Sunday, March 25, 2012

CAPS blog #5


Popular Culture in Today’s Society
Popular culture is defined as a new name for low culture, referring to those cultural products that most people share and know about, including television, music, videos, and popular magazines (Martin & Nakayama, 2009).  Cultural activities are all divided into two groups: high culture and low culture.  High culture activities consist of certain things of the world’s well to do elite such as the symphony, opera, and fine art.  A good example of a high culture topic would be the republican primary race going on right now leading up to the general election in November.  Politics is one of the main concerns of our country’s well to do elite citizens and they keep up on the different stories involving this topic.  On the opposition, low culture activities consist of the world’s non-elite in activities such as music videos, television, game shows, and graffiti art.  Popular culture is just another term that explains these types of activities that are more entertaining for the world’s non-elite citizens than the world’s well to do elite citizens.  As of late, there have been many things that have been a part of popular culture in our country such as Tim Tebow news in the sports world or news about different musicians announcing album releases and upcoming dates of summer concert tours. 
Popular culture can be directly related to the intercultural example of diversity.  The definition of diversity can expand our conceptions of what is possible—linguistically, politically, socially—as various ways of thinking coverage (Martin & Nakayama, 2009).  When the concepts of high culture and low culture are related to social aspects of communication they stand-alone.  In one way or other diversity basically means society is made up of different groups just like the examples I stated about low culture and high culture because these are different groups of society that are made up of different things.
This will definitely influence my intercultural communication interaction in the future because I am obviously an individual component of popular culture and know exactly what is comprised of high culture and low culture.  Throughout my life I have always been interested in certain things that fall under the category of popular culture such as entertainment, music, and sports.  After learning more about these two different types of culture it has definitely got me a little more intrigued to learn more about the activities that are associated with high culture. 
           
 Reference Page
Martin, Judith N. & Nakayama, Thomas K. (2009).  Intercultural Communication In        
Contexts: Fifth Edition. McGraw Hill Companies. pp. 350-351
  • This video is very interesting because it makes you think about yourself and how involved in popular culture you are.  This man talks about americans and how we can be slaves to popular culture due to commercials and advertisements.


























  • Here are some examples of popular culture items within our society today.  The Simpsons TV show has grown great interest as a low culture item and Tim Tebow and the popularity within the sports world is another great concept within this category.

2 comments:

  1. High and low culture are interesting topics. In and before high school, I would say I was influenced by low culture. In college, the Lied center has allowed for me to experience some high culture. However, in college I rarely have time to do most of the low culture things I used to. Could this relate to not having any culture, in college?!?!

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  2. I am in communication class all about popular culture right now so hearing your definition makes me think of a few things. I think rather then calling popular culture low culture it's rather better described as whats left over after high culture. Hearing the word low culture places emphasis on its lower standard, class, education ect. When in reality many scholars are starting to research popular culture and find this culture doesn't necessarily relate to ones intellect, class or income.

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