Popular Communication After Globalization

Abstract

The study of popular communication is carried out in many disciplines and many sites. It is often haunted by anxieties over high culture versus low culture and authenticity versus commercialization. Rejecting those binaries in favor of the dominance of the latter term in each, this article initially defines popular communication as objects widely circulated by mass media, texts to which people are widely exposed. Such texts are themselves commodities, and the meanings the texts facilitate are key. Scholars of popular communication usually espouse a leftist political agenda. They focus on signs that reveal processes in social or psychological experience, although some studies focus more on forms of discourse. The article proposes that studies in popular communication may be distinguished by whether they focus on rhetor, text, or audience. It concludes by urging a stance of critical populism, more popular involvement by scholars, and a greater understanding of erotics, or desire, in our work.Around the long table of this special issue gathers a motley communication family. Some of the venerable, hoary relatives seated here have an indisputable right to attend based on long acceptance in the academy. Others seem like rather distant cousins of doubtful ancestry. We don't quite know them, or see the family resemblance in their young faces. Worse yet, some may resemble the discipline next door. Popular communication is likely to be in this latter category: Whose child is it, and who invited it? What sort of side dish did it contribute to the feast? Because we have been disciplined as members of a disciplinary community, we will eventually resort to defining the term "popular communication." Let us begin, Joshua Gunn teaches in the