Culture
Dialectic Magazine will also have a significant focus on many aspects of culture. This includes the effects of pop culture on our everyday lives. Culture, according to its definition within anthropology is the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another. Culture also refers to sub-groups of like-minded individuals, for example, in the way that culture can be defined as the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture or the drug culture.
Culture also can refer to the mores and values of a particular country or society. Culture is at the heart of so much of what defines us as individuals. Culture and pop culture have very profound effects upon shaping attitudes, values, and beliefs. Pop culture contains within it media-driven trends that it could be argued interfere with what might be considered the common good, more often than not. Media-driven pop culture is often, in many ways, a distraction from the stresses of our every day lives. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Or is this pop culture influence one of the prominent dialectics of our modern-day experience? Is it polarized and devoid of healthy paradox or rich with paradox, or an alternating combination of both?
More than hearing about or reading about culture these days we hear and read about pop culture. “The earliest use of “popular” in English was during the fifteenth century in law and politics, meaning ‘low’ ‘base’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘of the common people’; from the late eighteenth century it began to mean ‘widespread’ and gain in positive connotation. (Williams 1985). ‘Culture’ has been used since the 1950s to refer to various subgroups of society, with emphasis on cultural differences.” (http://en.wikipedia.org)
Differences that can be denoted by the different beliefs, values, ethics, and social mores of various subgroups in a society. Differences which are also very notable between individual countries and the fabric and makeup of their own ethnic and religious customs.
Cultural trends are largely driven, often, by media. Media is in the eye of the storm of pop culture and its omnipotence in our lives. Media’s widespread and ever-proliferating inter-play with its focus on pop culture and its attempts to define it, sell it, and explain it. The ratings wars in media may be at the heart of the trends in pop culture that have profound influence on society’s values and morals – what many institutions, groups, and individuals within society come to value or devalue.
Culture and pop culture have significant influence in many areas of our lives. Some would say to our determent, individually and on a societal level. Others would say to our betterment. Yet others would simply say, pop culture is an unhealthy, narcissistic distraction that is taking away from the quality of our lives in many individual and collective ways. What do you think?
We will be examining aspects of culture and pop culture in up-coming issues of this online magazine in articles, essays, and via fiction and non-fiction.
© A.J. Mahari, Editor-In-Chief of Dialectic Magazine, October 4, 2009 -All rights reserved.
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