Culture Case

t is interesting that Raymond Williams creates a division between high class culture and lower class culture, suggesting that culture is ordinary, shared and common. If this is the case why does he emphasise a division in light of this concept? And if we all share a common culture can there be a division?

It is difficult to understand the term culture. What is culture? Is it a utopian dream, is it a shared group of interests that bring a community together, or is it just simply a way of life? There are so many questions surrounding culture and its meaning. Raymond Williams described culture as "maps of meaning through which the world is made intelligible", whether we agree with this definition or not, he was right in saying that the term culture is one of the most "complicated words in the English language";

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development {...} but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.

To formulate an essay entirely on cultures meaning would be extremely difficult due to its meaning being so vast and indescribable and would therefore not lead to any relevant conclusion. Culture has a paradigmatic complexity and it's this that makes it so hard to analyse effectively. However, if you were to place a leading phrase in front of the word "culture" , a word that defines its disciplines, it becomes more identifiable; pop culture, oral culture and print culture. Throughout this essay I will be mainly focusing on internet culture and will describe my understanding of the term and will address the key questions regarding the movement towards the internet revolution in terms of mass media.

But before I discuss Internet culture it is imperative that I decipher the essence of mass culture and mass media. To understand the term "mass", it is important to study Gustave Lebon. Although there have been many more recent theorists that have discussed the term "mass"; including Karl Max, John Stuart Mills and Mathew Arnold, Lebon's theories on "mass" have pervaded disputes on the subject ever since. A quote specifically that is questioned today is his warning that "the age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds" ([1895] 1916, p. 3), at a time when working class parties were more present and when western societies were dealing with the growth of industrialisation and mass migration to popular cities. His book "La psychologie des foules" was cited for its treatise to crowds, however is much more about the advent of mass society in physiological terms. He discusses "contagion, loss of individuality, and regression to a more primitive mental state were his favourite terms". The reason for the book being described as a treatise for the mass is his connotation of crowd behaviour within a larger mass. For example Lebon quotes, "thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions -- such, for example, as a great national event -- the characteristics of a psychological crowd". However, the mere coming together of a crowd is not sufficient enough to cause the disappearance of the conscious personality and to turn the feelings and emotions of a large group of people into synchronisation. At the same time, a crowd may cause its members to all behave in a rebellious nature, causing a local uprising, as it develops into a mass movement.

Lebon describes the immediate crowd and the scattered crowd to be generically similar, in terms of the