 Hi, everyone. Now that we've had a chance in a previous video to talk about and establish a foundation for what we mean by culture and ideology. And if you haven't watched that video, I'd encourage you to go back and do that to to establish what we're talking about here some of that terminology. Then now we can, though, talk about cultural analysis. Really get into how culture and ideology impact the creation of media and and how that media then impacts our society and how we as using critical media studies should be analyzing and really viewing the different media from a cultural aspect. So here we go. Let's talk about cultural analysis. First of all, let's just come to a common definition here of cultural analysis and say that cultural analysis examines artifacts from a perspective that seeks to understand how media influence the way that we think about the world as political and social beings. So again, we've established what we mean by culture and ideology. So now we're just going to look at how the media is influenced by that culture and ideology and again, the creation of that media and the impact and the purpose of that media and then how that media then impacts our world and how how we go about taking that in and really considering culture as a part of that then. So some major premises that we need to talk about here for cultural analysis cultures and ideologies normalize and privilege certain perspectives. So then we talked about how a culture and ideology create these norms. They tell us essentially what is normal, what is proper, what is correct based on those ideologies and based on that dominant culture. And so then that will privilege certain perspectives as we talked about in again in the previous videos. That will privilege certain perspectives and give people a leg up. People, you know, people of a certain that are part of that dominant culture will give them a leg up, give them some advantage there and normalize those practices for them. As a result, media is frequently used to reinforce and then also to exclude cultures and ideologies. So media is used regularly to to tell people what is right? What is normal? What is correct? Who is privileged, so to speak? And then also by nature, then if you're if you're privileging one group and normalizing some behaviors, then you are by definition excluding some other cultures and ideologies. So media is used to do that. We'll chat about that. And then as a result, socially powerful or privileged groups typically create and control the media, right? So people who are in the driver's seat, so to speak, in that power position are the ones who have the ability to create that media and reinforce that position, reinforce the sense of that normalization and things. So just to give you an example of how this kind of flows and how it works all together. First of all, you have this dominant culture group and the dominant culture group then creates the media. They have the resources. They have the authority. They have the power to create that media and to distribute it. And and then through that media, cultural norms are established. So cultural norms are established through what we see in the media and what's what's put out there in the media as saying this is proper. This is right. This is normal, so to speak. So these cultural cultural norms are established through that media creation. Then as a result, society seeks to normalize. We we see things in the media and come to understand that that is what is normal. That is what is expected of us. Then we as a society do what we can to get within that normal range, get within the norm and be part of the norm, which then reinforces the dominant culture group. Of course, we're playing into that, right? Whatever the dominant culture group wanted and gives them that advantage. Then again, reinforces that advantage and the cycle begins all over again. So just to put this in a more practical sense, let's just take a look at one set of TV, for example, television in the 90s, the 1990s. So you have this dominant culture group, which at the time was predominantly heterosexual white males, right? As we talked about before, that's been the dominant culture group and power group for a number of years in our culture. So we have this dominant culture group of straight white guys who are in that power seat there. So those people, those straight white guys are the ones making the media for the most part, right? So television shows, the most popular television shows throughout the 90s were ER, television show called ER, and Seinfeld and of course, the behemoth, the juggernaut friends, right? So what do we see in common with these shows? Well, predominantly these are shows that feature straight white males, right? Now you have some others, you have some other representation in there. You have some women, you have some people of minorities and things, but predominantly we're seeing media that features straight white males because it's created by straight white males and trying to create that sense of normalization because that's, you know, to reinforce that power structure then is what the media that's created is trying to do. So as a result, you have this media creation, that media that's created then starts to establish those cultural norms to inform us about what is good, what is right, what is normal, what we should be doing, what we should be hoping for and dreaming for. So the biggest one in that era really was friends, enormous cultural appeal and an impact. So first of all, you had just in the sense of the media, you had the shift away from family based sitcoms, which had been the norm. You know, we look at back in the 80s, you have the Cosby show, you have family ties, you have growing pains, you have all these shows even back in the 70s, things that are really based on family, especially sitcoms were based around a family and set up around the family. But now we have this shift to young professionals who have social lives who work sort of, although they spend a lot of time in the show at the coffee shop, I'm not sure any of them really had, I mean they had jobs, but I'm not sure how they kept them with all the time they spent in this coffee job and doing all these other shenanigans. But anyway, the point is, it's no longer a family structure. Now we're working with young professionals. However, another aspect of this that it created kind of a new way to think about family, right? Instead of thinking about family as mom and dad and the kids and so forth and you know, genetic ties like that, we started to think of family in a different sense, a looser sense, right? Family is who you make of them, right? Who you make family. That's your family. So these people and friends, these characters really seemed like family to one another, even though they weren't all genetically related. They really gave off this vibe of family. So we have a new kind of normalization, a sense of family. Let's add some changes in the patterns, you know, in a more practical sense of changes in the patterns of the way we speak. See the introduction of the word so as meaning, you know, very or, you know, strongly this thing. So, well, that is so cute. I so want to do this, right? That hadn't, that word really hadn't been used as frequently as regularly as it had been to indicate that this is something that is very and strongly and is highly desirable. So this or so, whatever they did, you'd introduce that really that word to the popular vernacular. The sense of sarcasm that Chandler had a lot of sarcasm, a lot of tone there. And then the thing with up speaking that Phoebe did that the character Phoebe did where she ended everything kind of a question and everything up speak at the end, everything trailed off toward the end. That was a trend that kind of was created by friends as well or popularized and became kind of the norm because it was so normal in there, right? So we established these norms based on these shows. And then, of course, in society seeks to normalize, we try and emulate these things. So we see it's not only in media where we had kind of knockoffs, so to speak, you know, the friends model of television became sort of really popular. We saw things like Sex in the City, a group of friends hanging out in New York, right? We saw it in How I Met Your Mother, which is, you know, there are differences, but stylistically, I mean, you can How I Met Your Mother probably does not exist without friends. And the same with the Big Bang Theory, a group of friends living near each other, living together, working together. So it's not about a traditional family sitcom in that sense. But so we see it in the way that the media is, is, you know, this formula is repeated in these TV shows as well. Coffee shops were made popular, made cool, right? Before, before friends came out, a coffee shop meant, you know, old guys sitting around whatever local donut shop there was, drinking coffee and complaining about things and just shooting the breeze, right? But coffee shops after this became really prevalent. Now we see them all over the place with comfortable chairs and couches and places that people hang out, people work, people do these things. That was not the case back when the show first started. Coffee shops were not really a thing in most of the country. And now they're all over the place. I live in a fairly small town. We have two in town and fairly small. I mean, probably 10,000 people or less live in this community. We have two coffee shops. So that made a real impact in that way. So society is seeking to emulate that, seeking to, oh, that's normal. So let's have that. We need those then if we want to be normal like them. Another big impact that we saw, you know, in society seeking to normalize or kind of emulate what happened here was what everybody called the Rachel. This haircut became very popular, very popular because it was, because Rachel had it on friends. So everybody wanted this haircut. Everybody wanted the Rachel. I don't even know if it had a name before that, but but it did then. So society seeking to emulate these things, seeking to normalize because these are what we're being told are normal, right? Which then, of course, reinforces again, the dominant culture group, because we're saying, okay, this is what these people want to be popular and what they think ought to be popular. So that's just how that cycle sort of works. In a contemporary sense, we can look at how media is impacted by culture and impacts culture, then intern impacts culture in a couple of different ways. One is class. And if we're going to talk about class, meaning class structure, class systems, then we got to bring back our buddy, Marx, who's the primary source of what we think about in terms of class, Karl Marx really establishes class system, which still applies in a lot of ways, in many ways today. We still use this class structure. So but but a couple of key differences between American society, contemporary American society and the way Marx laid things out. When Marx talked about class, he talked about three different kind of class levels or sections of class, right? You had the bourgeoisie, which were the upper level people, those are the people that owned the businesses, owned the companies, ran the things, ran, basically, we're in charge of everything. Then you had the proletariat, which was the working class, right, the people who worked for the bourgeoisie and who did all those and made the stuff. And but, you know, we're probably less educated and things. They didn't really have power. But so you had those are the two. And then in between there, you had this really small class of people that he called the petite bourgeoisie. Those are made up of doctors and lawyers and people who kind of worked for themselves. They weren't part of the bourgeoisie. They didn't really own big things. And they weren't part of the proletariat that didn't work for people in the bourgeoisie necessarily. But, you know, small skilled people like like again, doctors, lawyers, things like that, but a really small part of class in terms of how Marx saw it. But in American society today, it's really reversed. The petite bourgeoisie, the middle class really has become the dominant by far the dominant class where most of us reside in that middle class and that petite bourgeoisie. Even if we work in factories and things, we're probably part of that middle class in some way. So the middle class, the petite bourgeoisie have become the massive part of this. So that part of class is different in the United States in contemporary American culture. The other thing is the introduction of the which Marx really couldn't have first seen the information and media driven industries that we have today that we've moved away. Again, as we talked about previously talking about in a previous video, talking about postmodernity and the idea that we don't really in the United States, we have less making stuff and more making, you know, we build our careers, our lives on sharing information and selling services and so forth. And that has really, is very different from the way Marx would have seen things. So with those things in mind, though, media really pushes, for example, a couple of different ways that we're impacted by this. And they push a couple of ideas to be seen as classically American classically desirable, these cultural ideology that media pushes. The first is what we call the American dream, the American dream, which in the context of critical media studies and cultural analysis, in particular, we mean that the American dream says that if you work hard enough, then you can achieve anything. You can get anything. If you just work hard enough, it'll come true. All you have to do is work hard enough. And if you're not getting it, then you're not working hard enough. That's really an idea that's sold by the media, right? We look at all these movies, we look at all these people, we look at, you know, for example, tokens that we have, token representation of these things, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, for example, are tokens of this that came from more meager beginnings. Bill Gates was probably part of middle class, but I mean, he certainly wasn't from a billionaire family and they made themselves up, right? They just worked hard enough. And if I do that, I can become Bill Gates or I can become Oprah Winfrey, right? And have this media empire. If I just work hard enough and if I'm not getting it, then I'm not working hard enough. That's this idea, the American dream that the media is pushing at us. That's one of those cultural things that we have pushed at us. Another is what we call conspicuous consumption. The media kind of tells us on this idea that if we get stuff, then we can kind of earn our way into that upper class, into that bourgeoisie, right? If we just have the right clothes and we have a nice enough car, we have these luxury items, then we by default will be in that upper class, right? That's what we're told. So this conspicuous consumption that if we just buy these things and that's why name brands are so important that we can make our way into that upper class. Another way that we can look at contemporary perspective of cultural analysis is through race. We see this a lot in race. There's lots of prominent examples here. So ideas of like exclusion. One of the more famous examples, this would be friends. If we go back to friends, there's not a lot of color of friends. I mean, not only in the main cast, there's certainly no really minority representation in the cast of the primary cast of friends, but you look at the supporting roles. There are very few people of minority representation in friends as a whole. It's a very white show. It's a very Caucasian show, not only in in the ideology and the culture, but just on the surface, just looking at, you know, primarily most of the people in the show are by far white, right? So the exclusion of not only these minorities, but also they're all pretty much straight. There's not a lot of, you know, at that time in that culture. And so back at that time, it was pretty rare to have somebody represent, you know, the LGBTQ plus community on television. So I mean, we were excluding a lot of, a lot of different representation by default on friends. And so you have this idea of exclusion, this idea of stereotyping that when minorities or a particular class of people are represented, that it's always in a certain way. So, you know, again, we're slightly and slowly getting better at this. But if you go back, you don't have to go back too much in history to see that if you are a, if a Middle Eastern person is represented in television or film, they're probably going to be a terrorist, a cab driver. They're going to be, like, riding a camel or a carpet or something, you know, something very stereotypical like that. There wasn't a lot of depth in the representation of Middle Eastern folks in television and film. There still isn't a lot. I mean, again, slowly getting a little bit better and, you know, normalizing some of those and getting away from the stereotyping, but still predominantly. And that's not just with folks of Middle Eastern descent. This is, this is pretty much any, you know, minority group or class group. You can look at, there's going to be a lot of stereotyping when you're not in control of that media. Assimilation is another one that we see. So we tend to want to make other races more like the dominant power structure. So in this case, you know, the Cosby shows a classic example. Cosby shows incredibly popular. One of the highest-rated TV shows in the 80s. Really popular. Really broke a lot of ground for, you know, it's credited for having a lot of diversity in the cast, a lot of representation, especially of African American actors and actresses in the show. But really the rest of the show was, again, pretty white. Felt pretty much they were middle-class family. He was a doctor. She was a lawyer. The kids, you know, all the behaviors, all the expectations, all the ideologies represented there were really still part of that. The Bush White D.C. class, you know, really just represented in a lot of ways that dominant power structure of straight white men, you know, the differences they were, they were not white. But there was very little representation other than the predominantly minority cast. Everything else, their behaviors, their jobs, everything else seemed to fall in line with that dominant power structure and didn't have a lot of diversity in the representation there. So there's a lot of, they catch a lot of flak for assimilation in that regard. And then othering. We have this idea of othering that goes on in the media. So, you know, for example, you can have this with gender too, not just with race, but with gender. You have this, for example, this is Catherine Bigelow, who was a director, won an Oscars Best Director for the Hurt Locker. Had been a director for a long time. But when she won the Oscar, all you heard about was, oh, the female director, the Catherine Bigelow, the female director, you know, when other people are up for Oscar awards, you don't, you don't hear them say, you know, Steven Spielberg, the male director, or the man director, Steven Spielberg, or the male director, Martin Scorsese, or whatever, you know, you don't hear them say that. It's just the director or whatever. But when we, other people, we point out their, their difference, their othering, right? So anyway, some common questions that you get along with cultural analysis, and there are a lot, there's a lot of depth here, but just some very surface level questions. What are the dominant cultural elements under which this artifact was created? Again, we look at friends, for example, that was predominantly white males, straight white males. So that was what was represented in the, in the cast and the ideology there. How are those cultural ideologies represented in that artifact? What does this, how does this artifact seek to protect or challenge the dominant culture, depending on its purposes, whether it's there to protect those ideologies and culture, or whether it's there to challenge them and push against them? And what other cultures or ideologies are limited or excluded in this artifact? So we can look at this just briefly here. These are again, just surface level questions, but we can look at this briefly, just pick it on the big bang theory to pull the big bang theory in here. And we'll do just a brief idea of cultural analysis. First of all, the dominant cultural elements under which the artifact was created. I'm still, I can predominantly white, we're talking about the, you know, 2000s into the, into the teens or whatever, whatever you want to call it, the 2010 era. Big bang theory ran for a long time, but still again, predominantly white, predominantly male. Quote unquote, nerd culture had become kind of popularized so that people of intelligence were being celebrated at that time. And those characteristics were being celebrated, but we still see that, you know, there's a, there's a heavy emphasis placed on having the appearance of the woman who's in the cast of primarily, especially at the beginning, is very attractive, right? So Penny is there as the, so women are represented in such a way that being attractive is very important. Men are allowed to be smart, but and they're allowed to be white, but we still have some stereotyping there with the, even the men that are in the, in the cast. So, but it was created under those kind of circumstances. What are the cultural, cultural, or how are those cultural ideologies represented in this artifact? Again, you know, women are represented in the idea that they do better if they're, if they're very attractive. Again, especially in the beginning, you had characters come in later on that that didn't necessarily apply, weren't set up in that way, but especially at the very beginning, though, the whole fascination with Penny was that she was really good looking. That's why she was centralized there. The other ideologies, you know, the idea that, that, well, first of all, the men were straight in the, in the show, not in real life, but in the, in the show, the characters were all heterosexual. So that was normalized in that way. Still wasn't really that acceptable for a popular TV show to have gay characters. They were all, for the most part, white, except for Raj, who was, of course, Indian. And so came from that culture. But then you have a lot of stereotypes represented there in terms of, anyway, and so those, those ideologies were represented in that way that it was predominantly a white cast, predominantly men that were featured in the show. So, and featuring intelligence and in middle class and upper class people. How did the artifact seek to protect or challenge the dominant cultural? Mostly protected. The same norms and ideologies of it was pretty, it was a pretty safe show for the most part. There wasn't a lot of controversy surrounding it in terms of, again, there weren't a lot, weren't any gay characters really or strong, they'd gay actors on the show portraying characters though that were straight. So, so protected the culture in that way, predominantly white, predominantly well educated, emphasizing the idea that, you know, education is the only way to get ahead and working hard is the only way to get ahead. So those types of things didn't really challenge the dominant culture in a lot of ways. And other cultures that were limited or excluded, as I mentioned a couple of times, there wasn't a lot of racial representation diversity in the show here, or people of different sexualities, different things like that. So it was pretty, you know, right up the middle in terms of the ideology. So everything else was kind of limited and excluded from that. You didn't have a lot of representation of people from impoverished classes or people that were really uneducated so much. And if they were represented, it was in a very stereotypical way that made them put them in not such a great light. Right. So I'm limited in a lot of ways that way. So, you know, really a very popular show and a funny show, but pretty followed pretty much along the lines of, you know, what we would think of as normal stereotypes there. So now that we have this idea though of cultural analysis and the importance of cultural analysis, now that we understand the importance of looking for culture and understanding the culture in which this media was created and how this media projects that culture and really reinforces that culture, attempts to reinforce culture for the most part. Those are things we need to be critical of and analyzing and looking at the media and understanding, you know, what is this trying to sell me on? What is this, you know, representing? How do these symbols represent this culture? How is it trying to reinforce these things and how is it trying to push me toward normalization within that culture? You need to be on the lookout for those things. If you have questions about cultural analysis, anything else related to critical media studies, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you and chat with you in that way. So in the meantime, I hope you'll get out there and really start considering how the media that you're taking in impacts your culture, how it reinforces a particular culture and how it pushes you toward those norms.