Hong Kong Comics: Mass Culture?

Why are comics not appreciated as much as the dry narratives of novels in the literary world? A comic is composed of symbols to express concepts shared by all people in their own social environment, and provide more tools than conventional art to truly show artistic intention.

Pop culture is defined as a product of a culture that has a mass audience (Zeisler 2008:1). Pop culture is considered dependent on advertising, depicting women and people of colour in a problematic way and discriminating manner (Ziesler, 2008:2). Popular culture has become our common knowledge, and to understand it is a key part in understanding society as a whole. According to Beamish (2016), popular culture is a form of symbolic communication between humans. Symbols can be anything that can be recognized by a culture and often presented in the forms of language, values, norms, and material culture. The use of language is a powerful tool that allows for the media to relay particular messages to the rest of society. The imposition of certain concepts as a result can be argued as having a direct affect on the daily lives of those who are exposed. Whereas material culture allows the population to see these messages visually through advertisements, film, and television. Some basic forms of pop culture include television, film, music, news, and advertising. Popular culture is rooted in mass culture, and deemed for those who could not afford the means to participate in high culture activities. Those who subjected to the popular culture were assumed to be uneducated and unworthy of “real art” (Ziesler, 2008:1). The mass media

In Understanding Comics, McCloud defines comics as, “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud, 1993, p. 9).

Jenkins talks about how the consumption of media products is a collective process, in other words, the collective intelligence is seen as an alternative source of media power. He describes how within popular culture, the collective meaning making is shaping and changing the ways religion, education, laws, politics, advertising and how the military operate (4). Jenkins discusses a process called “convergence of modes”, he explains that media and communication are becoming interconnected like the telephone and television.

Comics, a medium used to express ideas via images and pictures, can be traced back to the cave period when humans communicated ideas and thoughts using paintings and pictures. However, as humans began to use words to communicate with one another, paintings and pictures as a mode of communication took a backseat. They began to be used only for visual impact whenever needed. In course of time, other than oral communication, written communication and print media were considered effective means of communication. Various genre like novels, poems, short stories, essays were all realized and accepted by scholars as resources to be used when educating children and adults. Inspite of the many famous comics – be it

Comics have brought a light to heavy topics that are hard to talk about. In nineteen

A main literary element in Eisner’s Theory of Comics and Sequential Art is imagery. “‘Comics’ deal with two major communicating devices, words and images”

Comics have been around for many decades in Canada. Comics are enjoyed by Canadians, young and old. They also come in many different forms such as graphic novels, comic strips, or web comics. But do you know the history behind these comics? Today in this essay you will discover the history behind these comics, some of early comics that were published in Canada, some of the most famous cartoonists, and comics today in Canada.

Its appearance almost always accompanies the strategic and parodic veiling of the human. The illustrative style of such comics has much to do with the way this process of defamiliarization works, and we must not forget that the primary mode of representation in them is never simply language—with its conceptual relations between signifer and signified—but pictures, which bear an indexical or perceptual relation to the things they represent. (130)

Comic books provide an excellent example of a modern method for examining these philosophical concepts. No matter how old man gets, we still wrestle with finding reason within the world and our role in it. Comic books have a broad demographic and create

For this week’s reading, it addresses popular culture through the critical approach. Unlike the functionalist approach, the critical approval focuses on the darker factors of popular culture. For this particular article, it will examine the effects of mass media on popular culture and how it shapes the way the audience perceives particular situations. In the David Grazian’s Mix It Up Chapter 3, “Welcome to the Machine: A Critical Approach to Popular Culture” will examine popular culture from the critical approach. It will address the foundation of the critical approach (49). It introduces Karl Marx’s idea about the ruling class and how they are basically the ruling material force of society (49). This reveals that the ideas of the ruling class are just the same as the ruling ideas that are created.

Mass culture can be defined as the collective culture created by exposure to the same news sources, music, literature, art and consumer advertising. The rise of mass culture is a relatively new phenomenon that has occurred largely because of the rise of a leisure class fueled by technological innovations, the surplus in production brought about by the industrial revolution and the time the average consumer had to dedicate to non-work pursuits brought about by the delineated work schedule favored by mass production and labor laws which defined the limits of the production schedule, and created a new space for workers and their families (Jacobs 13). Prior to the advent of mass

As our society continues to evolve, there one term that we struggle to define as a society. That term is culture, which is the very fabric of our civilization. However, F.R. Leavis’ ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’ is literary expression of what culture is. Leavis defines culture as ''a kind of paper currency based upon a very small proportion of gold''. According to Leavis, the argument on the subject of culture contends that minority values those who are capable of endorsing first hand judgement by possible responses. He specifies the rapid change of culture in America that threatens the future. He specifies the impact of Americanization on films that has led to decline of films and literature which in turn lowers the culture. The

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer is a pivotal article in history that changed the way in which many communications scholars viewed media. Both authors were members of the Frankfurt School, a school of thought which looked further into Karl Marx’s theories about capitalism and the issues of mass production. Published in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer revealed their beliefs that the media, much like the economy, is becoming mass produced, and is therefore turning people in society into media-consuming robots. Industrialization created work lives for people in which they would work on only one part of a larger machine. As a result, they felt less involved in the completion of the project as a whole, and therefore felt less pride in their jobs and their lives in general. Instead, these people turned to media and pop culture so that they would feel more fulfillment within their lives. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that these people had a reduced capacity for original thought because media is now force feeding them the ideas of what they can think and feel. This essay will prove that although Adorno and Horkeimer’s points were justified through the eyes of authors George Lipsitz, Lev Manovich, and Susan J. Douglas, there are still exceptions to their theories that they do not account for.

In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, members of the Frankfurt School who fled from the Nazi Germany to the USA, were publishing their seminal essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. Political critique, their thesis about the ideological domination of capitalism on cultural production is one that persists today and is regularly renewed (Mukerji & Schudson, 1991). Yet, since the first half of the twentieth century, evolutions have occurred within the ‘Culture Industry’, and while the theory – focusing primarily on the music and cinema industries – is still applicable to some features of contemporary ‘cultural industries’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2007), these changes require a contemporary reconsideration of it.