Subcultures, countercultures, and cultural change
Within any large society there are many cultures, and all of them keep changing.
High culture and popular culture
High culture refers to forms associated with elites, such as opera or fine art. Popular culture is the mainstream culture enjoyed by most people, such as hit songs, films, and sports. The boundary shifts: works once seen as popular entertainment, like Shakespeare's plays, can later be treated as high culture.
Subcultures and countercultures
A subculture shares most of the mainstream culture's values but has distinctive styles or interests, like gamers or skateboarders. A counterculture rejects some core values of the larger culture, as some 1960s communes did. Countercultures can be peaceful or confrontational, and some of their ideas later enter the mainstream.
How culture changes
Culture changes through innovation, discovery, and diffusion, the spread of ideas and objects between groups. Cultural lag, a term from William Ogburn, describes the gap when non-material culture is slow to catch up with new technology, as when laws struggle to keep pace with social media. Globalisation speeds diffusion around the world.
Flashcard
A group sharing distinctive styles while accepting mainstream values
Check your understanding
Laws about online privacy take years to catch up with new apps. This illustrates: