The Circuit of Culture is a theory or framework used in the area of cultural studies. It was devised in 1997 by a group of theorists when studying the Walkman cassette player. The theory suggests that in studying a cultural text or artifact you must look at five aspects: its representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation. Du Gay et al. suggest that "taken together (these 5 points) complete a sort of circuit...through which any analysis of a cultural text...must pass if it is to be adequately studied." Gerard Gogin openly uses this framework in his book Cell Phone Culture: Mobile technology in everyday life in order to fully understand the cell phone as a cultural artifact. His book is split into four parts: production, consumption, regulation, and representation and identity (through looking at mobile convergences).
Famous quotes containing the words circuit of, circuit and/or culture:
“each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited.... It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)