A critical analysis of the role of popular culture in creating and maintaining learning across British society.

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A critical analysis of the role of popular culture in creating and maintaining learning across British society.

In the following study I will be examining the way that popular culture has affected British public in relation to learning.  I will be first examining previous times and the ways in which popular culture has influenced people over time. I will be concentrating on the effects that music and advertising has had and shaped society over time, and the methods these mediums have used to achieve this.  

Throughout the last century British culture has been dramatically transformed through popular culture, the development of major corporations, the changing methods of the current governments of the time, and the development of methods that popular culture can reach the public, all contributing to an extreme alteration in the way society as a whole behaves.

Before the industrial revolution, popular culture was based on the agricultural year and around religious festivals for example, harvest, plough Monday, Easter, Christmas etc.) There was no division of the classes. Everyone joined together in recreation and entertainment.

In the nineteenth century however, there was a considerable change. A sharp rise in urbanisation meant people flocked to the cities away from the agricultural areas to the industrial centres. There was therefore a massive decline in the meaningfulness of the agricultural festivals. In the city there was a physical separation of the classes, the working classes living tightly together in houses built specifically to house workers. There were far fewer public holidays as the agricultural ones were regarded as obsolete. There were fears about the amount of control the rich had over the working classes, as there was in the church. The working classes saw how they were treated by the Church Of England in the city very different to what they were used to. Many theories arose about the church and how it was corrupt. A man called John Leicester believed the Church to be corrupt and began his own church. The Methodist church, derived from the Czech Maravian Church. Methodist churches have no icons, statues, or grand features such as stained glass. Many working class people became Methodist due to the supposed corruption of the Church of England and its discrimination against the poor. This caused worry among the upper classes that the working classes could rise up against them.

At this time, Irish Catholics were brought over from island to dig the canals. With them they brought the Irish Catholic faith. The Irish were regarded as extreme underclass and were very poor, therefore Catholicism was regarded as a religion for the poor. Yet another new faith for the working classes.

There was increased fear of revolution as the inventions of new non-conformist churches happened. More and more controls and legislation were applied to prevent the uprising of the working classes.


The Age of Interference

The worries that the upper classes had of a possible revolution caused them to impose many rules on popular pursuits such as cricket and football. There was also a move to open parks and museums and other recreational facilities to distract the working classes not only from drinking and riots, but political movements and uprise.

There was also a bought of middle-class pursuits invented such as Thomas Cook Holidays.

Advertising


Advertising is very easily exposed to the public. Advertising is available in a large variety of mediums, television being a main outlet, radio, posters, billboards, signs, newspapers and more, a more recent method being the internet. All of these things we come into contact with everyday. A very effective medium for advertising is the radio. This reaches people while they are doing other things, like driving or working, unlike television, which people only see when they have specifically sat down to watch it.

Roland Barthes (1950-1980) studied semiotics, which is the study of signs and how we interpret them. He said that we receive subliminal messages through adverts without knowing it, this in turn making us want to buy the product/service.
Roland Barthes dismantled images, the most known example of this being a picture of a black French Cub Scout saluting, and used his three levels of deconstruction to find hidden meaning to the image.
This can be applied to images and advertising we now see today. Phallic symbolism was and still is used today within advertising, especially on television and is found to be extremely effective. The Cadbury’s Flake television commercial is a prime example.

But of course, a few hundred years ago, television would not have been about and advertising would have been restricted to other mediums. Before the industrial revolution, posters or leaflets would have not worked because there was mass illiteracy at those times because of the lack of education facilities available to the general public.  After the revolution though, there was more education available to both children and adults of the working classes.

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But what is ‘working class.’?

Karl Marx was the founding father of communism and is referred back to consistently when definitions of social class are made. Born in Germany in 1818, Marx lived in France, Belgium and London. He was an associate of Engels, with whom he devised the Communist/Economic Determinist Theory.
This stated that there are two types of people. The Proletariat (who by efforts produce wealth) and the Bourgeoisie (the owners of factories and profits who exploit the proletariat).
In 1847 Marx attended a meeting in London, the groups aim being ‘the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the domination of ...

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