How would you define culture? I would define it as a collection of pieces of entertainment that encourage thought and enjoyment simultaneously. Wikipedia would say Culture was a Canadian hip hop rapper and reggae artist who collaborated on a cover of Toto’s Africa . Wait, that’s not right. Forget that.
Wikipedia defines culture (or high culture) as a set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. Personally I feel this leads to a slightly recursive definition if not for the other definition of culture – i.e. a Canadian hip hop rapper and reggae artist set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group – this refers to.
Wikipedia also gives a definition for low culture, saying it encompasses everything in society that has mass appeal. So you might ask “what is the difference?” (of course you might ask “where is the library?” but that’s not the question I’m going to answer).
The difference is that to be high culture, something must appeal greatly to a small group, and to be low culture it must just appeal to a large group. Of course you may ask “how do you define large, small and greatly?” (well actually you probably won’t – that distinction probably satisfied you and you would quite like me to shut up – but you should) but I won’t get into that for fear of losing you (please don’t leave me!).
So I think the best definition we can give of culture is the intersection of these two groups. To be culture, something should be both high culture and low culture. It should appeal greatly to a large group.
The original intention of this post was to demonstrate that video games count as culture, something I firmly believe though I know there are many who would disagree, but I felt that in order to know what was culture, I needed to know what culture was. So I will have to leave it to a later post to tell you why video games are a Canadian hip hop rapper and reggae artist.
Wait…
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