Thursday, February 12, 2015

Reflection
Chapter 9

What is popular culture? Popular culture is a new name given to lo culture, which refers to those cultures or products that most people share or know about such as television, music, videos and popular magazines. There are four characteristics that popular cultures poses. The first is that it is produced by culture industries, the second is that it is everywhere, the third is that it fills social functions and the fourth is that it differs from folk culture. Folk culture is traditional or non mainstream culture activities that are non financially driven.
Apart from popular and folk culture there is also “high culture”. High culture is the culture that is said to be an expression of the elite aristocratic and the rich, examples of these include the opera, classic sculptures, and symphony performances.

There are many ways in which people can consume the message of popular cultures. Encoding is the process of creating a message for others to understand and decoding is the process of interpreting a message. People with similar social identities tend to decode these messages in a similar way.

Often time’s people show a resistance of popular culture, this is when a individual or group chooses to stray away from the norms. An example of this can be the Amish and their decision to not fall into popular cultures.

Popular culture is also linked with stereotyping. Stereotypes are connected to social values and judgments about other groups of people. An example of this is that popular culture often portray males as sometimes being insensitive, sport-loving, cheating and violent wife-beaters.

Popular culture in the United States is mostly culture from the United States whereas popular culture out side of the united states is usually influenced by American popular culture. This is called Culture imperialism which is the domination of culture through the spread of culture products. An example of this is the movie that come out of Hollywood and are circulated around the world.



1 comment:

  1. It is a very good summary of the main ideas in the chapter. It would have been great to provide examples from outside the text. You could also react to the concepts that spoke to you the most

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