An Education & Outreach Project of Infinite Spectrum Productions

Posts tagged ‘pop culture’

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

There is a great body of work exploring the impact classics have on current popular culture. One of my favorite examples of this is the original Willie Wonka film with Gene Wilder. The script is one classic reference after another. It’s part of what makes such a low-budget promotional film for a candy company, a film that is often considered a classic, in and of itself.  It got me thinking about classics in a different light. Not just their impact on today’s popular culture but the impact they had in their own time. Classics AS popular culture.

Recently I asked ASU instructor, Scott Boras, an expert in Popular Culture, if there was any research on the classics as pop culture artifacts of their time. Scott shared with me that part of the working definition of popular culture was that there needed to be an element of mass consumption. But what defines mass consumption? Was Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer a pop culture artifact of its time? Would Shakespeare’s plays be considered popular culture of their time? It’s an interesting question.

For something to be mass consumed it must be mass-produced. In other words, large quantities of uniform products must be created. Since so much of popular culture is ideas then it would make sense that the printing press is probably one of the most important contributors to the creation of popular culture. The printing press allows us to replicate words and pictures-arts and humanities-making them accessible to those who would not otherwise be able to afford to have books copied by hand.

Copied by hand. We don’t think much about the world before the printing press. Recently, I was reminded of its import as the final pages of the St. John’s Bible were completed after 15 years. Yes you read that correctly 15 years. Imagine what your classroom library would look like if you had to hand copy and illustrate each of the books. How many books would be there?

I’m certain we’ve all taken history. The abstract idea of the importance of Gutenberg’s invention has been discussed; but I doubt it really registered in our minds why it so changed the world. This week I finally GOT it. This week I’ve come to understand; and because I understand its got me looking at today’s pop culture artifacts through a different filter. It’s not only about what is left over after what is considered art. It’s also about what the masses have access to.

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So…What is Pop Culture?

WHAT IS POP CULTURE?

So what is Pop Culture? That’s an interesting question. There are few theoretical concepts that are as value-laden as popular culture. There are multiple definitions, and even after exploring them there is little clarity. John Story, in his book Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, explores several definitions. A favorite of mine is that popular culture is the culture that is “left over” once we’ve decided what high culture is.  As an arts educator I often wonder who the “we” is.

In 2011, I was a nominee for the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award in Arts Education. No, I didn’t win but thank you anyway. I bring it up because I want to share a conversation I had at the reception prior to the award ceremony. Bear in mind this was a celebration of “high culture” from our definition. To understand this effectively you must know that I believe in meeting today’s youth where they are. In my view, if we are going to foster the next generation of artists and patrons we need to encourage positive experiences and not alienate them with boring experiences. So programs like Video Games Live that introduces youth to the symphony using music from their favorite video games is right up my alley. When I shared this view with a colleague, he sighed dramatically and said, “Anyone can paint a picture and sell it, that doesn’t make him an artist.” Obviously he doesn’t share my viewpoint and I’m guessing he must be part of the “we”. I don’t think I am.

The introduction to Post World War II American Literature and Culture Database sponsored by the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley (
http://english.berkeley.edu/Postwar/pop.html
) uses this definition:

Popular culture has been defined as everything from “common culture,” to “folk culture,” to “mass culture.” While it has been all of these things at various points in history, in Post-War America, popular culture is undeniably associated with commercial culture and all its trappings: movies, television, radio, cyberspace, advertising, toys, nearly any commodity available for purchase, many forms of art, photography, games, and even group “experiences” like collective comet-watching or rave dancing on ecstasy. While humanities and social science departments before the 1950s would rarely have imagined including anything from the previous list in their curricula, it is now widely acknowledged that popular culture can and must be analyzed as an important part of US material, economic and political culture.

I’ll let you decide which definition you like best. For the purposes of Pop Goes the Classroom we look at the following genres of contemporary popular culture: Graphic Novels and Comic Books, Films, Television, Contemporary Music, Table and Computer Games, Web 2.0, etc.

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The Classroom of Popular Culture

What video games can teach us about making students want to
learn

by James Paul Gee

Why is it that many children can’t sit still long enough to finish their
homework and yet will spend hours playing games on the computer?
Video games are spectacularly successful at engaging young learners.
It’s not because they are easy. Good video games are long, complex,
and difficult. They have to be; if they were dumbed down, no one would
want to play. But if children couldn’t figure out how to play them—and
have fun doing so—game designers would soon go out of business.
To succeed, game designers incorporate principles of learning that are
well supported by current research. Put simply, they recruit learning as
a form of pleasure. Games like Rise of Nations, Age of Mythology, Deus
Ex, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Tony Hawk’s Underground
teach children not only how to play but how to learn, and to keep on
learning.
Children have to learn long, complex, and difficult things in school, too.
They need to be able to learn in deep ways: to improvise, innovate, and
challenge themselves; to develop concepts, skills, and relationships that
will allow them to explore new worlds; to experience learning as a
source of enjoyment and as a way to explore and discover who they are.
Let’s look at how this kind of learning works in cutting-edge video
games. We might learn something ourselves.

Continue Here

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First let me say thank you to Felicia Day for posting the link below on her twitter feed. It was great fun to read but then I got to thinking-What could be a better unit that Dickens, HG Wells, and The Internet. It doesn’t get much more out of the box than that. With that as the only introduction I’ll leave the creativity of how you might use this little flow chart to you. Although I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Flowchart: Understanding the Web, for Fans of Charles Dickens

BY Doogie HornerTue Oct 26, 2010 In this latest installment, the author of “Everything Explained Through Flowcharts” (out Tuesday) travels to 19th (and 31st) century London–braving the plague, Jack the Ripper, and countless robbery attempts–to explain the 20th century’s most life-changing tool. Continued…

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Pop…Pop…Pop…Pop Culture

Welcome to the Pop Goes the Classroom Blog. It is my hope that the blog will become a collection of shared resources that everyone contributes to.

Before we get too far however, I think its important for us all to understand what popular culture. I’ve taken the liberty of copying this from Wikipedia.

Popular Culture

There are multiple competing definitions of popular culture. John Storey, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, discusses six definitions. The quantitative definition of culture has the problem that much “high culture” (e.g. television dramatizations of Jane Austen) is widely favoured. “Pop culture” is also defined as the culture that is “left over” when we have decided what high culture is. However, many works straddle or cross the boundaries, e.g. Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Storey draws attention to the forces and relations which sustain this difference such as the educational system.

A third definition equates pop culture with Mass Culture. This is seen as a commercial culture, mass produced for mass consumption. From a Western European perspective, this may be compared to American culture. Alternatively, “pop culture” can be defined as an “authentic” culture of the people, but this can be problematic because there are many ways of defining the “people”. Storey argues that there is a political dimension to popular culture; neo-Gramscian hegemony theory “… sees popular culture as a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups in society and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups in society.” A postmodernist approach to popular culture would “no longer recognize the distinction between high and popular culture’

Storey emphasizes that popular culture emerges from the urbanization of the industrial revolution, which identifies the term with the usual definitions of ‘mass culture’. Studies of Shakespeare (by Weimann, Barber or Bristol, for example) locate much of the characteristic vitality of his drama in its participation in Renaissance popular culture, while contemporary practitioners like Dario Fo and John McGrath use popular culture in its Gramscian sense that includes ancient folk traditions (the commedia dell’arte for example).[6][7]

Popular culture changes constantly and occurs uniquely in place and time. It forms currents and eddies, and represents a complex of mutually interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways. For example, certain currents of pop culture may originate from, (or diverge into) a subculture, representing perspectives with which the mainstream popular culture has only limited familiarity. Items of popular culture most typically appeal to a broad spectrum of the public.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture

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