ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 outlined some of the characteristics of texts that enable them to be made into popular culture, but the presence of these characteristics does not, of itself, guarantee that a text will be chosen. The people discriminate among the products of the culture industries, choosing some and rejecting others in a process that often takes the industry by surprise, for it is driven by the social conditions of the people at least as much as by the characteristics of the text. This popular discrimination, then, is quite different from the critical or aesthetic discrimination promoted by schools and universities to evaluate the quality of highbrow texts. Popular discrimination is concerned with functionality rather than quality, for it is concerned with the potential uses of the text in everyday life. Three main criteria underlie this selection process: relevance, semiotic productivity, and the flexibility of the mode of consumption.
Popular culture is made at the interface between the cultural resources provided by capitalism and everyday life. This identifies relevance as a central criterion. If the cultural resource does not offer points of pertinence through which the experience of everyday life can be made to resonate with it, then it will not be popular. As everyday life is lived and experienced fluidly, through shifting social allegiances, these points of pertinence must be multiple, open to social rather than textual determinations, and transient.
