Strong Response

This paper presents a summary of the article. The article deals with different issues related to technology, media and American politics. According to the author of the article, “Like a movie that doesn't show you the monster until the last .30 minutes, the aughts kept the leviathan hidden until almost the end. Despite 9/11, despite the dotcom crash, despite Iraq, life in the aughts was pretty swinging, even in (or especially in) New York, which fully shed the baggage of urban fear that dogged it well into the nineties. Murder rates continued to drop as Harlem and even parts of the Bronx became gentrified (Hirschorn, 34).

By definition, whatever is popular has a large audience and is well received by huge numbers of people. In the twenty-first century, the popular is most often produced by professionals (such as journalists, musicians, and filmmakers) to appeal to global audiences that traverse various local cultures. In this context, questions about the nature of popular culture that relate to its production and audience (e.g., the question of whether popular culture is produced by the people for themselves as a kind of folk culture) represent viewpoints more useful prior to the eighteenth century. Thereafter, popular culture has been understood as those ideas and entertainments that win the attention of a mass audience, and as such, it is a manufactured form of entertainment and idiomatic knowledge often characterized as being inferior to other, more highbrow or elite forms. It can then be imbued with sinister intentions; for instance, it can be thought of as a tool in a political armory designed to be a form of entertainment that is made easily available to keep the masses distracted and diverted (Hirschorn, 35).

Embedded in these views are assumptions that culture originating from the lower social orders, or appealing en masse to a mainstream, is both less interesting than highbrow culture and more heavily freighted with ideology. It also assumes that popular culture can be understood and interpreted properly from the vantage point of those in an elite intellectual position. Yet popular culture is not a homogeneous form; it has contradictions within itself as well as a range of diverse forms. Learning to read objects and practices in a critical manner was the key to understanding society. The dominant elite classes had expressed their own views through a monopoly over culture, and these values had been taken for granted. Now with the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the canonical elite forms of high culture were transposed into sites of cultural struggle as new modes of seeing were being developed. Across the Atlantic, other social analysts and theorists were at work reshaping views toward the popular and, in so doing, changing the sociological landscape of everyday modern life.

Restaurants grew glammier and back to their ever more excessively outfitted right-figure pads. Meanwhile, smug Brooklynites of a certain age turned a once down-at-the-heels borough into astroller januned bobo paradise as Brooklynites of a certain other age grew significant facial ...