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.
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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