I thought it was very interesting!
Dear Mom,
I’m supposed to try and explain cultural studies specifically theory to you in a way that you can understand it, me, and the world basically. O.o Well, here goes!
From the day we’re born culture affects us. Whether it’s the act of mom always holding us and dad being close by, the idea that boys wear blue and girls wear pink, and that from then on we’re raised as normal as possible (as culture suggests and you’re supposed to raise us in the dominating cultural world). So in a way, everything we’re ever gonna do, and everything we’ve ever done is a learned experience meaning we’ve seen it done elsewhere before we actually did the action ourselves.
Backing up, culture is just what one kind of people’s lives are like (their habits, their diet, their day to day routine) basically how they create their own reality. For example, I’m an indian from the Allegany Reservation in Western New York and my reality is very different from somebody who’s lived in the boonies (woods) in North Dakota their whole life. Even my vernacular is different…
Reading culture, whether it be a sign, a picture, words on a paper, a book, a magazine, is something we all do everyday. ‘Reading’ culture basically means looking critically at signs within a culture and using that analysis to draw conclusions about how that culture works. Signs being anything you can physically see in order to draw conclusions about why that culture is the way it is. This all ties into the next part…
In Becker’s “Becoming a marihuana user” he explains that when you first try something new, there’s a million different ways you can perceive this experience. However the dominating experience of the people you’re with tends to be the experience YOU have as well, basically there’s a meaning that emerges that may be different from your first perception of the action. In Becker’s study, he wanted to know if all pot smokers had traits that would make them smoke pot at some point (which is what people believed then). Surprisingly some people only smoked pot because their friends did, interesting enough, so he said that any behavior is the result of a ‘social experience’ in which the user defined a meaning for the experience. Then goes on to say that behavior itself should be studied, “meaning, conception…the way they think of this behavior makes experiences possible”.
Our ‘docile bodies’ are quite impressionable from the start of our lives. The nature of society is built on what others think and what’s normal. Or maybe what’s considered to be ‘hot’ (slim females built like Barbie, bulky muscly males with 6 packs, etc), but culture changes everyday. It used to be that way back when being ‘chubby’ was beautiful, not being starving thin and skinny so that if you turned sideways we can’t see you. I think being unnecessarily thin isn’t something you should be proud of. I think one should be comfortable in their own skin because the only that matters should be what ‘you’ think and not what everyone else thinks.
I also think that you shouldn’t do something just because someone else thinks it’s the ‘in’ thing. I know it’s a terrible cliché but if jumping off a bridge was the in thing would everyone really do it? Hmm…I think we would be surprised as to the reaction. (A similar situation could be when there were teen girls out there in the world that would take pregnancy pacts together, no idea why they would do that but this was before ’16 and Pregnant’ and ‘Teen Mom’). 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom tries to show the world that being a pregnant teenager is hard but the '16 and Pregnant' series just keeps going, i'm not sure that's what the show is supposed to perpetuate, that if your a pregnant teenager you can be on our show and everything is paid for...
Okay, mom you got all this? =] Just kidding.
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