Abstrakt: | The monograph constitutes the analysis of the subject-matter at the borderline
of sociology, theory of education, social pedagogy and pedagogy of
culture. In the theoretical part, the emphasis was put on the presentation
of the importance of the studies on pop-culture for the contemporary understanding
of educational phenomena in which mass media play more and
more significance. What was shown was an already historical argument on
the status of the popular culture (low culture vs high culture). Also,
a purely theoretical discussion of a social category young people constitute,
and relations between the notion of identity and world view was included.
Theoretical analyses close with an important subchapter devoted to the issue
of reception, decoding and interpretation of cultural texts in which the
author’s understanding of semantic phenomena was completed with the
analyses of such classics as U. Eco, L. Grossberg, S. Hall, J. Fiske,
R. Rorty, as well as Polish authors of studies on media and their message,
i.e M. Mrozowski, T. Goban-Klas, J. Gajda, Z. Melosik. In the empirical
part, the author discusses two selected popular discourses — a message of
young people’s magazines and hip-hop music. Next, it analyses the reception
of this content by young people, taking into account a critical reception
level and decoding models distinguished by Stuart Hall. Making use of the
method of content analysis by young people, the author makes a categorization
of the most important worldview notions included in the young people’s
magazines, such as sex, health, identity, stars, girl-boy, school, parents, etc.
and hip-hop texts, such as blocks of flats, drugs, girlfriend, emotions, identity,
life, money, police, politicians. In understanding the notion of world
view (Weltanschauung), the author follows Wilhelm Dilthey who distinguished
its three components: life experience, world image and life ideal.
The world view notions popularized by pop-culture reveal the contemporary
processes taking place within the scope of identity, axiology and theology of
a contemporary teenager. These involve moving the identity problems to the
body surface (identity somatisation), perceiving other people mainly as the
objects of a sexual conquest or potential rivals in the battle of social promo- tion, the need of an authentic and independent life free from obligations
and laws imposed on in advance. The dissertation answers the question on
the educational influence the discourses under examination may have on
young receivers, and shows the competences of young people in the area of
meaning selection. The aim of media education is the state in which young
people start selecting (rejecting) the messages transmitted according to defined
criteria and conviction that, as a result of the reception of these messages,
they either (intellectually, emotionally) gain or lose and waste time.
An important empirical achievement of this work seems to be a statement
that young people, often criticized for mindlessness, functional illiteracy
and ignorance, show a high level of reflexivity in their contact with the
pop-culture transmission. To prove that, the author presents his own classification
of the critical reception level distinguished in the course of the empirical
analyses (a critical reception of a negotiation, affirmation, selection,
incurable optimism nature, and unreflective opposition). The work is directed
at teachers, parents and educators, as well as all interested in the
influence of pop-culture on young people. |