Culture

From Metapedia

The term "culture" is, of course, a contested term with multiple meanings in various contexts and discourses. In the context of semiotics, culture can be viewed as the sum of rule-governed, shared, learned and learnable, transmittable, symbolic activity used by a group in any given place and time.

"Culture is the generator of structuredness... [and] the nonhereditary memory of the community" (Lotman). Meanings, values, significance circulate in second-order languages (symbols, values, images, stories, myths) that use both ordinary language (one's native language) and other sign-systems like visual images, mass media, and information technology. All these ways of transmitting shared and stored meanings involve a mediated content. To be in a culture means to be in preexisting but constantly changing sign-systems.

In the "Cultural Studies" model, "culture" is a field of conflicting and competing forces resulting from structured asymmetries in power, capital, and value.

Cultural Studies as an academic field has been accused of dematerializing or leveling media content in order to objectify ideological and political messages for analysis. The approach is often further characterized as an "effects" model of analysis that focuses on capitalist and corporate mechanisms of control and usually omits the agency and activity of individuals, groups, and subcultures who are the receivers and users of media.

The "Cultural Studies" Approach

Stuart Hall's "cultural marxism" approach builds out a more complex model based on extending the theory of hegemony, the social-economic processes for "manufacturing consent" among the lower classes (the "have-nots" or "have-lesses") to buy-in to the view promoted by ownership classes ("the haves").

In this view of cultural studies, mass media and communications typically encode (implicitly presuppose as a context for meaning) a dominant ideology which finds mass acceptance. Media is thus ideologically encoded to maximize the willing consent of the consumer and "have-nots" to "keep with the program" and perpetuate the status quo of power and wealth distribution.

Hegemony of ideologies that protect the governing and ownership class is not a matter of force, coercion, or obvious deliberate manipulation. It functions so well because it relies on the willing consent of those with less power and wealth to accept a dominant ideology, to see the world and act according the view of those above.

Examples of mainstream ideologies that circulate in the media and protect hegemonic power:

• Free speech (as a belief, when few have power in what they voice)
• Individuality (great for marketing, since consumerism requires the simultaneous presentation of unique personal choices and identities and the need to look and buy like everyone else in an identity group)
• Freedom of choice (part of our individuality beliefs, also the main assumption in consumer culture and marketing: the ideology of the shopping mall)

In this view of hegemony and culture, social behavior is overdetermined by multiple identity factors like race, social class, sex and gender, and nationality, which are encoded in hierarchies of power, significance, and economic value.

But Hall and others like Dick Hebidge show that people have many strategies for dealing with media contents: operate in the dominant code, use a negotiable code (accepts but modifies the meaning based on the viewer's and viewer communities position), or substitute an oppositional code (using critical awareness, demystification, irony, subversion, play, parody, like DJ sampling). In this way, many subcultures are formed around group uses of media, images, and music that create identities and differentiations from mainstream or dominant culture.