Culture Industries in a Postindustrial Age: Entertainment, Leisure, Creativity, Design

This article reviews the evolution of the concept of culture industries, when neither industry nor culture themselves are today what they were at the time when the term was coined. It attempts to explain the dilution of the term into more nebulous terms (“leisure industries,” “entertainment industries” or “creative industries”) and suggests new challenges for the research on culture industries. What is at stake is no longer an application of a Fordist production to culture, a one-directional mass communication and a mediation by experts, but rather: (1) a cultural experience which is no longer clearly separated from other activities (leisure in general, consumption and even work); (2) the communicative explosion of all industrial production in a media environment, where industrialized symbolic products are mixed with culturalized industrial products; and (3) the empowerment of the recipient, which on one hand ignores the traditional experts and on the other leads to post-productive (recreational and even creative) cultural practices.

Do students confuse dimensionality and “directionality”?

The aim of this research is to understand the way in which students struggle with the distinction between dimensionality and “directionality” and if this type of potential confusion could be a factor affecting students’ tendency toward improper linear reasoning in the context of the relations between length and area of geometrical figures. 131 9th grade students were confronted with a multiple-choice test consisting of six problems related to the perimeter or the area of an enlarged geometrical figure, then some interviews were carried out to obtain qualitative data in relation to students’ reasoning. Results indicate that more than one fifth of the students’ answers could be characterized as based on directional thinking, suggesting that students struggled with the distinction between dimensionality and “directionality”. A single arrow showing one direction (image provided to the students) seemed to strengthen the tendency toward improper linear reasoning for the area problems. Two arrows showing two directions helped students to see a quadratic relation for the area problems.