 Hi everyone. In this video, I'd like to start off our discussion kind of prefacing cultural analysis with a discussion of culture and ideology. Before we can talk about cultural analysis and how culture impacts media in our contemporary world and how we can go about analyzing that, we first need to understand what we mean by culture and by ideology and lay the groundwork there to really establish what we're talking about when it comes to cultural analysis. So that's what we're doing here. We're going to start off by checking out what we mean by culture and ideology and laying the foundation for a further discussion on cultural analysis. We need to start off though talking about a definition for culture. So culture is the learned and shared set of symbols, language, values and norms that we use to distinguish one group of people from another. So let's back that up a second and let's first of all rule out some things. Culture is not race. Culture is not the same thing as race. Culture is not the same thing as nationality. Culture is not the same thing as ethnicity or any of those types of things. Culture is because those things are not learned and shared. Those are things that are you know, genetic predispositions or a matter of geography or things like that, but they are not learned and shared. Culture is the learned and shared set of symbols, language, values and norms. Meaning that they are passed down. They are learned as we grow and as we mature. We attain a variety of different cultures and culture is not just about specific geographic region, different nations and things like that. We see different cultures and culture does tend to follow those things a lot of times. People have a shared race where ethnicity or nationality may have similar cultural values, but it's not because they're of the same race. It's because those things tend to make us live together and be around each other more and those types of things. But culture is learned and shared and culture exists in broad ways like in different countries and things like that, but it also exists in very small ways. Think about any hobby that you have, any group that you're a part of. That would really be a culture because each of those little groups even have a particular shared set of symbols and language and values and norms. Somebody in my family is very interested in animal crossing on the Nintendo Switch. They play that game all the time. That's a culture. There's a very specific language that goes around that. A very specific set of symbols, things that are important to demonstrate for people in that culture. I mean that has its own culture. Whatever hobby you're into, if you're into college football, that's a culture. There's all kinds of different cultures and co-cultures that exist. These things are learned and shared. They're passed on from one person to another and they're just how we distinguish each other from one group from another. As we're talking about this specifically as it relates to media, there are a couple of things we need to keep in mind. A couple of characteristics of culture that are especially important. First, culture is collective. Culture is not an individual thing. You don't have a culture by yourself. You have a culture because you share the meaning of these things with other people. Culture is something that is shared. It is collective and exists in groups. There's not to be enormous groups of millions of people. It could be a group of five people that make up a culture, but culture is something that is collective and it is shared in that regard. Culture is also rhetorical. As I mentioned, culture has to do with a shared group of symbols and language. That's really what we mean by rhetoric. Rhetoric is just that all communication is symbolic. Rhetoric is the symbols that represent that culture and language really is a specific form of symbol. The symbols and language that are shared in that culture, that's what we mean by rhetorical characteristic of culture in that regard. Culture is also historical. Not only in the sense that culture frames history and sort of creates history in a sense, but really a culture is tied to a specific period of time, a specific history in that sense in that regard. The culture of hair metal music, which was part of my culture growing up in the 80s. Hair metal bands like Poison and Winger and Warrant and Slaughter and those kinds of things. The big hair and the ripped jeans and the acid washed stuff and the skin tight outfits and a specific kind of power about those types of things. That was a culture, but it's bound to that part of history. There are people who still hang on to that and still are really into that kind of thing, but that culture kind of went away in the 90s when Grunge came around and that kind of music faded out of popularity in the biggest sense. That culture is really bound to that piece of history, that part of history. Cultures like that though, there are specific cultural aspects that are specifically related to a point in time in history or a period or era of history. Culture tends to be historical in that way as well. Finally, culture is ideological and we're going to get into ideology here. In fact, let's just move on. Culture is specifically tied to ideology. Culture is ideological that has to do with these beliefs and values and the norms that we establish as a society. Ideology is such an important part of culture. I want to touch on that as well, so let's just do that. What is ideology? Ideology is a system of ideas that unconsciously shapes and constrains both our beliefs and our behaviors. It's this kind of undercurrent in everything that we do. It establishes what we believe, how we behave, all that kind of stuff. It's all informed and shaped by the ideology that we subscribe to, to which we subscribe then. That's what we mean by ideology. Ideology has some structuring functions, some things that structure the different functions of ideology. The first of those we could talk about is limitation. This idea that we kind of have, ideology creates this sort of blinders for us. It gets us in the sense of, well, this is obviously what is correct and what is true and everything else is not. I don't understand how that would be in existence or what ideology can limit our perspective and our frame. We think about things like marriage, for example, here in the United States, here in Western culture, we think about marriage and we could think about what is marriage and what's appropriate for marriage, what establishes marriage. Here in the United States, we would ask most people what they would say, okay, why would you get married? What's the purpose of getting married? What defines your description of marriage and why should somebody get married? Here in Western culture, we would say love. Love is why you get married. You get married because you fall in love, you meet somebody, you fall in love, you are in love, you want to share that love. Love is the central focal point of why you would get married. If you said to them, okay, well, what if love wasn't a part of it? Let's take love out of the mix for marriage. Most people in our culture and Western society would say, I don't follow. Why would you take love out of the equation? How do you have a marriage that's not based on love? We just limit our ideologies. So entrenched in that, that we fail to understand that there are other cultures where they have things like arranged marriages or things where, but even if it's not an arranged marriage, where love is not necessarily the central component of why somebody would get married. Maybe they got married because maybe you would marry somebody else because they can help you maintain some financial stability or maintain a solid source of food coming in. You might get married for those reasons or to combine the powers of a family, so to speak, whatever. So there are other reasons in other cultures why people might get married, but here in the Western, as our ideology is so limited that we think, why would you not get married for love? There's no other reason that you should get married or would get married, right? Frankly, that's a fairly new idea. The idea of marrying for love is to go back 100 years. That was only a small part of the equation, maybe. And then before that, probably not even then. So we have this limitation. Ideology sets these limitations, and it really does kind of limit our understanding of a situation. But also look at normalization. What is normal? What is considered the norm in a society? That's really established in our ideology as well. So normalization, things like why do we, in a large part of the world, much of the world outside of the United States uses the metric system, which quite frankly, I may get kicked out of the country for saying this or whatever. The metric system makes a lot of sense. Everything's based on 10s, and there are different names. So you go up or down 10, and it's got a different name, but everything is based on the specific number, and it's all related, and it's all connected like that. So it really just logically makes a lot of sense. In the United States, what you use, it's called the standard system. And we have these different things. There's no real connection between yards and inches other than we say, okay, you know, a yard is three feet, and a foot is 12 inches. So a yard then is 36 inches. But it's random numbers, and it's random connections, and it's like, it's really kind of hard to sometimes establish between all of this, what is exactly happening between, what's the connection here? So how do you get from inches to miles where there's like 17 different equations that you have to do there? But that's the norm for us. I mean, several times, people have tried to change this over to the metric system to go along with the rest of the world. It's not happening. This is what we do now. This is the norm. This is how we see things. This is our world. And it's just not something we can just flip a switch and be done with. Another example is driving on the right side of the road. A lot of the different parts of the world, they drive on the left hand side of the road. We drive on the right. But that's the norm here. That's our ideologies, establishing that as the norm. Ideology establishes what our norms are, not only for those types of things, but for our values and our attitudes and things like that. So we're always constantly trying to stay in the norm, find the norm, stay in the norm. That's really critical and important for most people based on our ideology. We also, another function of ideology is privileging. Privileging. The most common example, especially recently, is that there are obvious inherent advantages. Privileges given to being a white male, specifically a heterosexual white male, straight white male that comes with privileges and has historically come with privileges. We are in an advantaged position. If you were a straight white male, then you will have kind of a leg up on some different things. But so we can look at that and look at that broadly and has been studied. But let's take a look at something a little different, a little more specific. In the modern workplace, technology is critical. Technology is key, especially I mean, so many people are working from home or working, you know, if they're out of the office, they're working from a distance or even in the office. We're using so much technology now that it's such a critical component. If you took somebody from 30 years ago and dropped him in a workplace now, they would be at a real disadvantage because they haven't had the experience with that technology, don't have the understanding of that technology and so forth. So it's really a privilege or an advantage when, you know, we think about students who are in the classroom who are learning. They know all this technology, right? And they're familiar with it. They're exposed to it in school, they have smartphones, they have at home and they have all these things. That provides them with a real advantage, but think about what you weren't in that situation. And this is where I really, if you're in a community where you don't have access to that at school, you don't have all those computers in your school, you know, you don't have necessarily every student with a smartphone and having access to that technology and being just so intimately familiar with it. It's what we call the digital divide. And that's a real privilege. I mean, it provides a real advantage for students and who are entering college in that sense and entering the workforce in particular. So, I mean, this ideology, there's an ideology of privileging here that when something is a norm, it creates a power structure, right? It becomes part of the power structure. And then you are privileged if you are having an advantage to that. And if you're not, then you're in a disadvantage, you're not part of that, but it creates this privileging system. And then finally, ideology connects to interpolation, this idea of interpolation and that the way that things become ingrained within us, the way that things become just part of our existence, part of who we are without even necessarily realizing it a lot of times. So, for example, I grew up in a Christian home. I was a pastor. I grew up in a strong Christian home. And I'll say too, though, that our parents gave us, my family, a great deal of freedom in determining our own faith, whether we're going to go to church, whether we're going to believe the same things they did. We had all this freedom, but really, I mean, we grew up. I grew up here in Bible studies. I grew up singing hymns. I grew up with all this. So to me, that was just part, I mean, if you were to ask me, when did you become a person of faith? I have no idea. I just always have been. It's always been a part of who I am. And so I don't know really how to separate that. The same thing can be true for lots of people of faith, but also just for us as citizens in the United States, right? We grew up with this idea that, well, of course, we're free. Of course, democracy is the best. Of course, we shouldn't have one person telling us what to do and just controlling everything, right? I don't understand how people would live like that, but in other societies, you know, when you're from Russia, you're from North Korea, you're from China, that's what you grew up with. That is the norm. Interpolation is that, you know, well, obviously somebody's in charge. Obviously, they're going to tell us what to do. Obviously, that class of people is separate from us and we're never going to achieve that. So, I mean, I don't understand what you're talking about with them. That's why a lot of times we feel like historically we felt like, well, all we have to do is help this country get to a democratic state, right? And then they'll be off and running. A lot of times when we do that, when we've tried, you know, kind of nation-building, so to speak, they've fallen back into their old habits after we leave, right? Because that's what they know. That's their, and that's so ingrained within them. It's just a part of who they are and that has been, you know, they've learned that over time and that's been part of who they are. So, interpolation just does ideologies. Interpolation is a part of ideology and that a lot of these things that we are so sure of and are so set in are just things that we've learned along the way without even really realizing it in that sense. Okay. So, all of this, and you're probably asking yourself, okay, what's the point? We haven't even talked about cultural analysis yet. What's the point here, right? What's the point? So, the point is that, you know, it's like an iceberg and this is a pretty cliche kind of example, but an iceberg, you know, you see this nice-looking iceberg out there and it's above the water and it's all this, you know, you see all this and it's beautiful and it looks pretty big just in and of itself, right? And then we realize now, holy crap, there's all this underneath there as well. There's all of this underneath there. So, what do we do with all that underneath there? I mean, it's really guiding that iceberg. That's the real issue, right? Well, that's kind of our, the top part of that iceberg is our observable behaviors and practices and then down beneath that, though, are our culture and ideology and that's really what informs and what structures the rest of our life. Everything that we do and say and how we communicate and what we believe is normal is really shaped by our culture and our ideology. So, that's why this is such a critically important concept to have a hold of before we talk about cultural analysis even. We need to understand these aspects of culture and ideology and how deeply ingrained they are on us and how much impact they have on the media that gets created as a result. Obviously, they're part of who we are. So, they're part of creating that aspect of the media that we see as well. We're going to talk about that in the coming video when I get into cultural analysis specifically. Now that we have a handle on culture and ideology, let's talk about cultural analysis and the impact that culture has on the media and how we ought to be on the lookout for that. Okay? So, keep working right through to the next video we have here on cultural analysis.