Column:

Leave pop culture alone

By Charles Austin

Published Feb. 26, 2008

While discussing our news quizzes a few weeks ago in my Journalism 2100 News section, my teacher described the fact that people take an interest in sports and entertainment as “unfortunate.” This is definitely the stupidest thing I have heard in a long time, and I hear it way more often than I should.

Looking down on sports, celebrities, music, movies or any other sort of popular culture does not make you any smarter or more respectable: it makes you dumber. Dismissing the culture you live in as vapid or “unfortunate,” only serves to make you culturally irrelevant and out of touch with your own society. Whether or not you approve of it, pop culture is inherently a reflection of a society and dismissing that reflection is no different than dismissing the society that created it.

The notion that there is nothing to be learned from popular culture is both absurd and pretentious. It makes the incorrect assumption that there is no value or meaning to be derived from things like Subway commercials, Paris Hilton’s antics and Soulja Boy’s music — and this is not true.

Subway commercials featuring Jared so blatantly reflect a glorification of being thin and in shape that I feel like I am insulting my readers by even explaining that.

Paris Hilton is important for the double purpose of speaking to both our desire to experience the daily lives of the rich and famous (of which she is both) and to ridicule those same rich and famous people for the life of excess they lead.

Soulja Boy is important because he speaks to our love of irony, unless I am missing something and people actually enjoy his music. On a sort of side note here, I saw an interview where Mr. Collipark (the genius who signed Soulja Boy to a record deal), essentially told Soulja Boy to his face that he didn’t understand why his music was appealing to anyone. Maybe this says more about the music industry than society at large, but I think it wouldn’t be too outrageous to assume that Mr. Collipark (perhaps unwittingly) signed Soulja Boy ironically.

Anyway, my point is that there is a definite reason for every trend in pop culture, and to say it’s “unfortunate” to delight in those things is to say it’s “unfortunate” to participate in our society. The underlying assumption being made there is that entertainment media is somehow “dumb,” and while this may sometimes be true, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Furthermore, I don’t think pop culture has made our society any less educated than it would be otherwise.

Even your stereotypical frat boy who spends eight hours a day watching MTV and playing Madden ‘08 is far, far better educated than almost every kid his age a century ago. Leisure time is essentially an invention of the 20th century. From the industrial revolution back to the dawn of man, if young people weren’t working on farms and factories, they were being killed by disease and war. For all intents and purposes, 20th century progressives created the notion of childhood. Your average middle-class child today is certainly more educated than your average middle-class child of any pervious era.

With the dawn of the Internet, almost everyone in first-world society has immediate access to a wealth of information far beyond what any one person could ever hope to learn. As humans, we are intrinsically curious and thus interested in learning new things. To dismiss a desire to learn about one’s own popular culture as “unfortunate” makes a judgment about what is important for other people, and it’s not only presumptuous, it’s ignorant and closed-minded.