Nowadays, popular culture is taking over millennials lives by storm. There are many controversies on whether this is creating a positive impact on society or leaving a scar. By definition popular culture is culture based on the tastes of ordinary people rather than an educated elite. By examining the popular culture of a generation or a country in itself, it can really communicate a message about the values and ideologies of that group of people. The representations that we might see in a western community might be completely different that the media representations that you might see here in the UAE. For example, in advertisements or reality TV in a western community will be most likely to show less traditional and custom content than an Arab community.
This relates back to the idea of becoming what you consume in the media. Thus, the popular culture is a representative of that community. The pop-culture that is being heaved at young minds is causing them to flourish in a world of synth culture. Synth culture is media that is in-authentic or “not as it seems”. This can cause real harm to the youth. While watching a documentary we got to see what goes on behind of the scenes of a public figure’s social media account. It was really interesting to see that they actually hire companies, this company in particular was called “The Audience”, and these companies run their social media accounts of hopes of attracting a bigger following. To reflect upon that, it is really eye-opening to me and many to see our favourite celebrities’ accounts and realise that it truly isn't them that you are interacting with online. Yes, their content may be authentic, but they certainly are not the ones posting and running the account. That pops up the question of how authentic is the media in representing culture and how real is the content that they are throwing out into the world. For example, the Oreo cookie participated in many social and political messages to gain a bigger following. In one of the posts on Facebook, the Oreo cookie had rainbow filling to represent that it was with same-sex marriage. Just by that one post the shares and likes increased by thousands. This one cookie became revolutionary. Many of the times when industries want to advertise their product the will those same viewers to their advantage. When advertising “The Hunger Games”, they essentially had competitions between the viewers on who could effectively advertise it the best. This shows that advertising schemes between these industries can sometimes question the authenticity of popular culture as a whole and jeopardise it into becoming harmful, and damaging to society.
Great post. Good points. I liked that you examined the relationship between social media and young people as I feel it is relevant in every discussion based around this topic.
ReplyDeleteOne thing you could improve on is your directness. I feel that you could have been much more blunt and straightforward with your post. I believe that this would have helped get your message across in a more efficient manner.
I agree with a lot of your statements and what I liked the most is that you actually argued for and against showing the 2 sides of the story. I agree with improving your directness as sometimes you seemed to ramble on a bit but overall you had really strong points and you used good examples to back up your points.
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