Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Kayla Salyer -- Dick Hebdige

Diving deep into culture, subculture, and hegemony Dick Hebdige forms complexities in places I never thought existed. I never thought culture could be such a complex concept, with so many different layers and meanings. A simple way to look a Dick's ideas of culture is to put them into simplistic terms. In a watered down scenario, we can see that culture has two basic definitions; one of intellect, and one of aesthetic pleasure, or material things. This can also be interpreted as culture being both a process and a product. These two things tie hand in hand to make culture what it is. But how does a dominant culture come to be? Why aren't subcultures dominant? Looking at this simply we may see that the dominant culture uses subcultures and controls them in a way that will solely benefit them as a whole. One way in which this is done is to put lower and middle classes into an ideological world which looks real in itself. This leads me the most fascinating point Dick makes. We define subculture as deviance towards the mainstream, to the ordinary. Culture defines it as such in order to make it acceptable. It defines subculture as a phase that will eventually be put back in line. This is put forth by none other than the media. The media puts subculture into culture; order is repaired by incorporating it into life in a convenient way that we would simply see as a phase. It doesn't stop here. Subculture then turns into an economic institution fueled by media. It becomes a commercialized product that we sell to the people to reinforce the culture itself.

Dick Hebdige's argument goes far beyond what I have been able to articulate. The importance that I have taken out of this is to always question why things are the way that they are because they are probably far more complex than you could have imagined. His ideas on culture and subculture reach far beyond what meets the eye.

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