English 313 Intro

Hello world! My name is Michelle Thomas and this is my blog for my popular culture class. I am 22 years old, and I am a senior at CSUN. I work and go to school full time, and I am looking forward to graduating and taking a break from one of my full time activities. In this blog, I am going to do analysis on many different readings and “pop-culture” things that we look at for our class.

In my opinion, pop-culture is any commercial products or media of any kind that is made for a general mass of people. While reading the article “Politics of Culture”, I learned exactly what culture from above and culture from below really meant. From my understanding, culture from above is associated with a hierarchal group in society that focuses more on how the culture affects their personal lives. This practice of culture was exclusive to a certain group of people who were particularly wealthy. These people had money to spare, so they would spend more to make sure that they were well “cultured”, which was looked at as a means to advance their knowledge of the fine arts around them. An example of what “culture from above” really meant was people who could afford the time and money to attend things such as theaters. These plays and operas that people from these times would attend would help to broaden their knowledge. It almost seems that these culture outlets were used as a way to increase social stance.

As time went on, the idea of culture changed. Culture went from being a social stance to being commercial products or media outlets that represented a mass of people. Culture began to represent different TV shows, movies, music, and other cultural things that had an effect on masses of people. In the article, culture from below was defined from being culture a person acquires from their families since they cannot afford the things that culture from above folk could afford. An interesting quote that explains this is when the author states, “Working-class people, on the other hand, will acquire from their family context and the schools they attend cultural dispositions that prepare them for lives at the bottom of the class ladder”. This is where the difference between culture from above and culture from below become most evident. If you really were to just focus on the words above and below, you could see that above obviously represents the upper class, where as below represents all other classes of people.






My e-mail: michelle.thomas.624@my.csun.edu