Popular Culture in a Digital Society: Nine Paradoxes

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.