Popular Culture example essay topic
381 words
For this paper, I have chosen to investigate the link between popular culture and violent behavior. This is due to my keen interest in many aspects of contemporary popular culture and an awareness of its influence in not only my own life, but also in the lives of teenagers across the globe. Thus, the stimulus for this research was personal and lay in my yearning to discover whether the correlation between violence and popular culture really existed, and if it did, how strong and influential were its effects on individuals and society? Many commentators argue that popular culture and mass media are ways of brainwashing the masses into the ways of a dominant social order. However, others see it as a means through which minority groups with subversive values challenge the dominant social order. This was seen with the advent of the rock music scene in the mid-late 1990's. There are two main types of culture, high and low. In 1871 E.B. Taylor defined culture as: that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and many other capabilities and habits acquired by... [members] of society. Here Taylor was talking about high culture, an aristocratic view of past-times such as ballet, theatre and art. Popular culture, on the other hand, is a form of low culture and is based primarily on marketing, mass production and revenue. Low culture is what is sold to the masses, ergo, low culture equals mass culture. All these terms refer to popular culture, defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology as: accessible to everyone.
Popular culture is far more widespread than high culture and in the United States and in Europe, for example, it is dominated by television, films and recorded popular music. This research focuses on low (popular) culture, and its influence on violent behavior. Through the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative information, as well as the examination of recent cases in relation to violent behavior, this study will determine whether this link exists, and if so to what extent. In addition, the study aims to discern whether popular culture is a way for dominant forces to exert control or whether it can trigger violence in individuals.
