Pros and Cons of Popular Review

Like anything, popular culture is a double-edged sword, with its positive and effective side, as well as the negative side that needs to be avoided.

As far as the positive aspects are concerned, we can at least recognize them from the following aspects.

First, the popularization and dissemination of contemporary culture, so that culture from monopoly to **** enjoyment. As mentioned earlier, the emergence of modern popular culture is linked to the mass media of communication, it is the product of social industrialization, urbanization and technologization, and its object of consumption is the general public of the society, so it can be said that popular culture is a form of cultural practice of the ordinary people. The practice of popular culture has accelerated the process of cultural diversification in contemporary China, and promoted the penetration and radiation of culture to the mass level. It breaks the monopoly of the cultural class on culture, a phenomenon of cultural privilege, and makes culture come out from the cultural pyramid, go to the people, go to the square, go to the family, and have a direct relationship with the spiritual and cultural life of hundreds of millions of ordinary people, and become their daily activities, so that the culture (especially the culture and art in the narrow sense) gets rid of the parasitical nature of the past which is dependent on a very small number of people, and obtains the extensive social nature. The cultural arts (especially in the narrower sense) have acquired a broadly social dimension. In the past, certain traditional forms of culture, such as painting and sculpture, existed in a "mysterious" and "cult-like" way, i.e. they were mostly isolated from the public as collectors' items for those with status and wealth. The mass production and reproduction technology of today's popular culture have broken this situation, making cultural masterpieces come out from the closed and mysterious existence and become something that everyone can enjoy. Undoubtedly this is a great historical progress in the history of cultural development.

Secondly, a new mode of cultural production has been formed. Popular culture has come out from the pyramid of culture, gone to the folk, to the square, to the family, and has a direct relationship with the spiritual life of hundreds of millions of ordinary people, becoming their daily activities. The more important significance lies in the fact that it creates a new mode of production: one is the mechanism of production of spiritual products guided by consumption; another is the participation of the public in the process of production of the products, which has changed the situation of monopolization and guardianship of cultural creation activities in the past by the minority of cultural elites. The second is the participation of the masses in the production process, which changes the past situation of a few cultural elites monopolizing and tutelage of cultural creation activities, and makes the production of cultural products change from the past single passive production-reception mode to a two-way interactive mode of production-reception.

Third, the cultural relief of mental pressure The economic development of modern society and the changes in human spiritual life have highlighted the soothing and dissolving functions of popular culture. The so-called soothing and dissolving function of popular culture means that through cultural participation, cultural acceptance and meaningful communication, people can vent their emotions, pacify their pain, eliminate their sorrows, balance their minds, ease their conflicts, and maintain their selves. For example, some television stations and radio stations now run a series of programs of conversation, on-demand broadcasting and mass participation activities, so that the public can talk and dialogue, express their inner feelings and express their self-assertion through these cultural channels. There are also popular songs, skits, comedies and cartoons that we can come into contact with every day that have a unique defusing function. Especially popular TV dramas, over the years, TV serials have attracted batch after batch of viewers to follow the broadcasting schedule and watch one episode after another, becoming the main way of night life for hundreds of millions of people. The reason for this is that these popular cultural products provide people with the space and means to dream, relax and soothe themselves in a way that cannot be provided in the tightly regulated real world. The TV series Longing gave the masses of Chinese society, which had experienced the radical and unsettling rapid changes of the 1980s, a peaceful imagination; it was a carefully crafted soothing text, like a commonplace song, that dissolved people's anxieties and made them savor a touch of truth in their nostalgia for the warmth of the past. Another example is the Shanghai Oriental TV station in January 1994 launched a special program "792 for you to solve the problem", the program was carried out in a month received 6856 letters from listeners, talking about all kinds of confusion and sorrow, so that participants from this to see a kind of hope, feel a warmth. This is the power of popular culture, this cultural power is any organization to take administrative means and economic means can not be formed.

Fourth, the cultural enrichment of leisure time. The popular and entertaining nature of popular culture provides a wide range of cultural means for people to spend their leisure time.

Fifth, a new industrial system has been formed. The forms of popular culture are many and varied, and the fields involved are very wide, so it has formed a series of cultural industries, such as the newspaper and magazine industry, film and television culture industry, advertising industry, entertainment and recreational service industry, etc. According to the current classification method in China, they are the most important industries in the world. According to the current industrial classification method in China, they are all important parts of the tertiary industry and can be called cultural industries. Although these industries are different in means of production, operation rules, circulation process, scale of operation, input-output ratio and so on, but in general, they are all the same as other industries in market economy, following the general law and development mechanism of market economy, going through the links of production, exchange, circulation, consumption and so on, and all of them need to make cost inputs and obtain certain outputs and benefits. At present, with the continuous development of popular culture and the rising status in people's lives, the scale and speed of the development of popular culture industries are increasing, constituting an important family in China's national economic system.

The negative aspects of popular culture are also obvious. Because of its commercial character, because it has a certain spontaneous blindness and the resulting complexity, its disadvantages are also obvious. As the Frankfurt School pointed out: in a superficial sense, it excessively stimulates man's desire for sensual enjoyment; in a deeper sense, it downgrades man's immaterial spiritual activity to a special material activity, thus quietly stifling man's free nature and abolishing his ideals.

Mass culture is still a shallow culture. In terms of historical development, popular culture is a cultural enhancement; but thinking in another sense, this historical progress has also led to the generalization of culture, which has become something reproducible and readily available, something flat, without a sense of depth and without profound meaning (of course not all of popular culture is like this). The main function of popular culture, or people's understanding of its main function, is entertainment, games and ways of pastime, often ignoring its reflective, enlightening and educational nature. Some people flirt with the production of popular culture as