John B. Thompson Cultural Theory Research

As a new cultural pattern,media culture is increasingly showing great vitality in various fields of the present era,but at the same time it inevitably brings a series of problems that cannot be ignored.The emergence and development of media culture can be linked to the industrialization,technologicalization and commercialization of modern society to a certain extent,and Thompson’s cultural theory was born under this background.Thompson regards the "medialization" of culture as an important basis for the transformation of modern culture,and incorporates the symbolic form into the scope of analysis,so that cultural theory,ideological theory and mass communication theory are organically combined,revealing the mediaization attributes and characteristics of cultural theory,ideological nature.It is on this basis that Thompson’s cultural theory should belong to media culture.Media culture is closely related to the development of modern society.We can start from the material and spiritual aspects to analyze how the life of contemporary people is constrained by media culture,and how to identify the way forward in the fog created by media culture.Of course,media culture has brought many conveniences to people’s lives,enabling people to break through the limitations of time and space and receive information from all over the world.But on the other hand,media culture has plunged the lives of modern people into the quagmire of consumerism,and as an important way of cultural production and dissemination in modern society,it has led to the rampant cultural hegemony of Western capitalism on a global scale,turning the mass media into the "mouthpiece" of ideology of capitalism.Thompson expects that through a comprehensive analysis of media and culture,the asymmetric social relations hidden in daily life will be exposed,so as to touch the nerves of power and cause the subjects in these relations to criticize and reflect,with a view to finally triggering the subject to think "whether these social relations are?" In addition,the media culture itself has complex social relations,and it has a very close connection with the economic base and superstructure of the whole society,which also determines that the media culture shoulders greater social responsibilities.This paper takes Thompson’s cultural theory as the main line,and in the process of systematically interpreting and sorting out the formation and connotation of its theory,it focuses on his criticism of the focus problems caused by cultural mediazation and his research on problem solving methods.On this basis,the significance and value of Thompson’s cultural theory are deeply studied,especially the enlightenment significance to the current socialist cultural construction in our country.