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This is a reading response to David Parker and Paul Long’s
“‘The Mistakes of the Past’? Visual Narratives of Urban Decline and Regeneration”.

Tim Berners-Lee is credited with ‘inventing the internet’. Revolutions in the last few years have seen the rise of what is commonly coined ‘Web 2.0’ - for the guy who came up with the idea for what was essentially Web 1.0, regeneration on this scale is something almost sacrilegious and unnecessary:

“Nobody really knows what it means… If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Taken from an interview with Berners-Lee on the topic of Web 2.0, he claims that the regeneration of the original world wide web was simply just a progression in “jargon” and not in reality.

When the post-war concrete architecture that, for Parker and Long, was the original cityscape of Birmingham began to be regenerated for the new and exciting post-modern architecture of Bullring and Rotunda, they saw this as sacrilege and unnecessary regeneration. Apparent forward thinking now which will turn out to be mistakes in the future?

Berners-Lee was convinced that the Web 2.0 wave would die down, but the ideas of procumercy which lie behind the “jargon” have - in reality - stayed strong online. Were Parker and Long really right to say that the developments of Birmingham would be considered mistakes in future years? Will they eventually be seen as outdated? Well, probably. But surely that’s the whole idea of development and, in turn, regeneration - otherwise how do we progress?

“Cities, like most of the lives they enclose, rarely turn out as intended.”

Well who knew that we’d all be blogging, tweeting and interacting online when the world wide web was established? Certainly not Tim Berners-Lee, it’s safe to say.

This is a Media Culture reading response to Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’”.

The ever-changing nature of popular, according to Hall, makes the term highly difficult to define - equally difficult is the notion of culture. This chapter looks at defining popular culture and how different definitions take into consideration different areas of both popular and culture.

Complexities in the term popular arise mainly from issues surrouning periodisation; Hall notes the mass changes between the 1880s-1920s, but also the ever-changing and advancing preferances of “the people”. From this, Hall draws three definitions:

1. Popular by consumption - media is popularised by mass consumption, which Hall says implies to passive audiences.
2. Popular culture is everything “the people” do or have done, which is considered far too descriptive and broad by Hall. Also, a difinitive list can never be achieved due to mass-media consumption.
3. Popular is the ever-changing ‘prefered’ choices of “the people” - this gives a dynamic list which can chance dependant on the cultural dialectic and periodisation.

Hall prefers the third definition as it dynamically changes as per mass consumption as well as consumer preference, rather than the static, endless lists of the first two definitions. Whilst the first two definitions also allude to popular as class, the third definition is not reliant on the links between popular culture and class.

On Sunday night I ashamedly bought into the consumer culture and went to see X Factor Live at the NEC in Birmingham. Whilst I’m not afraid to admit that I actually enjoyed it - albeit apart from Wagner’s hip-shaking - I couldn’t help but observe it from a Leavisite perspective.

(If you’re reading and wondering who on earth this Leavis guy is, in short he is a highly respected mass culture and literary theorist with strong views on mass communication and consumer culture.)

The X Factor franchise, which every year is bought into en mass by thousands of consumers (myself included), could be seen to have began the resurgence popularised talent competitions, as by far the most successful televised talent competition. One of Leavis’ main criticisms of the mass media is the standardisation of film, advertising and television. With so many programmes of the talent genre appearing on screens up and down the country, could Leavis’ concerns of standardisation truly be producing passive audiences willing to watch these fairly repetitive programmes week in week out?

Leavis’ work “The Canon” was a critique of the traditional process of naming a definitive list of outstanding literature - a list that if read and comprehended by all would lead to mass culture. Whilst the “Scrutiny” journal, founded by Leavis, followed a canonised discourse, critics then and now have questioned how a definitive list of culture can be produced. In which case, should questions not be raised about the canon-like process in which the X Factor is dictating the number one singing talents in the country?

Whilst the programme gives the illusion of the winner and subsequent runners-up being decided by the mass publics, the genre of the show automatically dissuades a vast majority of consumers away from being part of the process. Therefore, the X Factor is not representative of mass culture or preference, instead it is resultant of passive consumers accepting the Leavisite canon which is the wide-spread talent genre.

This post is part of a module in Media Culture which I am studying at Birmingham City Univeristy. Fan of Glee, or abhore the concept? Read Lucy Hird’s excellent Leavisite take on the programme »

This post is for @BCUMedia module MC513 and is a response to the reading ‘The Analysis of Culture’ by Raymond Williams.

Williams initially outlines three key definitions of culture:

• the ‘ideal’: “culture is a state or process of human perfection”
• the ‘documentary’: “culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work”
• the ‘social’: “culture is a description of a particular way of life”

It is clear that these three definitions, whilst independent of each other, must be used collaboratively to analyse culture; to evaluate fully “meanings and values” within all areas of ‘culture’, from “art and intellectual work” through to “institutions and forms of behaviour”, all three definitions must be used.

Williams goes on to define the theory of culture as “the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life”; where the analysis of culture is “the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships”. Through the analysis of culture, including the three definitions, Williams sees ‘patterns’ as key markers for the aforementioned “relationships”.

Williams also defines three levels of culture:

• “livied culture”: openly acceptable, of a particular time or place
• “recorded culture”: the culture of a period
• “selective tradition”: the amalgamation of the two previous levels

It is key to comprehend the concept of “selective tradition”, the beginnings of cultural selection “within the period itself”. This creates three levels of selection: “general human culture”; “historical record of a particular society”; or “rejection of considerable areas”.

Culture, according to Williams, is evolutionary - constantly reinventing and evolving itself. This characteristic is defined as “structure of feeling”, where new generations actively move culture forward or remediate older culture. Equally, “cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors”.