And before Joss Whedon fell out of favor, a lot of schools had courses in "Buffy studies". Yes, pop culture might seem a silly topic for a course, but clever instructors can use it as an entry way into more serious topics.
The cultural consumption of hundreds of millions (if not a larger audience) is not silly or trivial, it is a key part of the foundations of this civilization. The position of dismissing it cavalierly is a cultural indulgence for those who want to prove how serious of a person they are, which of course is the silliest cultural act mentioned here.
I am not sure that “wait, wait… don’t tell me” (a 50s radio show) had more impact than Hanna Arendt because of show’s popularity.
In 200 BC leaflets with Alexander the Great gossip stories were heavily requested and consumed. I don’t believe they affected western civilization as much as Euclidean geometry.
Broadly speaking pop culture has a short lifespan. Does not seem to be that interesting or impactful in the long run.
For example we have many articles complaining that we live in an era of incredible artistic ugliness where most works of art produced will hardly endure 50 years. They might be wrong (although I see where they are coming from, contemporary arts currency is shock not awe or beauty, it is a byproduct of the post modernist, high-tech society).
On the other hand, po culture surely helps to explain many aspects of the current civilization and problems of the day. Are these problems interesting? Maybe, to the extend that is interesting to know how they made tea in China 1200 years ago or who would be the Emperor’s wife.
Pop culture doesn't just concern itself with the trivial and there's plenty of high culture is long-surviving pop culture. Alexander gossip? We've got that:
It's been over 20 years since the last episode of Buffy aired. Madonna's most relevant period was in the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, which was 30 years ago. Both are still considered influential and pivotal.
I'm pretty sure "they" will be discussing both 20 years from now even if you haven't been discussing either in the past decades, especially if you don't have any interest in Media Studies.
Even if you think Buffy had no cultural impact beyond its own fandom, it's an interesting piece for analysis if you are interested in how media changes over time. For example it represents a great specimen for the change from episodic to serialized formats (with the first season following a more typical 90s "monster of the week" format to the final season mostly forgoing episodic plots in favor of the season-long story arc). And no matter how tiring it may sound the umpteenth time: it disrupted the traditional gender roles in media at the time, an oft-cited example being the very first episode opening with a young romantic couple where the girl is revealed to be the vampire rather than the victim (an inversion of a well-established horror movie trope at the time) and unlike other media this wasn't a throwaway gag but instead part of a general attitude to gender roles throughout the show.
Joss Whedon has rightfully fallen out of grace but Buffy was a collective effort of numerous show writers, cast and crew. The point never was to revel in its flawlessness (which would be absurd: even fans will spend hours explaining to you what problems the show had) but to use it as a specimen for understanding shifts in cultural attitude and genre.
If you're not interested in media beyond mere consumption (which is fine, mind you) none of this likely means anything to you. You can listen to and enjoy music without having to understand the nuances of musical theory and what individual artists influenced each other's style or whatever. But if everyone was only ever interested in anything at a surface level... well, you wouldn't be here, right? It's kinda in the name.
Buffy ran from 1997 -> 2003. So it's been 20 years since the end of BTVS, and here we are still talking about Buffy. :). So it has at least a 20yr lifespan, maybe 40? We shall see.
It would be interesting to see what shows are considered to be important in the development of culture in a hundred years time. Buffy is definitely a candidate, but my money is on The Shield. The storytelling hasn’t dated at all (although the outfits definirely have).
There’s also an interesting conversation to be had about how shows like The Shield and The Wire pushed narratives about policing that are bluntly, extremely right-wing.
Dunno what David Tennant paid to study Shakespeare at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland but it landed him work at the Royal Shakespeare Company and a pretty lucrative stage and film career.
Being Scotland and not the US there was likely some of that socialised education helping out, so I guess that might have taken the edge off cost a bit.
Bringing up any celebrity to prove a point that something is worth spending absurd amounts of money to study seems silly. Is that the lie we sell now? Get into debt to become a movie star?
Y'know, it's kinda funny that despite the commecialization and streamlining of the German university system following the EU reforms in the mid-2000s, German universities will still insist that the value of higher education is the refinement of the mind, scientific literacy and all that Humboldtian jazz whereas in US-influenced social spaces it's now apparently heretical to suggest that academic study of anything that does not directly translate to a workplace education or pay rise is not a scam.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem is not that someone might think attending lectures on a TV show you don't like is a waste of time and effort but that they will have to decide between that or having an income and the only way for them to do it is "spending absurd amounts of money".
Maybe, just maybe, literally no degree is worth "spending absurd amounts of money" and the primary function of degrees in the economy is literal virtue signaling (i.e. demonstrating endurance) and networking (or compensating for a lack of social capital if your family doesn't already provide you access to the right networks).
Maybe education shouldn't be so heavily privatized and so absurdly expensive to begin with. Maybe privatization results in more economically useful degrees but reduces the overall quality of education as an intellectual endeavour and entices vast amounts of people to go into crippling debt to do academic busywork to get the meaningless trinket necessary to make it past job application filters.
Less is more. If you want to make a point just make it instead of wrapping it in the bs.
And if your point is that people should embrace learning outside of the confines of the education system, yes I agree. You shouldn't spend any amount of money to be taught Shakespeare. Just read Shakespeare. If you are not motivated to learn it, don't.
> Maybe education shouldn't be so heavily privatized
Education is not privatized. The majority of education is public and / or not for profit. The problem with education is not profits. Non profit institutions are raising the cost of education to absurd heights and it's on track to be $1 million for a 4 year degree.
You can't blame capitalism for the rising cost of education as much as you'd like to. Blame the left wing administrative class.
I doubt Tennant paid tuition at RCS as many/most British subjects do not pay. As an American, my kid does pay. It’s also 50-75% less than the comparable American collegiate programs. Going into debt to do what you love is probably the best reason.
The study of it is often silly and trivial, because it generally rests on characterizing the output of a very few corporations [*] with arbitrary, associative observations, then declaring that those observations tell us something interesting about the consumers of the material i.e. everyone. This is silly.
The rest is people competing on effusively praising of some obscure pocket of pop culture, with the aim of remarketing it with the academic as the (paid) authority. That's trivial.
I have to say that it's a bad sign that only defenses one can come up with of an academic field of study is that it's also a part of "this civilization", and that everyone who dismisses it's importance is just trying to impress people. Which makes them even sillier than Madonna studies, I guess, because trying to impress people by not talking nonsense is actually bad and a sign of insecurity.
[*] I remember when Ben Bagdikian was warning us that only 50 corporations determined the majority of what we read and watched. Now you could get the men who get a veto over most of what we see and say to fit inside a medium-sized bathroom. I resent cultural critics trying to diagnose me based on their financial incentives.
First by providing a lighter course subject these courses are often a fun intro to the field of study that can get students more interested in more traditional subjects in the field.
Secondly, Limited cultural centers is exactly a reason to study it because everything is controlled by those corporations and it’s impossible to understand modern society without it. Should we throw away most of the masterworks of the renaissance because they were funded by the Medicis? Should we throw away medieval European art because of influence by Catholicism? Even though those corporations control everything individual artists still have voices even if it’s mediated by power structures. If say in a hundred years a professor wanted to offer a course covering the late 20th century and early 21st century culture not including artifacts produced by those corporations would be incomplete at best. An analysis of modern culture needs to start somewhere and why not something like Madonna or Buffy that students can personally connect with?
Now I’m fully sympathetic to arguments stating it’s too modern to have that objective eye since our analysis will be rooted in the same cultural frame that’s mediated by extreme corporate power. But even that has value.
No, the mistake is trying to understand these artifacts independently of the corporations. It is impossible to understand the artifacts without understanding of the corporations. The art cannot stand alone.
The art cannot stand alone, but the relevant part is the audiences and what they make of the art, the fan subculture(s) and what they build on top of it - in contrast with that, the corporations which made them are far less relevant.
You're just letting "relevant" do the heavy lifting of your rationale. It's a poor argument.
What the audiences make of the art is contingent on the social mores and cultural attitudes of the time - which depend on the socio-political-economic material forces that operate on cultural strata. This is why concepts like commodity fetishism, corporate ideology, and so forth become critical in studying pop cultural phenomena. If you take such a class and don't learn that it is a social studies course in disguise, then you've learned nothing. It's not just merely scholarship about aesthetics and whatever the audience thinks. So the risk here is that these classes are taught wrong. These courses ought to be even more difficult than STEM classes because they require sociology, political and economic theory, philosophy, and so forth, involving open-ended issues and problems about human society. But for some reason (another can of worms) cultural studies is perceived as an "easy" program for academically weaker students to pursue.
It sounds like you’ve never taken one of these types of classes then. Madonna studies or Buffy studies is not 3 hours a week of why “like a virgin is the best madonna song”. It’s usually analysis of the cultural context and history. Maybe the profs angle isn’t capitalism maybe it’s feminism, maybe it’s race but I assure you there’s depth to it. Unless of course it’s a course on how to write pop music or tv or something more skills based.
Quite the opposite, I've read academic papers on critical theory and related subjects. I have an advanced training in a STEM discipline but as an undergrad I took electives at UC Berkeley, a highly regarded place for studying critical theory. Those humanities courses set the stage for my own philosophical/political inclinations as a graduate student, as well as later on in my life.
So it is with those readings and my own academic background that it is worth pointing out that critical theory itself criticizes the social role of these college classes and the way they are taught. I'm not the first pro critical theorist reader to do so--these issues are raised and debated within these fields by professors / within the scholarship itself. A mainstream example is Slavoj Zizek, but he is by no means the only one.
It is the fact that you've either taken or taught these courses that I find your subtly uncritical "assurance" to be superficial and lack a deeper awareness of the positionalities of cultural studies in general. If you have done a substantial amount of reading, then you'd at least know exactly what I mean by the above and would not have written the your reply that way.
Having known and actually travelled quite a bit with Madonna, U2 and many other “superfans” I find this fascinating. Good to see it on HN too as it is definitely a subject worth studying!
I’ve always thought it was curious that it’s often male bands like U2 that are the most celebrated, versus female solo performers like Madonna. Not that there aren’t exceptions (and hip hop is a whole other thing), but it seems to be a trope in pop and rock music.
It's interesting how people so detached from these fields that they think "Buffy studies" or "Madonna studies" is a field you can enroll in to get a full degree in rather than just a niche subject in a greater field (usually some form of Media Studies or its offshoots) that rarely has more than a singular course available still find it important enough to express their disdain for it, literally making something up to be angry about.
If you're upset that Media Studies exists as an academic field, fine, but at least be honest about it and don't pretend it's a specific thing you take offense with just because girls like it.
I’m not sure that I would recommend a young person get a media studies degree. What I can say is that as an adult reading about media studies is fascinating and rewarding. Learning what goes into good film making touches on history, psychology, marketing, writing, and more. Many philosophers use media as a jumping-off point because our media reflects our culture. It makes watching movies more enjoyable to boot!
I realized some years ago that there are two types of players. Those who play music, and those who play team-sports. Both are called "players" even though the fields are far apart. So I started thinking why are they both called "players".
Musicians don't play AGAINST anybody. Team-sportsters do. But they both play for an audience. Both provide entertainment, do not produce anything tangible.
Seems odd that we still must ask the question of "Can this immensely popular thing fit as a 'proper' topic of study."
Like, duh, anything immensely popular thing can.
I'm more interested in the substance. Swift is extremely very different from Madonna and it perhaps says A LOT about, maybe not us, but certainly "pop culture" and its role in our lives.
As a former Edtech founder interested, I was proud to see the shift in academic language to “skills” and “providing student’s value.” We worked hard for that.
The “business-ification” of higher education has one virtue - which is a return to the idea that students are a meaningful participant in what matters in defining education.
It’s limited to viewing them as consumers (and parents as buyers) which is very dated. Today’s average college freshmen is 27, a single parent, working full time, and paying their own way.
But it at least acknowledges that we graduate students from high school with almost zero discovery time for their passions and interests. I recognize there’s a lot of debate here on whether those matter (just “be good at something and you’ll be passionate about it” is a common counter-point to “find your dream vocation”), but it does require very specific skills to learn to answer those questions for yourself. Skills take time to develop.
The humanities continue to be, despite their post-modern vernacular, the heartbeat of Enlightenment era thinking where all we need is to “give students the right content and they’ll have a more elevated understanding of themselves and the world.” Anything that pulls the tools kits they’ve developed into “right now” application is a step forward.
It also reflects the Boomer leadership domination in effect everywhere - a generation who, mostly, cannot conceive of a world where the content humanity produced before is eclipsed in both size and (potentially) importance every day - very soon to be every hour - globally.
As we enter humanity’s global journey into living in perpetually exponential times, finding resonance in the voices of the past is vital and comforting. We see we are no different than our ancestors. Every child should have the benefit of meeting a mentor in the biography of someone they see themselves in. Education institutions don’t have that as a goal (they have “canon”) but perhaps one day they will.
The concept of an institution is shifting to reflect its true nature - an amorphous amalgamation of today’s opinions tied to an organization that has to find a way to function using yesterday’s decisions.
The humanities are Madonna. Swift is the representation, for multiple generation, that playing your own game is possible & lucrative as a founder. She is Gen Alpha’s Steve Jobs. When you are the founder you get to care about what you want to care about, write about what you want to write about, and advocate for what matters to you. All you need is a team, a community, and compelling experiences worth buying.
That’s not just my economic philosophy. It’s my political, spiritual, and social justice playbook as well. The more people own “the means of production” as their own commercial entity, the faster they learn to prize adaptability and a set of values that enable them to chart their own destiny.
I see it as the synthesize of capitalism, socialism, communism, and a host of others. To the extent any philosophy has a practical implication, that is a tool a founder can try & learn from.
“Me, inc.” is the last hope I see for a century of citizens herded into becoming consumers.
The heart of it all is agency. The data on student agency is unequivocal. The more agency, the greater the learning and the more unique the outcomes. In a world where the rate of change is accelerating, those two are pillars of survival & success.
