For my post blog entre, I decided to focus on Hebdige and his piece on culture and ideology. In summary, Hebdige speaks about how culture is understood and how subcultures are extremely powerful. He says, "Ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense" (127). In class, we spoke about how this refers to how ideology becomes so naturalized and never truly question it because it is a way of life we have been living for years. Also, for the most part, it is something in which our society is structured by. Ideology is so naturalized because it is something we have been explicitly exposed to since birth and no one seems to talk about the general beliefs of how everything is structured. For example, when I grew up I watched a lot of Disney movies that showed a certain ideology, although I did not know it. Disney presents the ideology in which a man and woman should have relationships, how females and males should act, etc. Growing up watching this, overtime unconsciously shaped my beliefs and my ideologies towards the world. I never remember a time in which I asked my mom or dad why men and women act the way they do, why it was "normal" for men and woman to have relations with each other because ultimately I thought it was the structure of life because it was never questioned publicly or in my household. Overall, I thought this reading from last week was very interesting and I thought it was also interesting how we cannot escape ideologies because even striving away from an ideology is an ideology itself. The term ideology was very confusing for me at the start of the semester, but I feel now after this reading and discussing it in class, I have a way better understanding and I can apply it to my own life.
For my post blog entre, I decided to focus on Hebdige and his piece on culture and ideology. In summary, Hebdige speaks about how culture is understood and how subcultures are extremely powerful. He says, "Ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense" (127). In class, we spoke about how this refers to how ideology becomes so naturalized and never truly question it because it is a way of life we have been living for years. Also, for the most part, it is something in which our society is structured by. Ideology is so naturalized because it is something we have been explicitly exposed to since birth and no one seems to talk about the general beliefs of how everything is structured. For example, when I grew up I watched a lot of Disney movies that showed a certain ideology, although I did not know it. Disney presents the ideology in which a man and woman should have relationships, how females and males should act, etc. Growing up watching this, overtime unconsciously shaped my beliefs and my ideologies towards the world. I never remember a time in which I asked my mom or dad why men and women act the way they do, why it was "normal" for men and woman to have relations with each other because ultimately I thought it was the structure of life because it was never questioned publicly or in my household. Overall, I thought this reading from last week was very interesting and I thought it was also interesting how we cannot escape ideologies because even striving away from an ideology is an ideology itself. The term ideology was very confusing for me at the start of the semester, but I feel now after this reading and discussing it in class, I have a way better understanding and I can apply it to my own life.
Comments
Jane, your takeaways from the reading and from class are similar to mine in a sense that as a child growing up and developing, many things which I witnessed in popular media I would often view as normal. Just like your view on men and women in relationships, I realize that I never questioned our education system the way that I do today, even though it directly impacted my life and it was just something I did because I thought it was the way the world worked.
ReplyDeleteThe education system is something that many don't hear too many critiques on until they reach a higher form of education. Media doesn't do much to touch on it, and the education system itself doesn't do much either. It wasn't until my senior year of high school into my college years where this really became a topic of conversation for me. So many people go through the education system put into place in our country because in way they have to. Without the traditional education that everyone else in your community gets, you can easily become an outcast and not fit in to your community. A traditional education is essential to become an active and meaningful member of our society today, yet it is increasingly becoming more critiqued by many people in the world.
Restructuring the education system in our country would be a difficult task and would separate generations from those before and those after the restructuring. I am not sure if something like that would be such a good idea for our already increasingly changing culture. And although our education system of far from perfect, it is still much of what it is supposed to in terms our educating the people that go through enough to become meaningful members of our society. It is difficult to imagine what my life would be like if I were to go through a different form of education, but it is something to ponder and think about as we do go through college, and have children of our own who will ultimately go through the same process that we have.