Is Pop Culture Diminishing Our Imagination?

    Who needs cable television anymore? Within the last decade, pop culture in the entertainment industry has vastly changed. Streaming services have truly taken over the television and film industry, with thousands upon thousands of shows, movies, short films, documentaries, and more, being easily accessible through various streaming services. One can argue this is more convenient for people who only watch certain things. For me personally, I’m subscribed to Disney + and Netflix, mostly because I am a big Star Wars and Breaking Bad fan. However, this easy accessibility and repetitive consumption may very well make us more comfortable and less open to trying new things. Despite the vast amount of pop culture everywhere today, repetition of familiar tropes and entertainment consumption can diminish our imagination itself and may prevent us from wanting to branch out into consuming different or unusual types of pop culture, making us, well, boring.

 

    We discovered this week how philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, from the Frankfurt school, argued that pop culture is purposely meant to be vast in order to appease people with all different interests and wants. Due to this presence of pop culture, the two argue that we have become too overstimulated with pop culture, diminishing our creativity. This made me really get thinking not just because of the modern-day pop culture that’s present in our society, but due to the accessibility and how easy it is to consume it like never before. Just how much does modern-day pop culture affect our creativity to not only try something new, but to understand and learn different genres of music, tv shows, film, fashion, technology, and more? Another major factor of this is social media content. From Tik Toks to Instagram reels, these monopoly platforms are literally designed to have a set algorithm tailored to our interests. As an Instagram reel user, now that I think about it, my entire feed is really all the same, whether it’s sports, memes, or politics, literally all my interests are shown to me, nothing new or different no matter how much I scroll. Thinking about this from a personal standpoint, I realize how easy it is for modern day social media and entertainment to block out any new interests, as newer pop culture is purely meant to satisfy fast consumption and attention cycles. Fast paced digital content definitely shortens attention spans, making it harder to sustain attention to newer content that one may not be used too. By the way, let’s not forget about ChatGPT, that can find literally anything within seconds, making one less imaginative and creative to obtain different sources, come up with different ideas, or go to the library and read. Essentially, it seems as though modern-day pop culture not only diminishes our imagination, but it makes us lazier.

 

 

What could this do to newer pop culture? My takeaway from this is that diminished imagination and motivation won’t really change how we consume pop culture itself but will determine what type of culture will be released in years to come. Will things be more or less the same? Eventually, will our attention spans be so short that only the best of the best content of the same genre be consumed? More importantly, how will this culture be remembered? Will it be regarded as an easier time with things becoming more accessible? Or a bad time as this makes us all quite dumb and less creative over time?