Popular and Academic Culture

Popular and Academic Culture

Research Report

Background and introduction

Since we have been in the era of information, we are exposed to and absorb many various information resources. The ubiquity of information has made people feel it is hard to see the differences between popular and academic culture. Hence, the accuracy of the definitions of the two cultures has been hard to distinguish. This study is going to talk about two issues--popular and academic culture. The purpose of this paper is to show some of the differentiations between popular and academic culture, and how these work in the processing and evaluation of information. Moreover, this paper will focus on using analysis tools--purpose, audience, evidence, style & language--to elaborate the characteristics of popular culture and academic culture, and to evaluate how accurately we can differentiate examples of the two cultures.

This paper will use some examples to help us to understand what kinds of products belong to popular culture and what kinds of products belong to academic culture. Magazines and advertising are typical examples of popular culture while lecture notes, textbooks and dictionaries represent academic culture.

This paper will use Storey's work on popular culture (1998) to provide definitions of popular and high culture. We also refer to Gibbs' explanation of different learning styles (1992) to explain the relationships between surface & deep learning and how it might succeed to popular & academic culture. Also this paper will apply Shermer's study of what kind of information leads us to wrong thinking (1997), providing us tools to analyze the reliability of information in both popular and academic culture.

So, these sources help us to identify relevant examples for analysis. The specific analysis of these sources emphasizes the importance of reliable analysis, and the definitions of both popular and academic culture present a clear boundary to discriminate their characteristics. Moreover, based on these sources, we might discover how much objective information can be found in both popular and academic culture.

Definition of popular and academic culture

Popular culture:

Popular culture is produced for the mass of people and is motivated to make money. The product of popular culture has low quality and is easy to create (Storey, 1998). Definitely, in our society, we can see many products of popular culture in the form of advertising, magazines, internet chat, clothes shows and soccer match, among others.

Popular culture is designed for a mass audience: for example, advertising for a new car will attract people who want to buy a new car. These people may be drawn from all areas of the population: teachers, workers, doctors and business men and women. So, it is not only for a special group. We meet different advertising every day and every where on the buses or on TV, through flyers and so on. Advertising is designed to reach and appeal to a mass audience that covers the whole population. (Storey, 1998)

Also, popular culture is designed to make money. Advertising motivates the audience to spend money to own a new car. Hence, the primary purpose of popular culture can be treated as making profit. People will be stimulated to buy clothes seen in fashion shows may not really fit them as well as people pay to watch live sports performances such as soccer. (Storey, 1998)

Furthermore, products of popular culture are usually related to people's daily life with low quality (easy to create). For example, advertising for a new movie, the contents of advertising will only pick some of movie pictures and performance. So this advertising has not any creative information and does not take so much time to produce it. However, what were picked are the most wonderful effects for the movie, therefore, people will strongly look forward to watching it. (Storey, 1998)

Popular culture is a cultural battlefield between "elite" power group and public. In other words, power group and average people can be influenced each other. Particularly, power group will collect the feedback of mass consumers' buying behaviour to adjust current values and beliefs in products to keep power position. For example, Coca-Cola produces a new flavour, but people would drink old flavour so that the consumptions of the new flavour drink decreased. Therefore, the company has to reduce the product. So we may see the power group can not always control the popular tendency and people may impact power group to improve popular culture. (Lecture 2)

Academic culture:

To compare with popular culture, academic culture only fits special group, its products are usually hard to create, and academic culture has higher quality than popular culture. Moreover, academic culture is more original (Storey, 1998). There are many products of academic culture, like dictionaries, lectures and textbooks. To detail how definitions fit examples, let us see some of them.

Textbooks were only used by students who are studying it. The mass of people will not read textbooks very often because they do not need to know special knowledge for their daily life. Thus, it only fits special group. (Storey, 1998)

Moreover, textbooks tend to give students some specific knowledge, so its content must be evaluated and logically organized by authors, and it must take a long time to collect thousands of useful and reliable information to edit in the textbooks. Therefore, textbooks should be very hard to create. (Storey, 1998)

Furthermore, we say that products of academic culture must be higher quality, such as dictionaries. Dictionary is a kind of standard to give audience accurate definitions of vocabulary, and it almost includes overall information about vocabulary, such as words' pronunciation, evolutions of vocabulary, construction of vocabulary and so on. Thus, dictionaries are extremely authoritative tools when people want to find exactly the meaning of vocabulary. (Storey, 1998)

To further demonstrate how the definitions of academic culture fit to example of textbooks, we may discover that the content of textbooks intends to extend students' previous knowledge of particular courses. Therefore, most of the information will challenge students' old knowledge. Economics textbooks and philosophy textbooks primarily present a lot of theoretical knowledge and some of theories are very abstract