Pop Culture Freaks Identity, Mass Media, and Society

YouTube celebrities. Binge-watching television. Professional athlete scandals. These are the phenomena that make up our popular culture and permeate our society. In this accessibly written introduction to the sociology of popular culture, Dustin Kidd provides the tools to think critically about the cultural soup served daily by film, television, music, print media, the internet, and sport.Utilizing each chapter to present updated and timely examples, Kidd highlights the tension between inclusion and individuality that lies beneath mass media and commercial culture, using this tension as a point of entry to an otherwise expansive topic. He systematically considers several dimensions of identity-race, class, gender, sexuality, disability-to provide a broad overview of the field that encompasses classical and contemporary theory, original data, topical examples, and a strong pedagogical focus on methods.The second edition of Pop Culture Freaks still encourages students to develop further research questions and projects from the material, but now also gives students a better understanding of the multi-disciplinary theories upon which they should draw to do their own research. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are brought to bear in Kidd's examination of the labor force for cultural production, the representations of identity in cultural objects, and the surprising differences in how various audiences consume and use mass culture in their everyday lives.