Why Study Popular Culture?

Why study popular culture?

Brand exercise

• Take you wallet purse out and list all the brands and logos you can find in your wallet purse

Popular culture

• Reveals who we are, what we believe in, and what we value
• Glee a show in the US. Famous from outside to the US
• Miss American
• It forms the way we think about and operate in the world
• It reflects who we are
• It reforms how we perceive operate in the world －Vision is powerful (Picture: Detroit in ruins)
• Hear about popularity of the trilogy; Read it; Participate in the culture.
• The trilogy reflects our inner desire (that we enjoy the content, that we want to be a part of the group, etc.)
• It creates a new norm . (Fifthy Shades)
• Legacy of Popular Cultures Studies
• MSU: Top Nine School for Popular Culture
• Often Associated with low-culture

Does not necessary mean poor in quality or deviant

Low in term of social hierarchy and agency

• Often Associated with the non privileged population

-Racial and ethnic minorities

-Woman

-Youth

-Homo/Bi-sexuals

Culture:

“A system for communal life that includes specific beliefs, rituals, performances, art forms, lifestyle patterns, symbols, language, clothing, music, dance, and any other mode of human expressive, intellectual, ritualistic, and communicative behavior that is associated with a group of people in a particular period of time” Danesi, P.2

• He is a cultured person

Knows art. Goes to a classical music concert. Reads Shakespeare.

“Culture”: Hint of elitism? Hint of superiority?

High Culture to Low Culture

“Culture”=High Culture

==Stablished aesthetic canons, social class, education, and other variables within the community.”

==The privileged class.

==Race/ Ethnicity

==Class At least middle class /Age Adults/ Gender Men/ Sexuality

==The privileged Class(Whites, Rich, Adult, Hetrosexual)

==$8 Beer

“Culture”=Low Culture

==The non privileged class

==Immigrants

==Poor

==Youth

==Homo/Bi-secual

==$2 Beer

Romance novel, Disneyland, Urban bar, Hip Music are not high culture

Cultivation Theory-Different from Popular culture

看暴力视屏也会变的暴力

Popular Culture: Two Schools of thought

• It has existed since the primitive times (Classicists)

Historians have failed to recognize

• It originates in the late 18th C (modernists)

Need for the middle-class and mass communication system

Popular Culture: “The arts that have most validity for the greatest part of the population are not considered arts at all.” (John Dewey, qtd in Nye, p.1)

Popular Culture in our context

• The term surfaced in the 1950s
• Popular culture became a social reality in the mid 20th century
• Category of taste and lifestyle
• Post WWII affluence+ baby boom

Hippie/Disco/Punk era

• Contemporary origin of popular culture

Popular culture: