POP CULTURE

Pop culture (popular culture) is defined as youth culture that is loved by the mainstream. In Japan, pop culture tends to mean animation, games, and comics. Antonym for pop culture would be high culture which includes classic music, art, and something requires education in order to understand them.

Formerly, high culture used to be for only bourgeoisies or nobility who had a good education. For example, you needed knowledge of sonata form to enjoy classic music. Contrary to high culture, everybody could enjoy pop culture without education or particular knowledge. However, in 20^th century, as the people have begun to have power, the definition of culture also changed. The number of the people with education increased, and then high culture gradually opened to the public. In addition, the development of mass media or technology of mass production made high culture more familiar to the people than before. We can see the famous paintings through the posters, and CDs, TVs, and radios provide us opportunities to listen music. High culture has assimilated to pop culture like.

The development of the Internet is also a key factor to connect the people with high culture, and also they create new pop culture. You Tube and ニコニコ動画 developed the concept of video sharing.

Social Networks

What is social network? If I ask so, many people would think of facebook, twitter, or mixi. Social network basically is defined as the communication service that helps people to communicate each other through the internet. Actually, I am a facebook user and enjoying my friend’s posting and photos. Let me focus on facebook and explain its history briefly.

According to “The History of the Internet a Nutshell,” facebook was launched in 2004 mainly by Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. At the first time it was targeting to college students, and then it was opened to the public in 2006. Facebook has more than 750 million active users now.

Then, let’s focus how facebook is different from other social networks.  

First, how facebook is different from twitter? For instance, although facebook users become “friend” with each other’s permission, in twitter people can connect other users one-sidedly. It means that we can follow other’s twittering without permission. Therefore, users would connect to even a passer-by if the person twitters interesting information for him. This characteristic suggests that twitter fits to provide information rather than communicating. How about mixi and facebook? Facebook and mixi have many similarities, yet one of big differences between them could be that facebook requests its users to use their real names. The system with real names enables its users to bring their real community to social network as it is. Therefore, the services provided by facebook are more realted to user’s daily life than that of mixi. I do not mean that real name system is superior to the anonymous one.  However, it is clear that  facebook meets needs of many people in term of communicating ;therefore, it has been able to succeed as one distinguished social network.

 I put one link about the conflict about the right to remain anonymous on the internet in Japan.

http://seetell.jp/en/18117

This article provides you an opportunity to think about privacy on the internet.

           

The guy who had created hypertext

Ted Nilson is one of an American sociologist, a thinker, and a pioneer of communication engineering. He is famous for creating the concepts of hypertext  and  hypermedia. He believes that  a user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds. This tought is his motto. Nilson also works on Project Xanadu.This project was the first project for hypertext whose purpose was improvement of World Wide Web.

http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=6681

This website briefly explains about Ted Nelson and his projects.

In this video, Ted Nelson is talking about today's  software and his own view of it.

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