SuRef---008---流行文化（新GRE写作 Issue ）（小姜老师发布）

Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review) © Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012 Supplementary Ref 008 流行文化 Popular Culture John Storey. Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture (Second Edition), The University of Georgia Press, 2003 【流行文化定义】The term popular culture can refer broadly to common aesthetic or life practices, in both the statistical and qualitative senses. But theorists have used the term more precisely to designate a particular form of common culture that arises only in the modern period. Popular culture in this account is distinct from both folk culture and high culture: unlike the former, it is massed-produced; unlike the latter, it is mass-consumed. Popular culture is distributed across many forms of mass communication including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, music, books and cheap novels, comics and cartoons, and advertising. It contrasts with high cultural art forms, such as opera, classical music and artworks, traditional theater and literature. 【流行文化的特点】Characteristics of popular culture  Constantly changing  Based in large, heterogeneous groups of people  Based mainly in urban areas  Material goods mass-produced by machines in factories  Prevailing money economy  More numerous individual relationships, but less personal  Weaker family structure  Distinct division of labor with highly specialized professions and jobs  Considerable leisure time available to most people  Police, army, and courts take the place of family and church in maintaining order 【流行文化的产生】Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, western European societies experienced a particularly intense social reorganization. Vast numbers of the former peasantry now concentrated in dense cities to work in newly developing mass-production industries. Industrialization and the rise of organized capitalism restructured virtually every sphere of life: new concepts of uniform time, the mixing of previously dispersed local cultures, and the dehumanizing life of factory work all contributed to a homogenization of experience, producing a sense of shared fate across wide territories. At the same time, mounting social density and the vastly higher division of labor in capitalism increased social differentiation, giving rise particularly to vibrant middle classes. These changes had profound implications for political as well as cultural life. Contributions to the spread of popular culture  Industrialization  Consumerism  Urbanization  Rise of formal education  Resultant increase in leisure time 【电视与流行文化】Television is the popular cultural form of the twenty-first century. It is without doubt the world’s most popular leisure activity. T.V is a reflection of culture or social reality like music, it is a ‘social ritual’ in which Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review) © Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012 we all share. It is produced for a mass audience which makes it part of ‘popular culture’. It transmits cultural values or dominant ideology. It is capable of satisfying the cultural needs of a diverse group of viewers. During the Second World War the BBC, as the first national broadcaster, assumed cultural authority and importance - their founding principles were to “educate, inform and entertain”. BBC saw itself as the guardian of morals, provider of ‘culture’. The concept of television was first conceived in 1923 when Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian working for Westinghouse Corporation in the US developed the iconoscope. This was the first practical electronic tube for a television camera. It suffices to mention that commercial television started around 1941, slowed down during the Second World War and picked up with greater vigor thereafter. Television began to generate interest in popular culture in 1947. 【体育与流行文化】Sport, as defined from the twentieth century perspective, is a physically competitive activity, controlled by societal restraints and agreed by that society to be worthwhile. Therefore, in each successive era of human history, sport is a reflection of the civilization in which it functions, and integrally related to that society's political and social needs. Rather than an escape from the real world, sport reinforces or responds to its cultural context. The Victorians wisely saw the ability to use sport to promote social values but no sport by its very existence promotes any specific political or ideological position. Therefore, in the twentieth century sport was yet again redefined to reflect the broader developments of the century. The Olympics and other major international sporting spectacles have revealed that in the current century sport cannot exist beyond the tawdry reality of politics and ideologies but are rather a major factor in a nation self image and world perception. Sporting successes and failures are a measure of a nation's potential beyond the playing fields and arenas. How a country plays the game has become a measure of the nation's collective personality. 【电影与流行文化】 Films can provide entertainment, an opportunity for intellectual reflection, and a means to understand the depths of the human heart.Your hairstyle, dress code, speech behavior, eating habits, family life style and understanding of the world are constantly reflected and influenced by radio, television and the film industry. Thus, information from television, films and mass media in general, has impacted greatly on how we spend our daily lives. Before 1900 Thomas A. Edison had invented the kinetoscope which made it possible to take films in more or less the same way as today. In the Western world, by 1900 movies had become popular attraction in amusement arcades, music halls, traveling fairs, wax museums and vaudeville houses in many countries. Another important development happened in 1903 when the American film director Edwin S. Potter released his most important film entitled Great Train Robbery. It was the first movie to use modern film techniques such as filming out of sequence for practical reasons and later editing the scenes into their proper order. By 1901 many studios were created due to an increase in the demand for films. This led to a rise in movie stars in 1910. These were popularized by television, radio and newspapers and they also became household talks by their fans. However, the film industry began in earnest in 1911 when the Nestor company built the first studio in a district of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. Today Hollywood has become the world’s hub of motion pictures. By 1913 the American Director D.W. Griffith defined the art of motion pictures. Some of his techniques like altering camera angles, using close-up in dramatic way, breaking scene up into multiple shots, are still used today. This led to the mass production of films in 1915. By 1925 most of the Hollywood motion- picture studios were established namely, Fox, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Paramount, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers. 【 音 乐 与 流 行 文 化 】 Popular music is everywhere. It has become more and more an unavoidable part of our lives. We encounter it in the shopping mall, the supermarket, on the streets, at work, in parks, in pubs, in clubs, in restaurants and cafes, on the television, at the cinema, on the radio, downloaded from the internet. In addition, we can locate it in music stores, in our individual music collections, at concerts and festivals. Our musical choices contribute to our sense of self. They also contribute to the economic well-being of the Saving My Revised GRE Issue 《拯救我的新GRE Issue》(Manuscript under Review) © Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012 music industry. Popular music has grown as audio recording technology has advanced. The technological development of the recording industry can be traced at least back to 1877 when Thomas Edison conceived of the phonograph as a way to record the human voice and developed a crude phonograph record machine. Electric record players were developed in the 1920s to replace the wind-up machines leading to a spectacular growth in the sale of records. Stereo sound, developed in the 1960s, allowed recording of more than one soundtrack. The individual tracks could be issued by different speakers. The audio cassette, cassette tape or cassette, was first produced in 1964. The CD (compact disc) using laser beam technology was introduced in 1980. Sony introduced the digital audio tape in 1987 with better sound quality than analog audio cassettes. Music is downloaded when a song file is moved across the Internet from one computer or website to a different computer. Such activity can be legal, or illegal when copyright material is moved without permission or payment.