Folk Culture
The distinction between folk culture and mass culture rests on the difference between two basic types of society.
The first, in which folk culture is said to dominate, is characteristic of pre-industrial societies. That is, societies that existed before the invention of machines and mass power sources (steam, gas, electricity, etc.) and in which the main type of economic production was agriculture (basically subsistence agriculture where people farmed for their own survival with little surplus produce). An example of this type of society is Britain before the Industrial Revolution and the development of a Capitalist economic system.
The second, in which mass cultural forms are held to dominate, is characteristic of industrial societies such as present-day Britain. This type of society is characterised by factory production based around machines, rather than agriculture.
Elite theorists in particular characterise folk culture as a vibrant lower class culture (music, dance, medicine, oral traditions and so forth) variously expressed through popular gatherings such as festivals, fairs, carnivals and so forth.
This culture is passed from one generation to the next in a variety of traditional forms, in particular folk songs, fairy tales and word-of-mouth.
Industrialisation is the villain of the situation, in that it destroyed much of the basis of folk culture by forcing people away from agriculture into towns and factories, breaking-up the traditional communities on which much of this traditional culture was based. The cultural vacuum left by this break-up was filled by popular / mass culture, manufactured and sold to people as a substitute for this traditional past. Unlike traditional folk culture which was seen to be active and participatory, popular culture was seen to be characterised by its passivity. In basic terms, people simply consumed whatever was put in front of them, such was their desire for cultural products.
In modern Britain, for example, modern elite theorists criticise the "Heritage Industry" that recreates the things of the past - buildings, communities and the like - and sells the "experience" to its customers who visit, watch the video and buy the T-shirt before moving-on to consume another pre-packaged slice of culture.
Trowler ("Investigating The Media", 1991) summarises this view thus:
"Capitalism quickly polluted folk culture and replaced it with a plastic commodity culture - mass culture. The old traditions were quickly wiped out. The working man and woman have become passive recipients of culture, not active participants in it. Today they sit in the cinema rather than take part in the folk dance. They buy fast food rather than make good food themselves with traditional recipes. Advertising has given them the constant desire for things which they can't have. The world is filed with characters from the television who they don't really know, though they spend hours reading and talking about them as they once might have done about characters in the village. The mass media's role has been to transmit and propagate mass culture".
The above is a politically Conservative view of culture. A more politically-radical interpretation was given by a group of Marxist Conflict theorists, writing from the 1940's, known as the Frankfurt School. These writers offered a different solution to the problem of the development of mass culture.
They argued that mass culture was a way of distracting the working classes from the real causes of their problems in Capitalist society (low wages, exploitation, lack of power and status, etc.). In simple terms, the development of a mass culture that encouraged passive consumption of the pre-packaged products of big business not only destroyed vital, communal, aspects of folk culture, but also provided the working classes with an illusory sense of happiness, togetherness and well-being.
A modern example of this might be the tabloid newspapers' preoccupation with the monarchy. People are encouraged to take an interest in the lives of people with whom they have little or nothing in common, seeing them as soap-opera figures to be watched with passive fascination rather than active criticism. Thus, vital questions about the role and purpose of a monarchy are overlooked in favour of questions about who is sleeping with whom, how much each will get from a divorce, whether Charles will marry the real "love of his life" - the permutations are endless.
To aid our involvement, distant people with distant lives are personalised with pet names - Chas 'n' Di, Fat Fergie, the Royal Mistress and so forth. Through these devices, the argument goes, we are encouraged to view these people as somehow "just like everyone else, except they are fabulously wealthy". The behaviour of royalty is further portrayed, soap-opera fashion, as a series of scripted events and set-pieces. Thus, the "fairy-tale Wedding" gives way to the "saga of the Royal Divorce", made more complicated and fascinating by "the Other Woman" (or, by way of variation, the "Other Man").
Both the Elite and Frankfurt School viewpoints have things in common, even though they are politically far apart. For example:
In summary, although both of these basic theories have modern-day advocates, the main argument levelled against them (apart from charges of political bias) is that neither accurately captures or reflects the true complexity of cultural developments and forms of behaviour.
In particular, both see working class culture as dangerous and worthless (Elite theorists saw it as a threat to high cultural forms, whereas the Frankfurt School saw it evidence of a working class that had been diverted from the pursuit of its real class interests by "bread and circuses").