It’s necessary to dispute elitist thought

Is “popular culture” good or bad? To engage in a debate on this topic, we must first address one of the most notoriously complex concepts — culture. Perhaps it is because everything we do and say can be called culture, and that culture becomes an ambiguous set of standards, assumptions, and problem-solving methods. This is precisely why we must be careful when dealing with the compounded and overused term.

The term is generally used as the opposite of “high culture”. If “high culture” represents the most sophisticated and abstract artistic styles created by human beings, popular culture is the “low culture” that the undereducated or even uneducated mass could have access to.

In this sense, popular culture challenges the elitist establishments. If “high culture” reminds people of traditions or classics that closely tied to a memory of the past, popular culture is the tool for each generation to take control of their future.

If you ask me whether popular culture is good or bad, I’d say that it really depends on what specific type we are talking about. Saying that popular culture is dumbing us down without acknowledging the historical contexts within which many forms of popular culture were produced and consumed is to say that there is no wisdom in the artistic forms produced by the masses and for the masses.

The idea that the so-called “high culture” produced by a certain group of elites should be enforced on everyone is, to say the least, dangerous.

From Dr Yuting Wang

Sociology professor based in Sharjah