My
sister—15 years my senior—refers to me as the “Encyclopedia of Useless Information.”
She’ll tell me she likes a song or a television show, and I will give her the life
story of the singer or actor, complete with jail stints, children’s names and
number of marriages, information she wasn’t looking for or particularly
interested in. While our tastes usually align, the way we consume popular
culture is vastly different.
The
oldest of five, my sister grew up in the 1960s and can remember our parents
bringing home the family’s first color television set—which was limited to
three channels--in the back of an Impala station wagon. She listened to Elvis
on an 8-track player and read about her favorite stars in magazines. I was born
into the Sesame Street generation, watched Saturday morning cartoons and listened
to New Kids on the Block cassettes with my SONY Walkman. By the time I reached
middle school, we had cable television and I listened to Beastie Boys CDs on my
boombox, and by the end of my high school years, I could use dial-up internet
to research and listen to my favorite grunge bands and learn anything I wanted
to know about their lives—something my sister couldn’t have imagined while waiting
for the mail to see who had made the cover of Teen Beat that month.
According
to Deanna Sellnow, “popular culture is comprised of the everyday objects.
actions, and events that influence people co believe and behave in certain ways,”
which means that Elvis and Teen Beat were as much a part of shaping my sister’s
life as Nirvana, MTV and Google played in shaping mine. However, the way we
consumed—and continue to consume those objects, actions and events—is vastly
different. Does this mean that older generations were immune, in some ways, to the
“noise” of popular culture in a way that younger generations, who are constantly
connected to a device, won’t be able to experience? I think I’ll Google that
and see what the masses have to say.
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