Literature Review on Popular Culture and New Media

Compiled by Hauwa Otori

Popular culture is defined as what is socially acceptable among the masses. With old media, television programs were programmed for a particular time. If your favorite primetime show came and went, your only option was to fake your way through the water cooler conversation the next day and hope that no one caught on to you. According to Chris Andersen, new media has created a fragmented culture through what he calls The Long Tail effect on popular culture. The theory basically says that with more and more content and available media platforms, our culture and economy is continuously moving away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets at the top of the demand curve and moving towards a huge number of niches in the tail. On the other hand; however, it can be argued that new media also allows a shared culture through other mechanisms such as recommendations, tagging, most viewed, most commented, etc. Below is a list of related sources that will help gain a better idea of whether new media leads to a shared or fragmented popular culture.



On-going Scholarly Sources

• The Extinction of Mass Culture by Marc Gunther, Fortune Senior Writer
  http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/11/news/economy/pluggedin_gunther.fortune/index.htm

• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, 2004

• Rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: from consensus to contestation; New Media & Society, Vol.9, No. 5, 827-847 (2007)
  http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/9/5/827

• Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach by James Lull, 2000

• New Media Cultures by P. David Marshall
  http://www.newmediacultures.co.uk/

• Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York:
  New York University Press, 2006.

• Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. USA, 2006.
  

On-Going Blog Sources

• http://www.tedfreidman.com/ – TedLog – Culture, Politics, and Technology

• http://www.longtail.com/ – blog based off of the article entitled The Long Tail by Chris Anderson – both basically talk about the relationship between the increasing number of media outlets and decreasing amount of choices

• Logic + Emotion: Influence Ripples + Social Fragmentation
  http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2007/09/influence-rippl.html

• http://www.prsquared.com/2005/10/cultural_fragmentation_the_lon.html