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Bryan Chen

Dr. Brian Johnson

Analyzing Contemporary Pop Culture

28 February 2013

Automatic Cultural Omnivores

When we watch and analyze episodes of Breaking Bad, are we merely enjoying an

edgy pop culture TV show or are we also interpreting and weighing realistic high culture

social commentary with questions of moral ambiguity? When we find ourselves laughing

with the television comedy series Community, are we simply mindlessly following along the

sometimes slapstick comedic narrative or are we also engaged in deciphering the meta-

humor and pop culture references in order to find more humor carefully inserted into the

program on different levels? With these questions in mind, does it not seem like a lot of

todays popular culture media is more similar to high culture media than ever before? Does

this higher yield of cognitive involvement in pop culture than ever before lead to the rise of

an unprecedented number of cultural omnivores?

An area of overlap has developed between popular and high culture in many

modern works of our time; for those of us who enjoy works of complex popular culture, our

consumption of these media automatically turns many of us into cultural omnivores.

Cultural omnivorousness, per Petersons definition, refers to the tendency of people to

often make cultural choices from many menus (Gans 10). Cultural omnivorousness in this

incarnation occurs by the virtue of our consumption of mass culture media that has

converged enough with high culture to be of comparable complexity and significance not

unlike what is generally found in high art media. The consumption and enjoyment of media
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with both mass culture and high culture qualifications is omnivorous behavior. This

cultural omnivorousness is congruent with Steven Johnsons more recent concept of the

Sleeper Curve, which posits that what we consider to be the most debased forms of mass

diversion . . . turn out to be nutritious after all and also that [mass] culture is growing to

be more intellectually demanding, not less (Johnson 9). Taking Johnsons claims even

further, popular culture media may have in many ways begun to converge with high culture

to create a blend of media that can be enjoyed by multiple taste publics on multiple levels.

For the purposes of this essay, the term popular culture (also referred to as pop

culture or mass culture) shall be constrained to focus on popular forms of mass media,

especially recent and current television shows, movies, books, and games. Additionally,

pop culture is usually disparate from what can be considered a conventional educational

track in present-day America and often can be broken down further into several genres and

sometimes subgenres and subcultures such as situation comedies, reality television,

transgressive minimalist fiction, science fiction, drama, jazz, gospel, punk, goth, Redditor,

and hipster. Creations of mass culture include media ranging from reality television such as

The Bachelor and Jersey Shore to Top 40 Radio Hits to Christopher Nolans The Dark Knight

films, The Matrix, Inception, Fight Club (as a book and a film), even including television

shows such as Breaking Bad and Community.

Taste culture, a term heavily used in Herbert Gans book Popular Culture and High

Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, means a defined set of tastes exhibited by

certain groups based on aesthetic standards of beauty and taste, but also on a variety of

other emotional and intellectual values (Gans 6). By this definition, pop culture consists of
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the popular mass media among the upper middle, lower middle, low, quasi-folk, and

youth/ethnic taste cultures. By Gans description, taste cultures are categorized by class

position, which are in turn defined and affected by factors such as income, occupation, and

education and further complicated by age, gender, and race (Gans 8). Popular culture in

this essay refers to such a wide range of taste cultures because since the writing and

publishing of the Gans book, society has evolved and social currents have continued to

muddle the originally blurry boundaries between the delineated taste cultures. Gans

himself notes in Popular Culture and High Culture that taste cultures are analytic

aggregates constructed by the social researcher rather than real aggregates that

perceive themselves as such (94).

High culture shall be restricted to consist of media that is designed to challenge or

question audience expectations, preferring introspection to action, containing multi-

layered complexity and meanings. To this end, high culture media generally includes some

sort of philosophical, psychological, and social context and/or awareness fueling its

classification. A common trait of high culture media is a focus on the construction of

cultural products, such as the relationships between form, substance, method, and overt

content and covert symbolism compared to popular culture media, in which the

standards for overt content are generally set noticeably lower (Gans 101). A good portion

of high culture by this definition consists of a best-of collection of high quality older

cultural artifacts, which can make it unfair to compare high culture with pop culture, a

topic that is addressed by both Gans and Johnson to significant effect.

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Examples of pop culture media that show noticeable convergence with high culture

characteristics include the television shows Breaking Bad and Community. Breaking Bad is

an example of mass culture media in that it is a syndicated television drama series

occupying an hour-long slot with high tension moments, classic television archetypes,

scheming evil villains, and explosions. However, in addition to the predictable pop culture

trope, Breaking Bad also boasts intense dramatic plot complexity and accomplished acting

as well as pronounced symbolism in every scene and subtle foreshadowing, characteristics

heavily favored in high culture media in contrast to the flashing arrows present in much

television of lesser complexity, especially of the past.

Community as a television show includes its fair share of slapstick humor as well as

eccentric statements of exceeding silliness to more than satisfy viewers of mass taste

culture. However, Community is also chock full of self-referential meta-humor and popular

culture references, in which the humor is based off of an awareness of popular culture

media flashing arrows and tropes, going as far as parodying pop culture classic

cinematography as an inside joke. The meta-jokes and pop culture references are evidence

of a more interactive creator-user relationship, showing the convergence and evolution of

popular and high culture creations over time. The beauty of Communitys multiple layered

taste culture humor also lies in the way one can still gain an enjoyable viewing experience

without fully understanding all levels of the taste humor, though it would of course

probably be an optimal experience to grasp all levels of taste humor.

In addition to taking into consideration Gans postulate that all social groups or

classes have aesthetic urges with some sort of participation and institution in their taste
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culture that adequately meets their aesthetic needs, an understanding of the Sleeper

Curves effects gives credence to the argument that mass culture is now more convergent

than ever (Gans 93). The Sleeper Curves relation and application to the Flynn Effect

suggests that the growth of the average IQ of the populace is positively correlated in

relation to the increasing complexity in popular culture media, showing that the

accessibility of cultural omnivorousness is possibly related to the increase in the average

intelligence of the American population (Johnson 147). If it were not for the progress

society has made in average popular culture media complexity, the prevalence of culturally

omnivorous behavior in society would not be as pronounced as it is today. While the

direction of the causal relationship between the Flynn effect and mass culture complexity is

still not entirely clear, it can be recognized that the increased average IQ probably fuels

progressively more demanding media from mass culture from the user and demand side of

the demand-supply model.

Not only does Gans carefully draw his imaginary lines, he makes a point of noting

that the currents of pop culture tend to converge (and diverge) frequently, which leads to

the existence and flourishing of cultural omnivorousness (96). Even during the 1970s

when Popular Culture and High Culture was originally published, Gans meticulously noted

the lack of concrete cultural boundaries in practice that allowed the various taste cultures

and taste publics to intermingle and borrow from each other. This fluid cultural blending

then allows cultural items to commonly belong in more than one taste culturea

phenomenon that has since become even more widespread. The idea of cultural

omnivorousness through convergent cultural media can be difficult to isolate due to the

way omnivorousness describes the consumption of media of media from various taste
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cultures. In practice today, the taste cultures are frequently so blended together in media

that omnivorous behavior may not always be an indication of a conscious choice out of an

interest in consuming multiple taste cultures simultaneously.

In any case, whether or not the choice is made out of conscious interest should

matter little as long as it puts the consumer in a position in which culturally omnivorous

consumption of the media is reasonably attainable. What this translates to is the ability for

media consisting of multiple taste cultures blended together to possibly become stepping

stones for further progress in the narrowing of the gap between pop and high culture. The

merging of mass and high culture also fuels the growth of cultural omnivores by providing

high culture complexity in media that is widely consumed and easily available to the

masses. The familiar mixing and cross-influencing across taste cultures in certain popular

media is especially possible because, in accordance with the Sleeper Curve and Flynn Effect,

we are now conditioned to be able to accept increased complexity in our mass culture

media, allowing it to converge with high culture with more ease than ever before.

Both Gans and Johnson note in their writings that mass culture media often gets a

negative evaluation when compared to past mass culture as well as high culture media

because mass culture media does not constrain itself too rigidly to high culture aesthetic

standards chiefly because it does not need to, and the lowest parts of mass culture are the

ones frequently pitted against the brightest mass culture moments of the past or the

classics of high culture that are held by academics and scholars in highest esteem. When we

compare the best of todays popular culture media to what may be considered the best of

past mass culture, a different story is observed; for example, comparing Breaking Bad or
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Community to the Andy Griffith Show or The Brady Bunch tells a different story than

comparing Jersey Shore to I Love Lucy (Johnson 91).

When appropriately comparing the best of current pop culture media to the pop

culture media of the past, it is apparent that high quality current mass culture media has a

large affinity for converging with high culture, which makes it conducive to increasing the

amount of cultural omnivorousness. The merging of mass taste cultures and high culture

complexity is beneficial for cultural omnivorousness because it can lead to higher levels of

exposure and consumption of media with high culture complexity by taking advantage of

the accessibility of mass culture media.

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Works Cited

Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste.
New York: Basic, 1999. Print.

Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually
Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead, 2006. Print.