The Definitions and Importance of Culture, Ideology, and Popular Culture

Categories: Communication Philosophy Popular Culture

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The first chapter of this book goes into all of the definitions of culture, ideology, and popular culture. Below are the most important points I found in the readings. First, culture can be used to refer to “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development'. We could, for example, speak about the cultural development of Western Europe and be referring only to intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic factors – great philosophers, great artists and great poets. A second use of the word 'culture' might be to suggest a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group', for example, literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals.

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Finally, the book suggests that culture can be used to refer to “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity'. In other words, culture here means the texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning. Ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people.

For example, we could speak of 'professional ideology' to refer to the ideas which inform the practices of particular professional groups. A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment. Ideology is used here to indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality.

Popular culture is simply culture that is widely favored or well-liked by many people. And, undoubtedly, such a quantitative index would meet the approval of many people. We could examine sales of books, sales of CDs and DVDs.

We could also examine attendance records at concerts, sporting events, and festivals. A second way of defining popular culture is to suggest that it is the culture that is left over after we have decided what high culture is. The third way is that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass produced for mass consumption.