| Home |
 |
Student Resources |
|
Part V: Cultural Tradition: Popular Culture |
|
The word “culture” has different meanings for different people. For some, it is a matter of taste, indicating one’s knowledge of and participation in the artistic achievements of a society. For these people, to be “cultured” means to place value in the accepted aesthetic objects produced by one’s society— “classic” paintings, “great” literature, “classical” music and dance, etc. But the study of culture can also be viewed in wider terms that include many facets of the everyday world around us.
The study of “popular culture” refers not to the time-tested, widely accepted masterpieces of a society, but to everyday objects and phenomena, which can reveal society’s values. Rather than a matter of taste or aesthetics, the study of popular culture is more like anthropology or sociology—it begins with the belief that changing tastes and beliefs can reveal a good deal about a society’s wider values.
The selections in this section of The Conscious Reader focus upon such popular creations and phenomena, seeking by analysis to unveil the underlying meanings that can be derived from popular music, film, radio, television, sports, the ways in which we use language in everyday life, and even comic books. For a writer, understanding the ways in which popular culture can be treated as a subject for study can provide a vast range of possible topics—topics with which you have a great deal of personal experience simply by virtue of your awareness of the culture that surrounds you.
|