SAMPLE EXAM ANSWER
Question 1 (20 marks)
‘Popular culture is a form of cultural pollution, which undermines traditional values and standards.’
This viewpoint, which I will be supporting in this essay, stems from ideas relating to culture which can be traced back to Matthew Arnold. The idea that popular culture ‘pollutes’ culture suggests that traditional (high) culture needs to be protected from the superficial and disposable world of contemporary popular culture.
By separating culture from money, Arnoldsaw culture as an expression of creativity rather than as a mechanical production line shooting out cultural products for audiences to gobble up and then throw away when they become bored. I see culture as something which expresses a truth or an idea about humanity in a way which is not afraid to be challenging; the contemporary world of Big Brother and Heat magazine are two good examples of popular cultural products which threaten real (or ‘high’ culture).
The Channel 4 television show Big Brother presents a world where celebrity-status (however z-list) is the prize and where the journey is made up of trivial and mundane popularity contests. It offers absolutely nothing of value whilst attempting to create an ‘addiction’ of voyeurism and its cheap thrills. Meanwhile, while Channel 4 count the money as the advertising revenue rolls in, they also cut their funding of serious documentaries and weighty dramas and films because ‘good’ television cannot attract big enough audiences. This‘dumbing down’ of culture by programmes like Big Brother encourages audiences to lose their powers of concentration and their ability to think and be challenged. Presumably this is why Channel 4 is happy to screen Big Brother and its spin-offs on several channels, often at prime time, yet was not interested in purchasing the rights to the challenging, thought-provoking and critically acclaimed drama series The Wire (a drama of real cultural value).
Magazines like Heat feed off programmes like Big Brother in circulating interviews and photos of ex-contestants shopping in Tescos, promoting a culture of empty celebrity and encouraging people to sift through mindless pap rather than read a book or reflect on what might be important in life. Popular culture encourages to us to develop an interest in gossip rather than the news, in celebrity rather than humanity, and moulds us to expect culture to be easy to absorb.
A further example can be found in London’s theatre-land. Musicals fill theatres up and down Shaftesbury Avenue because they are popular and accessible. Meanwhile, directors have little chance of staging plays by both traditional and contemporary playwrights because audiences are used to a good tune to sing along to rather than 90 minutes of concentration and being challenged to think.
The victim here is real culture – anything genuinely challenging and interesting is being rejected in favour of easy, lazy consumption. Popular culture really is polluting our cultural world.
Question 2
Personal communication is much influenced by the gender of both senders and receivers. Consider gender’s specific influence on appearance. (20 marks)
It can be argued that the means by which we communicate with others is significantly influenced by our gender – our understanding of what it means to be male or female. This understanding has been learnt via agents of socialisation such as our family, the media and our peer group. According to Goffman, the ways we communicate – which includes our appearance – are aligned to how we choose to stage ourselves to the outside world. Our use of props -which may well include clothes, accessories and body art -communicate our self-image to others as well as the sub-cultural groups that we belong to. Perhaps above all, our appearance communicates our own understanding of ourselves (as we have learned it) as either male or female.
Traditionally, gender has been communicated through appearance in fairly structured ways. A good way of examining this is to consider the traditional school uniform: trousers, shirt and tie for boys, a skirt or dress for girls. These paradigmatic choices of clothing in themselves communicate an ideology relating to the differing roles of men and women in society as well as ideas about masculinity and femininity. Clothes were seen as a signifier of power (men) or domesticity (women). The changing perception of women as people who can take an equal role in the work-place means that in contemporary society it is now perfectly acceptable for women to wear trousers; however it is still pretty unusual to see a man dressed in a skirt or a dress in the work-place (or elsewhere in society, for that matter). Perhaps this suggests that the cultural codes governing male identity are more controlled than they are for women. If a man wears a skirt he is choosing to make a statement: one message being encoded by this choice of clothing could be that he is rejecting the stereotypical assumptions of masculinity. When David Beckham was photographed wearing a sarong a few years ago, he was both mocked and acclaimed by different sections of the media. Some receivers saw it as a healthy expression of a modern male identity, and a rejection of the burden of the stereotypical male image – others read his clothing choice more as a cynical attempt to appeal to the pink pound, or even as a comment on his own sexual orientation.
Makeup is another prop used differently depending on gender. For women, the cultural practice of wearing makeup has become normalised; it is almost expected that to present yourself as a ‘normal’ woman you must enhance your facial features in the form of this literal ‘mask’ (Goffman). Who this mask is for is debateable. Some women will claim that it is not to present themselves as more attractive to men but to enhance their own self-confidence. Of course, make-up also comes with its own cultural codes – too much and you are perceived as a slapper. The syntagm of what is means to be a man in western society does not include the wearing of make-up because make-up is a signifier of femininity. When men do choose to wear make-up it is probably a way of expressing their membership of a sub-cultural group (such as punks or Goths) where the boundaries of gender identity are allowed to be more blurred, or perhaps their sexual orientation.
Question 3 – cover of Finishing Touches book.
a) Who do you think is the audience for this text? (4 marks)
Judging by the paradigmatic choices made in constructing this book cover, we can infer that the audience being targeted is female, 25-45 and middle class with aspirational tastes.
b) Identify and briefly explain icons, indexes and symbols within this text. (6 marks)
Iconic signifers include the woman, the sofa & the fireplace – collectively they are used to signify a home – specifically, the lounge. The assumption is that it is a lounge the audience aspire to.
Indexical signifers include the positioning of the woman. The way she holds the cushion acts as evidence that this is herlounge. The outstretched hand in the direction of vase acts as evidence that she has just finished putting the ‘finishing touches’ to the tray. The two wine glasses on the mantelpiece act as evidence that two people - a couple – live in the home.
Symbolic signifiers include the two logos used to anchor the text (Changing Rooms and BBC). The flowers and wine can also be seen as symbolic signifiers of romance.
c) What does the room and its contents communicate about the woman’s identity? (10 marks)
The woman’s identity is being staged as a middle-aged, middle class home-maker. This has partly been created through the choice of female model, who is well groomed, slim and blond. It is also communicated through the props used to‘stage’ the woman’s identity: the minimalist furnishing of the room and its reliance on black & white colours which connote simplicity and sophistication. The paradigmatic choices made in selecting the fireplace, wine glasses & flowers help to create the syntagm of ‘the middle-class home’ – it all looks as though it has been plucked out of a Heals’ catalogue. This is what helps to communicate her socio-economic background. The books scattered on the hearth at the corner of the image signify an education and interest in the world. The carefully arranged lounge creates a calm, thoughtful and stylish identity for the woman. The choice of words such as ‘styling’ and ‘transform’ is also the language of women’s magazines, and helps to position the woman as the home-maker, anchoring her identity even further.
Question 4
Use your knowledge of communication and culture to explore the role played by self-knowledge in the creation and maintenance of personal identity. (20 marks)
How well we know ourselves is an important factor to consider when assessing the creation and maintenance of our personal identity. According to Cooley, it is partly through other people – and their reactions to us – that we gain self-knowledge in the first place. His ‘looking glass’ theory suggests that we use other people as mirrors through which we can see ourselves reflected. For example, we might try out a new outfit when with a friend to judge their reaction; as a result we might judge that outfit to be a success or not.
Gaining information about ourselves in this way, and reflecting on our strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures allows us to control the way we want the world to see us. It allows us to refine and project a sense of personal identity which reveals ourselves in the way we want to be seen. This process of editing out aspects of our selves which might be perceived as negative is known as gate-keeping. Many people engage in this everyday as they create and maintain pages on sites like Facebook and Bebo. People carefully include information and photos which help to maintain a sense of personal identity that they are happy with.
We can apply the Johari window to this process. If we know ourselves effectively, we also know what to reveal in our‘open self’ and what to conceal in our ‘hidden self.’ It might be that the more familiar and comfortable we feel with people, the happier we are to reveal ourselves more honestly, and the more our ‘open self’ expands. However, what we can’t control is our ‘blind self’ - those things about our self that others know but we don’t, or our ‘unknown self’- those things about our selves which have yet to reveal themselves to us or to others. Our own self-knowledge depends to an extent on how honestly we manage the feedback we get from others. Many of us use various self-maintenance strategies (Gergen & Gergen) to minimise the effect of feedback we perceive to be negative (for example, by rubbishing those who gave the feedback: ‘what does my teacher know anyway’) , rather than using negative feedback to reflect honestly on ourselves.
This leads to an interesting point, which is that our sense of personal identity is not a static and unchanging concept. We can never know everything about ourselves and as we experience more of life our self-image and the identity we want to present to the world changes too. As Goffman says, the roles we play in life partly determine our identity, and when we are ‘new’ to a role, it makes sense that a lack of self-knowledge means that our ‘blind self’ is likely to be larger until we have learned who to be in that role, partly through the process of feedback. This often happens when someone starts a new job, for example.
In addition, the sub-cultural groups that we identify with in life may well change as time passes. Our identification with a particular cultural or sub-cultural group will certainly influence how we construct a sense of identity and then knowingly present it to the world, as anyone who has decided to become a goth or a punk knows.
