| The adolescent period is the important all-round developing period, and also the period during which the self-consciousness is growing very rapidly and beginning to show its special role in the process of self-development. The self-recognition in this period determines the function of self-determination, and in turn the development of self-determination determines whether the adolescent could enter into social life successfully or not. Self-recognition functions in the reciprocal process between the self and society, and in this process many factors, such as society, environment, education and one's own quality show their influence to self-recognition and evaluation. As one culture form generated in the industrialized cities and the consume society, popular culture takes popular media as its carrier, the city dwellers as its target, and enjoys the qualities as duplication, patterning, mass producing, typologizing, planning and universalization. The unique consuming and entertaining functions and the ideological functions of popular culture are showing the influence to the development of the adolescent and the adolescent culture.The word "culture" in the west originally referred to the cultivation of the land and plants. Later it refers to the cultivation of the human body, mind, and especially the cultivation of human artistic and moral ability, and also it refers to the summation of the material, spiritual and epistemic treasure coming from human labor. Popular culture also could be called mass culture. There have always been different views about the meaning of it. It has its unique characteristics different from other forms of culture. It is different from the dominant culture, the refined cullure and the folk culture in the aspects that popular culture conmins large amount of information and entertains largenumbers of readers, it has the popular and patterned style and the typed story, it is for everyday appreciation and its purpose is to give pleasure to the audience. As a culture form in the new age, popular culture in its practical function could lessen people' s sense of the authority of the holy, advocate personality, set free the minds and strengthen the sense of democracy, and hence it plays the very important role in the reconstruction of humanity, and is good for people to seek the individual spiritual freedom. At the same time, as a product of commodity economy, popular culture is controlled by market mechanism. Popular culture is produced for making profits and therefore ii gets the characters of being vulgar and recreational. That shows the dual practical functions of popular culture.The function of self-recognition runs through the whole life of an individual. The adolescent period is no doubt the crucial period for the development of self-recognition. Viewed from the growing process of an individual, self-recognition is realized through the socialization of an individual. There are two parts in the process of socialization — the socialization of the individual and the individualization of the society. The process of socialization is carried out in the whole life, and so it will not stop just at some stage of life. However, the requirements of socialization are different in different stages of life, and then self-development shows the unique features at different stages. Both sociology and psychology make explorations into self-development in the process of socialization and they have given many valuable theories arid inspirations.From the connotation of self-recognition, seI I-development has obviously many stages, mainly the stage of oneself, of personality and of self-determination. \ I though different theories of socialization have di I'i'erentfocuses on their study of the development of self-recognition, they all emphasize the importance of socialization at the beginning years of an individual. To the parents, the adolescence is the period that gives them more terror, worry, tension, but less confidence. Popular culture is one of the important factors that can not be ignored in child growth. Whether it could be good or bad to the child growth mainly depends on whether the society, schools and parents could use i t properly or not, whether they could help the chi ldren set up good standards of values and good judging ability or not. In this way, the bad influence of popular culture could be reduced to the least degree.Popular culture is the kind of thinking and culture form that suits to the social structure and relationship of the modern industrialized society. Only in the indu$trialized society can popular culture become one of the most important factors that give great influence to the socialization of the individual. The culture of every society is composed of many kinds of subculture forms. Every member in the society always undergoes many forms of subculture. To the subculture of the adolescent, popular culture is the most convenient and most uniting:culture resource. In order to understand the reasonable requests of the adolescent, the society should pay more attention to the developing direction of their subculture, and make it have the proper tension with the leading culture. The influence given by popular culture to the self-development of the adolescent is mainly carried out through providing rich resource to the adolescent subculture. On the basis of this, we can make the investigations from many angles and sides. As to the forms of media, television and internet are the two most, influential ways.The influence of popular culture to the growth of adolescent has two ways----the positive and the negative, and it is shown in the following threeaspects: the influence of popular culture to the life of adolescent, the influence to the values of the adolescent and the influence to the aesthetic taste of the adolescent. To solve the self-recognition problem occurred in the growth of the adolescent, we need face with seriously the inactive and even negative influence of popular culture to the self-recognition of the adolescentand take effective measures---to strengthen the positive influence of thepopular culture to the adolescent, to guide popular culture with right values, to regulate the growing of the content of popular culture, to carry forward and cultivate the national spirit in the popular culture, to carry out the guiding role of the adolescent subculture to the adolescent, to strengthen the development of the adolescent culture undertakings and cultural production, to strengthen the building of the adolescent morality, to pay more attention to the guiding roles of the proper development, the regulation and improvement of popular media, and the perfection of media education mechanism to the adolescent self-recognition. |
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