References and Popular Culture

"A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded."

For all the snobbery present in Bordieu's piece, he makes an important point. We use the media we produce and consume to communicate with others who share our interests, experiences, and beliefs, and over time this generated an ever-evolving lexicon of cultural shorthand. This goes far beyond the level of elitist snobs looking down on people who could not afford the education and access needed to consume media deemed "high culture" or whatever term is chosen to imply "too good for them". Members of a fandom will have inside references which someone who is a casual consumer of that text might recognize but not fully understand, and someone outside that group would miss altogether. Some of these are either so ubiquitous or so deeply rooted in the human psyche that they appear everywhere, crossing cultural boundaries at every level. Those are things like the Hero's Journey being a metaphor for the progression from child to adult and Rags to Riches reflecting the wish for a better life and/or power of human perseverance in the face of adversity.

As I said before, this lexicon is constantly in flux, even more today than in the past with the rise of meme culture and viral popularity of new media made possible with the advent of the internet and easy access to it with the rise of smartphones. with respect tot today's subject, I submit
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opinion/west-side-story-broadway.html about the stereotypes and improper portrayal of Puerto Ricans in Westside Story, how the 1961 film still influences their public perception, and why it's time to let it go.



addendum;
For the sake of interest, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/star-trek-tng-and-the-limits-of-language-shaka-when-the-walls-fell/372107/
discusses the Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok", which involves a species whose entire language is comprised of references which all of them understand, but which are incomprehensible to anyone who does not have detailed knowledge of their history and culture.