Smiley Face - 3/22

Looking back on this week's classes, there are two main points that I took away: firstly I made a connection between the work of Dick Hebdige on subcultures and that on Jenkins and his participatory culture, and secondly the language of education and hegemony within everyday set-ups.
According to Hebdige, the construction of subcultures is heavily reliant on ideology in order to become part of society. Jenkins elaborates further on this by recognizing 'participatory fandom' as key to the functioning of any subculture, since subcultures are primarily identified by their opposition to hegemony therefore it would be expected for subcultures to thrive off of input from within. The world of the internet has opened so many doors to the creation of subcultures within hegemonic societies and each can thrive in its own electronic world. Subcultures ultimately and eventually become naturalized within the structure of any given hegemony and consequently the subculture, that was once unique and different, has become part of the mainstream. The way that the mainstream media is able to succeed in making subculture part of culture is by presenting it to the public within the context of the current ideologies of the culture. When subcultures faces threats from hegemonic dictatorship, it is certain that the dominant ideology will surpass; however technology has made it possible for the battle between dominant culture and subculture more difficult to fight.
The language of education can be clearly found in the double-coding of 'class.' Education has always been difficult for me to perceive as a hegemony, yet the structure of me sitting in class writing down every thing important said in the room or that's posted on the board is not natural. The relationship between the structure of a college (classes, disciplines, divisions etc) and the structure of any society is similar. Therefore the functioning of a dominant hegemony needs a solid structure based on class and subdivisions to work.