Theory Of Mass Society And Mass Culture example essay topic
Further, this view states Culture was isolated from society - autonomous because it had to be abstracted from one way of life (pre-industrial) and then transmitted and extended to another (allegedly inferior) way of life to 'save' that society. The Leavisite concept of culture is still common and is firmly bound up in the theory of mass society and mass culture. Mass communications are seen to hold a crucial and privileged place in mass society, taking over the role of creating and distributing the values and information common to a society. Mass culture, unlike high culture, is unable to transcend its time and place and offer any kind of lasting truth to its audiences and, at worst, positively damages them. Critics of Leavis have questioned the narrowing of 'culture' to literature. idealist concept of culture, synonymous with 'high' culture, it carries with it its implied opposite - the denigrated 'mass' culture. a central assumption of the approach is that there exists a natural hierarchy of high culture and mass culture.
This is how the idealist approach deals with differences. "Media vs. Humanities" Simon During The Australian Identified approaches: materialist / Frankfurt School The mainstream perception is that universities produce and teach truth through research while the media produce and communicate quickly consumable information and opinion. The weird, ill-judged consensus that the culture is "dumbing down", which the media itself has helped to forge, is an important expression of this belief assuming as it does that the media breeds stupidity. the notion that the media is shallow and deals in opinion while the universities deal in depth and truth is misguided (though by no means simply false). The media are in unacknowledged competition with the humanities. in the interest of truth rather than ideology, they have also undercut the western classics claim on transcendental value to which the mainstream still genuflects. The humanities' old ethical project has been marginalised first by the democratisation of cultural and media consumption, second by the commercialisation of leisure pursuits, and last, by the segmentation of culture into market niches.
Reader The central materialist assumption is that it is the material conditions of physical, historical and social being or existence which determine what counts as consciousness. Marx and Engels argued that social problems were political and needed solutions that put social interests ahead of private interests. "in direct opposition to idealism" The Frankfurt School's "critical theory", as it is known, consisted of investigations into sociology, ideology and philosophy in which their aim was a Marxist analysis of contemporary society.