AP Human Geography
11/9/15
The Rise and Fall of Pop Culture
Cultural Intercourse and Landscape
Chapter 4: Local Culture, Popular Culture, Cultural Landscapes
Thoughts and Ruminations
Essay Question- How do the terms assimilation, local culture, and popular culture used in chapter 4 relate to The Rise and Fall of Pop Culture and Cultural Intercourse and Landscape?
In the past decade popular culture, or pop culture, has changed quite drastically. It has gone from a rather small group of things such as TV shows, books, and people that are commonly known throughout a large area to quite the opposite. Nowadays, there are so many new facets of pop culture that not everyone can keep up with them. In the article The Rise and Fall of Pop Culture, by Don Aucoin, describes pop culture as a foundation that is breaking due to the sheer amount of new things that qualify as pop culture. Aucoin writes, "Its foundation was a large but essentially knowable range of movies, music, TV shows, and fads that most people were assumed to be familiar with. But that foundation is buckling under the sheer weight of all the things that now qualify as pop culture". So many new things are becoming a part of pop culture that the old "foundation" of pop culture that most everyone was familiar with is now starting to disappear.
Even though pop culture has lost the old "foundation" and become more diverse, there is also an aspect of it that makes people very much alike. This is called assimilation. Assimilation is the process through which people lose originally differentiating traits such as dress, speech particularities, or mannerisms when they come into contact with another society or culture. In our world today with social media outlets such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook people can see certain things from other cultures they like through pictures and videos and then adopt them and incorporate them into their own culture. In the article Cultural Intercourse and Landscape, culture is defined as, "patters of learned behavior that leave permanent traces and are transferred from generation to generation". Adopting the smallest thing from another culture such as a way someone talks and slowly having that incorporated into another culture can make a huge impact because of how quickly it can spread through things such as social media, and after it has spread it is going to be passed down through generations.
With so many people altering their way of life due to pop culture there are some who decide to do the exact opposite. This is known as local culture. Local culture is a group of people in a particular place who see themselves as a collective or a community, who share experiences, customs, and traits, and who work to preserve those traits and customs in order to claim uniqueness and to distinguish themselves from others. An example of local culture would be the Amish. The Amish do not use modern commodities such as cell phones, cars, electricity, and much more. This is in an effort to preserve their old customs and to not give into popular culture and change their way of life.
With so many different aspects and niches pop culture has quickly become one of the most discussed and important topics in today's world. As things such as social media continue to get bigger and bigger, there will only continue to be more different aspects of pop culture.
The Rap group NWA from Compton wanted to express their feelings about certain topics but were discriminated against by people like the police because they were African American so they made the police look like the enemy through their lyrics then their fan base bought into the new idea and culture of hating the police and then they became one of the most popular rap groups in history.
This map shows how NWA began rapping in Compton and then their music began to get popular in densely populated cities like Harlem and The Bronx. After it spread to New York it truly blew up with rappers like Jay-Z and Nas who then made rap one of the most beloved types of music in America. Compton, Harlem, and The Bronx are now known as the hearths of rap music.
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