It is tempting to write off popular culture as brainless fluff—something to distract ourselves with during our downtime, rather than something that deserves our critical attention. Sellnow, in What Is Popular Culture and Why Study It?, challenges us to look closer at the media texts that shape the everyday world. Television programs, movies, songs, billboards, magazines, advertisements, and video games are all instances of popular culture, and like other rhetorical artifacts they “matter” in that they have the power to influence how people think, act, and make meaning of the world around them. Popular culture is rarely value-neutral. It both directly and indirectly reinforces or disrupts social norms, conveys ideas about how the world works, or suggests that things could or should be otherwise.
According to Brummett, rhetoric does not only happen when someone is giving a formal speech or when we are being overtly “persuaded” to think or act in a certain way. It is present when we watch a movie or TV show, laugh at a comedian, or tune into “just a story” or “casual” characters, narratives, and images that inform us (often unconsciously) of what is “normal,” “desirable,” or “acceptable.” This is illustrated by many of the videos featured this week. Colin Stokes’s “Hidden Meanings in Children’s Movies” provides an example of the complex and sometimes problematic messages that we might miss when watching a film marketed as “safe” or “innocent” entertainment for children and families. The Simpsons video about family values is another instance of how humor is often deployed as a means of critiquing mainstream institutions and values. At the same time, The Simpsons reinforces the very cultural understandings that it is poking fun at—namely, our assumptions about what a “family” is and should be like.
The video asking whether 24 has normalized torture through its depiction of Jack Bauer is even more obvious in how the program and other, similar texts seem to justify torture as an effective and morally acceptable form of violence (even while other episodes and TV shows have made it clear that torture is illegal and would get Jack Bauer fired or imprisoned in real life). This relates closely to Sellnow’s discussion of the effect of mediated popular culture on what audiences believe is “right” or “wrong.” By enacting excessive, spectacular violence over and over in the name of “saving lives,” we end up normalizing violence as an effective or justified means of resolving a conflict or producing the “greater good.”
Stephen Sewell’s “Consumer Slaves” is another example of popular culture’s presumably unintentional miseducating of audiences to normalize assumptions about the relationship between identity, happiness, and consumption. As Klosterman argues in “Death by Harry Potter,” it is not enough to point out problematic assumptions or messages—massively popular cultural artifacts are also important as frames of reference for entire generations. In this case, the Harry Potter books were not merely stories that some people liked to read, but a part of growing up for millions of children and young adults. For some of those young people, Harry Potter was the first story of complex adult themes that they ever encountered, and was the first opportunity to reflect on issues of good and evil, authority and personal responsibility, friendship and loss.
David Jacobson’s Pop Culture 101: David Jacobson Talks to Allan Parker about the History of Pop Culture Studies is a short reflection on the history and importance of pop culture studies. He connects back to Klosterman by making the point that the field of “pop culture studies” would not exist if popular culture was not in fact one of the most common and potentially important forms of everyday education.
In sum, the videos from this week support the idea that popular culture is not simply an unthinking reflection of society; rather, it both mirrors and actively constructs the social world. This happens whether we are engaging with “children’s” films, sitcoms, or talking-head interviews with celebrities on science programs. The media texts that people create, watch, read, or listen to over and over, or use as teaching tools for children, are all rhetorical in that they teach us how to see the world and our place within it.
Discussion Questions: What can audiences do to continue to enjoy popular culture while also remaining aware and critical of the values and assumptions it normalizes? Do you think popular media creators should be ethically responsible for the messages they send, either intentionally or unintentionally? Why or why not?
I appreciate that your analysis of our readings leads you to these questions, as they are so pertinent to our current environment. How does ethics integrate with mass communication, pop culture, and political rhetoric? So far, it seems to be a performative virtue signal, and less of a leading value. Without accountability, morals and ethics tend to be novel. However, how can we expect to hold someone accountable for speech, especially in the one nation that protects it? On the one hand, we have slander laws for lies and defamation, but the push to further enforce, or encroach, on speech is very visible. Our European allies have already sacked speech for morality policing and political correctness, and much of the world has never had the luxury to speak publicly without government oversight. I believe this is one of the main issues of our times, or even for America as a whole: protecting our right to free speech. There are lobbies and rhetoric and foreign nationals urging for us to "protect it through restriction" which sounds as logical as giving anything away to keep it longer. However, when people do incite violence using rhetoric, when slander and defamation occur on the public stage, how can we get accountability and justice without sacrificing our personal freedom?
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