3.Ideas. Sometimes an idea will spread like wildfire, and then, just as suddenly,
slip out of view. The Celestine prophesy, beliefs in UFOs, various New Age
ideas, and everything you needed to know you learned in kindergarten are
examples of idea fads.4.Personalities. Some celebrities burst on the scene for their accomplishments, for
example, athletes (Tiger Woods, Lebron James) or rock stars (Norah Jones, Bono,
Eminem). Yet others are simply “famous for being famous”—everyone knows
about them and seems to care about them, but few actually know what they’ve
actually done to merit the attention. Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and
Jessica Simpson are examples of the latter.Today there are also Internet fads, sometimes called “Internet memes,” which sud-
denly circulate wildly and/or draws millions of hits through the World Wide Web.
Internet memes, defined as “self-propagating units of culture,” include people (like
Mr. T, the A-Team actor who is considered one of the earliest Internet fads), video,
audio and animation segments, and various websites and blogs that suddenly become
“in” places to read and post.Fashion. Afashionis a behavior, style, or idea that is more permanent than a fad. It
may originate as a fad and become more widespread and more acceptable over
time. For example, the practice of tattooing, once associated with lower-class and
even dangerous groups, became a fad in the 1990s, but is, today, an accepted part of
fashion, with over one-fourth of Americans under 25 years old having at least one
tattoo.
Fashions involve widespread acceptance of the activity, whether it is music, art,
literature, clothing, or sports. Because fashions are less fleeting than fads, they involve
the cultural institutions that mediate our relationships with culture. Fashions may
become institutionalized and aggressively marketed to ensure that people know that
unless you subscribe to a particular fashion, you will be seen as an outsider. While
fads may appear to bubble up from below, fashions are often deliberately created. (In
reality, fads are also likely to have been created.)The Politics of Popular Culture
Most cultural elites are culturally conservative (regardless of how they vote or what
sorts of policies they favor). That is, they wish to conserve the cultural forms that are
currently in place and the hierarchies of value that are currently given to them. The
status quo, as Bourdieu argued, reproduces their cultural dominance. As a result,
changes in popular culture typically come from the margins, not the center—from
those groups who have been excluded from the cultural elites and thus develop
cultural expressions that are, at least in part, forms of cultural resistance.
Take clothing, for example. Blue jeans were once a workingman’s attire. In fact,
Levi Strauss invented blue jeans to assist gold miners in California in their muddy
work. Appropriated by the youth culture in the 1960s as a form of clothing rebellion
against the bland conformity of 1950s campus fashion, blue jeans were considered a
fad—until kids’ parents started to wear them. Then fashion designers got into the act,
and the fad became a fashion. Today these symbols of a youthful rejection of mate-
rialism can cost up to $500 a pair.
Trends in clothing, music, and other tastes in popular culture often originate today
among three marginalized groups: African Americans, young people, and gay men
and lesbians. As we’ve seen, blue jeans were once a youthful fashion statement of60 CHAPTER 2CULTURE AND SOCIETY