Prehistoric examples of popular culture include the elaborate pictographs, petroglyphs, and large-scale geoglyphs drawn by ancient cultures inhabiting caves in southern France, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and the American plains. The Greeks gathered around theater, festivals, music, poetry, and food. Apparently, the Athens of ancient Greece celebrated 120 festival days a year ^[2], while the world’s oldest ongoing festivals include the New Year’s festival Navruz, the Jewish celebration of Passover, and Holi, the Festival of Colors, celebrated annually in India since the 4th century. The medieval age added rituals, parades, and fireworks. The 19th century saw the rise of story papers, serial books, and pulp fiction. The 20th century witnessed the arrival of cartoons, graphic novels, anime, manga, murals, graffiti, street art, alongside music recordings (from wax to tape to mp3s), movies (from film to video to mp4s), TV, and cable TV, which was initially billed as “advertising-free.” However, the routine digitization of what was once considered popular culture effectively transforms popular culture into what Noël Carroll termed “mass art” ^[3], whose current distribution mechanism is primarily the internet. While popular culture commands people’s presence, mass art accommodates their remote access.

So long as algorithms are used to identify potential target audiences, mass art can never be as popular as yesteryear’s radio, albums, cinema, television, or publishing. Consider that 40–50 million Americans tuned in weekly during the 1970s to watch the sitcom “All in the Family” when the US’s population was 60% of its present size. So long as no two people are dished up the same menu of cultural options, media distribution is a niche business (distributed to targeted consumers). Online content that fails to reach the broader public diminishes its chances of gaining popularity. When society is so fragmented that so few people share, let alone appreciate, similar cultural experiences, can anything count as popular? For example, Jimmy Kimmel’s “return” on 23 September 2025 garnered 6.3 million live TV views, whereas 29 million people streamed it later. Either way, does a total of 35 million global viewers in a world of 1.53 billion English speakers exemplify popularity? Similarly, a New York Times “best seller” typically sells between 10,000 and 100,000 copies in a year, an even tinier fraction of the number of potential consumers.

While “entry costs” have historically proven the biggest barrier to popularity, these days, fragmented audiences risk rendering popular culture obsolete. So long as we value popular culture’s capacity to unite people, data collection meant to identify and target “siloed” viewers proves counterproductive. Social media exacerbates this problem by cordoning off people into small cliques. In attempting to dominate the private and the political spheres, social media has set the stage for worldliness to spin out of control, causing the public square to unravel into an intangible web that manufactures, though it claims to mirror, public opinion ^[4] (p. 678).

This entry continues with a discussion of the distinction between art and culture, which relates to how scholars have historically differentiated popular culture, mass culture, and mass art. Digital societies exist both online and offline, since digital products, whether LED signs, digital imagery, video games, or film, are fixtures of our ordinary world. As it turns out, there are at least eight additional paradoxes associated with popular culture in a digital society. Effectively “mass art,” popular culture in a digital society exhibits five key properties: (1) digital media’s low-cost products and low-skill tools are (2) created and distributed to appeal to as broad a cultural sector as possible (qualitative) and thus aim to (3) attract consumers (quantitative) who capably enjoy and deploy cultural content both (4) offline and online, yet “popularity” ultimately depends on 5) efforts to maximize unity and minimize fragmentation.

Paradox 1.

Digital societies employ algorithms to identify target audiences and direct relevant content, which further fragments the public, thus making “popular culture” increasingly unattainable.

References

Glynn, H. Why Fiske Still Matters. In Understanding Popular Culture; Routledge: New York, NY, USA, 2011.
Mikalson, J. The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 1976.
Carroll, N. A Philosophy of Mass Art; Clarendon Press: Oxford, UK, 1998.
Spaid, S. Surfing the Public Square: On Wordlessness, Social Media, and the Dissolution of the Polis. Open Philos. 2019, 2, 668–678.