Popular Culture

What is popular (low) culture? "Popular culture is a symbolic expression allegedly aligned with the questionable tastes of the "masses," who enjoy commercial "junk" circulated by the mass media, such as soap operas, rock music, talk radio, comic books, and monster truck pulls" (Campbell, 18). When looking at the high-low hierarchy it often determines the way people view culture as a whole today, saying high culture is good taste and low culture is questionable taste. Many audiences take for granted the world of high culture and fine art causing many young people to not know where a library or museum is located, which promotes people to overlook important information for a paper or research project on a certain topics. Now many tend to look to the Internet for their sources of academic information. In the world of postmodernism, or as scholars define, mixing generations by recycling old media in new ways, the internet and emerging technology enables accessing information much easier, but it takes away from face to face communication. This newly defined technology or postmodernism is cheapening forms of public life such as email, libraries, and public communication. But, when looking at pop culture, countless people encounter it with a short life span, distracting them from what true meanings are, and exploiting aspects and understandings of what is meant to be.

There are many differing distractions that a human may face in living their everyday lives. Pop culture does nothing more than add to it. When looking at the internet again for examples, we see websites such as "You Tube" or "My Space" causing communities of people to find pleasure in mindless web surfing. These web sites restrict a person's ability or strive to search for history or anything significant to an individual's culture. Instead they focus on an image of themselves and what they portray to society via the internet. Other forms of contemporary distraction include movies, television, and rock music. These can be seen as distracting to students, and drives out their imagination causing their experience to serious literature and philosophy to shift downward. With all of these "newer" influences in a modern life, people look more to trends, or pop culture, in their lives rather than enlightening themselves with literature and philosophy. Campbell states that, "The assumption is that because popular forms of culture are made for profit, they cannot be experienced as valuable artistic experiences in the way more elite art forms are" (22). When magazines, movies, and CD's are being made, they are being made for what the public wants or what the public wants to hear, driving away true concepts of what is important in life. More and more people are tuning into an episode of The Simpsons, or a reality based television show devaluing a person's perspective on high culture, which again includes but is not limited to art, museums, literature, philosophy, and knowledge.

The internet, television, music, and popular culture can be seen as very disposable, meaning that elements of popular culture have an extreme short life span. TV shows usually only last a couple of seasons, different artists singles may only last up to a month on the Top 40 charts, and newspapers circulating on average for twelve hours in a given day. Just when someone is getting used to a newer form of culture, it is taken away and the time to adapt to a different form is started. This was formally seen in the 1960's and 1970's. During this time critics argued that popular forms of culture create a feeling of instability as well as a sense of fleeting. Following a trend rather than making a stance in the public eye leads away of what is substantial for society. This drive forces the public from hearing important news reports, world events, and acquiring a broad definition of knowledge. Now the tables have turned to that of having a one hit wonder on the charts, or a TV show that plays every Thursday being more definitive in our lives. More and more people are being exposed to reality TV, infotainment, and musically oppressed groups who entertain our world