01 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
Legal Perspective of "Semiotic Democracy"
"Cultural populists," . . . generally view popular culture as contested terrain in which individuals and groups (racial, ethnic, gender, class, etc.) struggle, albeit on unequal terms, to make and establish their own meanings and identities. As the populists see things, the consumers of cultural commodities (movies, songs, fashions, television programs, etc.) neither uniformly receive nor uncritically accept the "preferred meanings" that are generated and circulated by the culture industry. T... 1 
notes
notesAlso a way of saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," in that entertainers have no control over how the viewer reinterprets their work.
29 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
The Hypersociality of Collectible Card Games
Yu-Gi-Oh! demonstrates how pervasive media technologies in everyday settings
integrate the imagination into a wider range of sites of social activity.
Far from the shut-in behavior that gave rise to the most familiar forms of antimedia
rhetoric, this media mix of children’s popular culture is wired, extroverted,
and hypersocial, reflecting forms of sociality augmented by dense sets
of technologies, signifiers, and systems of exchange. David Buckingham and
Julian Sefton-Green (2004) have arg...
1 CCGs are a very social game, involving not just game play but trading, bargaining, getting out to find cards, etc.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
No Such Thing as "Universal Culture"
As the pop pundits keep reminding us, we are becoming a global culture. We share the same TV shows and movies, drink the same Coca-Cola, and shoot the same Kodak film. But this "global culture" is highly superficial—^it is only the gloss of popular culture, apparent only in what people over the world would like to buy. I am guessing that those boasting of an electronic superhighway where "anybody" can be connected to "anybody" have not traveled much in the third world; they are blinded by t... 1 notes
notesPundits keep reminding us that culture is becoming homogenized, but tell that to the third world inhabitant living without electricity or internet.
06 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Middlebrow Culture of Effort
The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself. Many uneducated lowbrows, particularly immigrants, cherished middlebrow values: the millions of sets of encyclopedias sold door to door from the twenties through the fifties were often purchased on the installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children w...Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism intellectualism
Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism intellectualism
1 notes
notesThe post-WWII people who bought encyclopedias and literature were trying to better themselves and believed in self-improvement through self-education. When that culture was lost in favor of pop-culture, America lost its middle-class intellectualism.
