Monday, February 9, 2015
"The Rise of Popular Culture: A Historiographical Sketch" by LeRoy Ashby is a very informative article. I found it to be a little dense, but it had a lot of useful information about many different intellectuals who studied popular culture. A large portion of the information that is presented in the article expresses how popular culture is a power structure and that there is a balance between people choosing to consume and people choosing what to consume. The past few weeks in this class has made me more aware of that power structure, particularly the more positive aspects of it. Despite being manipulated into consuming, we can manipulate what we consume. This means that we can be taught ideologies by pop culture, then unlearn those same ideologies from those same sources they originated from. Everyone in a culture is affected by it's pop culture, the more we understand, expose and decipher it, the more prominent the positive aspects will be.
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It is interesting that you mention that we can unlearn things we are taught by these companies. Looking at the change of pop culture over time something that might have been okay for the time but is completely unacceptable now might be an example. These business probably helped reinforce very negative ideologies of their time period as well. I think an example of today’s effect from these advertisements would be the sexualization of ads. It is very common in ads such as Axe body wash and fragrance commercials showing that it is okay to be sexual and intimate without commitment.
ReplyDeleteT. Bowers
It’s weird to think that culture is power. Could it be this way in other countries? In America, media is all around us and is implemented in almost everything we do, so it’s easy to see how the power lies in the popular culture if media is a big part of it. What about places where a family might have only one telephone, what is their popular culture defined by? Just a thought…
ReplyDeleteI would think that the popular culture that affects a family with only a telephone would be the ideals, expectations and traditions that the the town or village they live in internalize. Say, for example, there's a weekly gathering/religious service that the every one in the small community they live in attends. While there, they are probably listening to music, dancing, being told of religious expectations, to them, it's an integeral part of life, similar to popculture, music, entertainment and conveying of ideas.
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