Sunday, October 27, 2013

lacansmirror, Hebdige

Hebdige examines the concept of culture as he begins the chapter by defining it with an outdated definition.  It says that culture is a "cultivation, tending, in christian authors, worship; the action or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage, husbandry; the cultivation of rearing of certain animals"...I could not go on (124).  My definition of culture would not have used one of those words.  If I was describing old farm life, maybe, but that's about as far as this definition resonated with me.  Hebdige agrees that a definition like that  is ambiguous and simply reflects the past centuries definitions instead of adapting to the way our culture is today.
Later in the chapter he explains that "the theory of culture now involved the 'study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life'" (125).  The original new elements of life were still focused on face-to-face relationships.  Since there were more cultural relationships established, I argue that this would be culture 2.0 compared to the first definition in the chapter.  In a postmodern era, I believe our culture still heavily revolves around relationships, but now it is on many more levels.  We show culture online when connecting with friends, offline when at work, and we connect ourselves between our real and virtual identities.


These three types of relationships come together to create the culture 3.0 that we live in today.  Hebdige discusses social relations and processes in the ways they are "appropriated by individuals only through the forms in which the are represented to those individuals" (128).  The sign identities that our culture inherits define ideological dimensions and value semiotics.  Hegemony is a dominance of power, but in culture 3.0, the semiotic value in one aspect of culture can outweigh or influence the rest of it.  To be truly hegemonic the 'self' must have semiotic value on all ideological dimensions.

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