Is hanging out with SE++ pals high culture or mass media? [sociology] thread

Elaro

Hi I'm betraying my people taking a sociology class this semester and the class (with professor) said that social media is not even popular culture! He said it was the kind of culture that was the worst was mass-manufactured culture.

So!

Is interacting with my internet friends the worst kind of culture, the medium kind of culture (pop culture), or the high kind of culture? Are there any actual sociologists on the forums, and why are they having an aneurysm right now?

BahamutZERO

Not a sociologist, but having not heard of this terminology before, I now have opinions. The definitions I found seem to call something mass culture or popular culture based on whether you're talking about the production of it (mass culture, things created to be consumed as a cultural product in a large scale) or the consumption of it (a cultural thing is consumed on a large scale and becomes popular culture). Social media to me seems like a complicated combination of folk culture (just shit people do) with mass culture (brands and products and articles and such, things created for mass consumption), all mixed together and becoming popular culture as the reach of individual bits of folk culture is occasionally blown way up to the level of mass culture by the viral memetic nature of social media.

All of this terminology seems super vague though, sociology needs to be more of a hard evidence-based field and less of a squishy feelings and opinions field IMO.

Ringo

Sociology can be a hard science field, but a vast swathe of the questions Sociologists try to answer require longitudinal studies and decades for things to actually happen and be measured. Our academic culture doesn't really allow for people to be paid on the basis that their research might be valuable fifty years down the line, so everyone has to churn out research and papers filled with incomplete data and guesswork in order to keep their jobs.

That's not to say there's no value in the mass of Sociologists making guesses, bouncing off each other, and just generally trying to hash out what the fuck is/was/will be going on! But it's always going to look messy until enough time passes and actual trends emerge from the data

Prolegomena

I assume you've already told him about the jelqing thread?

Ringo

Now the real scum of the soft sciences are historians and anthropologists who just make up what happened and why it happened.

Fiction writers, the lot of them!

Captain Inertia

Prolegomena wrote: »

I assume you've already told him about the jelqing thread?

Quite a handy thread

Jedoc

It goddamn better be high culture, or else why would poop threads be banned?