CIVILIZATION WHAT IS POP-CULTURE • Culture One if the two or three most complicated words in the English language. (Willams 1983)
May refer to:
- A general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development - A particular way of life (lived culture) • Ideology The most important conceptual category in cultural studies (Turner 1996) - May refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people - Maybe used to indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality - “False consciousness” - Power relations outside the “class” POPULAR CULTURE • Popular (Williams 1983) - well liked by many people - inferior kinds of work - work deliberately setting out to win favor with the people - culture actually made by the people for themselves • It is the culture that is let over after we have decided what is high culture. • Definitions of pop-culture is often supported by claims that it is mass produced commercial culture. • • The field of popular culture is structured by the attempt of the ruling class to win hegemony and by forms of opposition to this endeavor. As such , it consists not simply of an imposed mass culture that is coincident with dominant ideology, nor simply of spontaneously oppositional cultures, but is rather an area of negotiation between the two within which – in different particular types of popular culture – dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural and ideological values and elements are mixed in different permutations. (Bennet 96)