Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Introduction


     Hello and welcome to Alex’s Pop Kiln. This is an introduction to Alexandra Johnson’s Popular Culture Blog for English 313: Popular Culture. I first would like to say my main interest is photography and fine arts as well as film and computers. I find that this course is relevant to prior art courses that I have taken reflecting on pop culture, pop art, mass media and American lifestyle as a commodity.
First, I would like to state what popular culture is from my perspective.
·      Popular culture is what is popular now (current at the time).
·      A mix of art, media, television, film, computer and other unveiling technologies,
·      that is exercised (or emphasized, or expressed) within a culture.
After reviewing some of the courses text, I found that my perspective on popular culture is much too narrow. Although the ideas that I have expressed do coincide with the ideals of popular culture there is more to popular culture’s meaning.
According to the text of Chris Barker, Raymond Williams describes culture as “a whole way of life” (Barker 41). Which is then referred to as the anthropological approach to culture. Up above I listed only five ideals that derive from popular culture; however, popular culture consist of more that just five. It seems that politics, church, gender, classes are among many other ideals that develop within a culture. Barker states, “the idea of culture refers to shared meanings” (Barker 42).  Basically when two individuals can share the same meaning from the same source, there is an understanding that is achieved. If the understanding (meaning) can be shared through out a vast number of people then it becomes popular in culture.
In reference to Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s The Politics of Culture, it was stated that, “anthropologist have always used the word [culture] in a much broader sense to mean forms of life and of social expression” (Rivkin). Barker’s text also states, “William’s concept of culture is [anthropological] since it centers on everyday meanings: values, norms and material/symbolic goods (Barker 42).  Both views are derived from how people behave during social settings.
Both readings mention Marxist theory and the idea of culture being political. Although we learn from our own experiences and are taught most of the things we say, do and think. The everyday images we see on television or in magazines, for example, are controlled to a certain degree. They too control our social order.
Other aspects I found that interested me in the writings of Rivkin and Ryan’s text was John Fiske’s remarks on audiences being able to “decode” cultural messages. This enables audiences to think about their lives culturally without hesitation. As an audience do we receive these messages subliminally? Another aspect I found of interest was the remarks by Pierre Bourdieu and “social systems”. “Bourdieu argues that culture is a way of distinguishing between positions in the social hierarchy and that the social system thus tends to reproduce itself through culture and through schooling” (Rivkin). This being stated, culture is controlled to a certain degree by usage of selective imagery and subject matter.

 (41) Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice, Chapter2: Questions of Culture and Ideology. Sage 2008.

 (42) Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice, Chapter2: Questions of Culture and Ideology. Sage, 2008.

Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden:  Blackwell, 1998.

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