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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - World Affairs/Debate - Does pop culture damage established intellectual culture? |
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ziffhasnoaim/password Snifit                  Since: 06-07-06 Last post: 6487 days Last view: 6487 days |
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| I've been arguing with myself over the influence of counter-culture and pop-culture in general on the established intellectual culture of a nation. I've come to the conclusion that it is a subjective trend that depends on the boundaries, and nature, of the culture in question. As it is said, even in the modern time, all cultures are unique. They have their own flavour and mannerisms.
My major cases are the Japanese and Canadian cultural landscapes. Both of them are unique, yet very similar (to a surprisingly high degree, too!). I'm going to mostly be assesing literary culture. My first case will be Japanese culture: Japanese culture is one founded on a thousand years of victory cult worship, geographic and linguistic isolation, and cultural exchange with its fellow Asiatic neighbours. I feel that the ultimate exp I will elaborate on my points by editing this post, so keep up with it if you're interested and don't be afraid to add content through your own posts on the thoughts of counter/pop culture influences on intellectual culture. |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6297 days Last view: 6297 days |
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| You need to define "intellectual culture" as opposed to "pop culture" and "counter culture". Are you proposing an eternal standard-bearing high brow canon of intellectual works against which we measure current output? By intellectual culture do you mean academic culture?
For mine, I'd argue that pop culture is part of intellectual culture. I don't think you can draw a meaningful distinction between different cartegories. What's the Simpsons? What's Shakespeare? What about James Joyce's filthy, filthy love letters? I don't like the idea of culture as eternal and unchangable and in need of protection. Culture changes over time, it forms new theses and antitheses and synthesis and the result is change. This concept of "damage" is subjective and I for one would argue that, on average, pop culture has become more complicated and intellectual over the last, say, 50 years. -------- As for language. It seems like you're basically arguing a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language shapes and limits culture and exp For example: It has been said that Irish has no words for "yes" and "no". This is often claimed as some sort of pop-linguistics idea, implying that the Irish have some crazy perception of the world that doesn't deal in absolutes. Actually, it's just a quirk in the structure of the language, where you attach a negative or a positive modifier to the verb instead (I think that's how it works). Same deal with Innuit and its "40 words for snow". It's an polysynthetic language where, effectively, a "word" could be composed of enough components that it's a complete sentence in other languages. Politeness is especially subjective and you can't claim a particular language or culture is especially "polite". Every society on this planet has very different politeness behaviours and they don't translate. I imagine that a lot of Japanese behaviours seem quite rude to people of other cultures. Other examples: Belching is polite in Polynesian societies. In English we place great emphasis on polite words, whereas in Spanish there's less emphasis on this and more on polite tone to requests, and so forth. Stuff like personal space requirements are different everywhere. Japan isn't more polite, it just has different ideas of politeness. ------ Language changes over time, and languages are shaped by circumstances more than the converse. English started off as a peasant language, Spanish was shaped by a large degree of mixing between people from different regions, French by the imposition of a centralising and dominating nation state run with one specific dialect, and so forth. Japanese developed the way it did as a result of the circumstances it's in. If Japanese is a highly rigid, regimented language, then it's because Japanese society has been that way. There's been little mixing with other cultures, little immigration or population movements to cause elemtns of the language to have to interact with new situations, and the result has been that a lot of the complex rules and distinctions have been preserved for no real reason except that's how the language is spoke. By contrast, English speakers have undergone titanic changes over the last thousand years. We've lost things like noun case inflections and grammatical gender. We've simplified verb conjuugations dramatically and moved to a system where instead we rely unusually heavily on word-order and auxilary words. We've imported large chunks of French and Latin vocabulary, simply because the language developed that way fluidly and naturally as a result of the circumstances of the speakers. Is the language any poorer for this? Nah, it's just different. Standard language forms are false and temporary and inevitably eroded by organic change. (edited by Arwon on 08-03-06 01:48 AM) (edited by Arwon on 08-03-06 01:59 AM) |
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