Was bei vielen Beachtung findet: Zu den Transformationen des Populären

Abstract

Being popular means getting noticed by many. Popularity is measured as well as staged. Rankings and charts provide information on what is popular while vying for popularity themselves. They do not speak to the quality or originality of the popular, only to its evident success across different scales of evaluation. People do not buy good products, they buy popular ones; they do not listen to the best music, but to popular music; they do not share, like or retweet important, but popular news. Even the ‘unpopular’ can be popular: a despised politician, a hated jingle, an unpopular measure. The popular modifies whatever it affords with attention. Its quantitatively and hierarchically comparative terms (‘bestseller’, ‘outperformer’, ‘high score’, ‘viral’) generate valences that do not inhere in the objects themselves. Conversely, the non-popular, which does not find any measurable resonance in these terms, risks being dismissed as irrelevant or worthless simply because it does not appear in any rankings or ratings. This can also be observed particularly with artefacts whose relevance as part of high culture could be taken for granted even when they do not achieve mass resonance. Our paper proposes the following central hypothesis: The transformations of the popular, which began in Europe around 1800 and introduced the powerful distinction between low culture and high culture, establish a competitive distinction between the popular and the non-popular becoming dominant over the course of the 20th century. As a result, the popular is no longer either culture of the ‘lower classes’ or the inclusion of the ‘people’ in the service of higher goals. The popular today is hardly the object of desired transgressions (Leslie Fiedler’s “cross the border, close the gap”) or an expression of felt or feared “massification” or “flattening”. The dissemination of the popular is no longer a normative project. It has, in fact, become an inescapable condition of cultural self-understanding in the globalised present. The purpose of our research is to devise a theory of the popular that does justice to this fact. Our research outline identifies two decisive transformations that have led to this condition: 1. the popularization of quantifying methods to measure attention in popular culture around 1950; 2. the popularization of the Internet around 2000, whereby the question of what can and cannot become popular is partially removed from the gatekeepers of the established mass media, educational institutions and cultural elites and is increasingly decided via social media.

Reassessing the Gap: Transformations of the High/Low Difference

“…With the popularization of the Internet around 2000 and with our current digital, algorithm-driven culture and its constant display of the metrics of popularity (likes, retweets, views; rankings, charts, hit-lists), the disruption of high/low distinctions has clearly intensified. In fact, pop's popularity is putting pressure on the institutions of high culture, whose reactions range from accommodation and resilience to outright resistance (Döring et al 2021;Werber et al 2023).…”

“…This Special Issue begins with the translated and significantly revised version of an article originally published in Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift (Döring et al 2021), authored collectively by Niels Werber, Daniel Stein, Jörg Döring, Veronika Albrecht-Birkner, Carolin Gerlitz, Thomas Hecken, Johannes Paßmann, Jörgen Schäfer, Cornelius Schubert, and Jochen Venus, and retitled "Getting Noticed by Many: On the Transformations of the Popular" here. The article lays out the research objectives as well as the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1472 Transformations of the Popular, funded by the German Research Foundation (2021-2024) and hosted at the University of Siegen, and it also prepares the ground for the articles collected in this Issue.…”

Zur Rolle von Unterhaltungsmagazinen in der Pandemie. Zwischen entdifferenzierten Sammelsurien und differenzierten Wissensvermittlern

“…Hecken 2006 , S. 85; Döring/Werber/Albrecht-Birkner et al. 2021 , S. 4). Dabei stellen sie eine Kippfigur zwischen Spezialisierung und Entdifferenzierung dar: Sie dienen weniger als andere Massenmedien der Information, weil es ihnen nicht um das Neue geht, sondern um die Sensationalisierung und Spektakularisierung des Bekannten; sie dienen der Unterhaltung in dem Sinne, dass sie auf eine reizvolle Weise für möglichst viele möglichst anschlussfähig sein, also den Common Sense bestätigen müssen.…”

Of Auction Records and Non-Fungible Tokens: On the New Valences of Superhero Comics

“…30 It is important to stress that we are not so much interested in market analysis or investigating Marvel's digital business models than in the ways in which the app creates new possibilities for buying, trading, and collecting digital "originals" and how the aesthetics of the app as well as the discourses surrounding the introduction and promotion of superhero NFTs indicate the transformation from qualitative to quantative regimes of valuation, including a shift from the older high/low logic to a new popular/non-popular logic. For more on these changes, see Döring et al (2021) as well as Werber et al (2023). For an astute and well-researched history of comic book publishers' evolving investment in the digital distribution of comics, see Perren and Steirer (2021, chp.…”