Culture

'Taste' enables us to read people in different ways by making choices that show our individuality or group status. High Culture is considered 'good taste' with a limited niche audience who are powerful in society as they are more likely to be educated compared to the low culture mass audience that would engage in X Factor on a Saturday. Taste is used in society to gain status which are socially constructed by the primary source of the family, to the secondary sources of education and religion which challenge the notions of inner taste or 'authentic sensibility'. Basically Pierre Bourdieu stated that we learn taste and are not born with it)

Cultural Capital can be invested into consumption practices which raise your symbolic capital e.g. power. Therefore documentaries and radio 5 are assumed to be of a higher culture compared to that of X Factor and celebrity reality TV shows which are to do with people in society using the shows to try and become famous and entertaining the population more than educating them with facts that will help them in life. Pierre Bourdieu stated that 'different forms of culture provide different forms of pleasure'. So for the mass audiences (9 million tune into X Factor each week) are pleasured each week by watching people similar to them trying to succeed under the power of the likes of Tulisia, Louis Walsh, Kelly Rowland and the mighty Gary Barlow who each lack high culture knowledge (maybe not so much Gary who back in the day was part of a band that is well known and possibly more popular today than when they began - Take That). Anyway people that are high cultured would rather engage in a famous play at the theatre such as Shakespeare as the theatre is seemed to be higher culture than that of television (considering it has been entertainment a lot longer than television).

However there are different forms of elite popular culture which can also shift from one to the other over time following society and its taste. Nessun Dorma (Pavarotti) for instance was always associated with high culture as it is one of opera's most famous songs.

However for the youth of today it is probably only recognised due to it being re released by Paul Potts who sang it beautifully on the X Factor which lead him to win the competition and become well know in society because of it. Therefore Nesun Dorma is now associated with Low Culture and no training as before this audition Paul was just an ordinary citizen who worked in a phone shop to earm his living. Therefore there has been a shift in culture as Nesun Dorma is familar to a mass audience due to it being sung on the X Factor which is a show existing of low culture and a high mass of around 9 million viewers a programme.

Therefore the debate of weather ballet is still an English high cultured form or weather in today's society it has transformed to lower culture due to the mass population of children and women that learn ballet as a women's alternative to football which is seen as low culture in society (even though secretly those with a high culture standard still support their home town team and sneakily check the scores or peak at Match Of The Day to watch the highlights alone as the house was to busy to risk puttng on Sky Sports 1 at kick off time) Back to the debate of ballet- it is also known that there is a Royal Ballet School in London where only the best can attend in order to appear at theatre on stage. Therefore as most people may only use ballet as a form of exercise or fun and may6 eventually 'drop out', it could also be evident that those who are part of the Royal Ballet may in fact be of a high culture of where their primary source of education, the family, have encouraged them to take Ballet seriously and to engage in it as those would have in the past which seems to put Ballet in a categorty of Low/High Culture in modern society and can be left up to yourselves weather you think it still remains high culture or has shifted to low culture due to its mass population.

Therefore today's society appears to be low culture with mass media comapies competing with eachother for highest viewing figures to make the most amount of money. Therefore reality programmes and soaps are the main programmes with minimal high cultured programmes such as documentaries that would educate it's audience as today we all enjoy being entertained so we can be involved and forget the inequalities and stress of everyday life. (Such as worrying about our philosophy reading which by the way is high culture so we can be proud to say that we do exist of some high culture amoungst our reality and celebritised lifestyle.

Reymond Williams 1958 'Culture is ordinary'