Media Assessment: Popular Culture

Media Assessment

Popular Culture:

Popular culture is everywhere, from walking down the main street of a city to scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed. As a part of day-to-day life, it is purely impossible to avoid. Popular culture can be outlined as all the concepts, knowledge, material, creative works and philosophies expressed or appreciated by the bulk of the population at a given time. Things like social media, billboards, TV shows etc. are all involved in the world of Popular culture. The Miss Universe 2015 final is a prime example of popular culture. We see the host Steve Harvey announce the wrong winner which blew up in the media. This resulted in seeing this event on social media, magazine articles, television etc. Everyone knew

1—18 is a great example of explaining popular culture in depth and elaborating on the inner aspects. We learn about the widespread position of popular culture and the construction that establishes it as a product of industry (Omayra Cruz, and Raiford Guins. Popular Culture; a reader. SAGE Publications, 2005). The concept of ‘Popular Culture’ really relates to this reading as it explains when, where and why popular culture is around us. Popular culture is getting bigger and bigger each year with more ways of accessing it, it will be interesting to see how much popular culture evolves and changes over the next 20, 30, 50 years. There are so many questions that would be thoroughly intriguing to know about the future of pop culture and how it will shape the society of that time. Popular Culture is considered to be a big part of a lot of people life’s which with the all the technology and access to a whole array of information is completely understandable. Popular culture has strong relations to education, society’s ability to approach knowledge and mass communication. It has great impacts and influence, everything from food packaging to fashion. Most of us have those pop lyrics we know every word to off by heart or that reality TV show, that we won’t admit to watching, but at the

We have seen fandoms from way back in the era of the ‘Beatles’ to now where we see many fandoms from multiple genres of the media era (Cosplay, television shows, celebrity’s and singers). A fandom can develop around any part of social curiosity or activity. Sherlock Holmes has been named to be have one of the very first serious modern fandoms which was around the 1890’s (“Fandom” Wikipedia; pt. 1). But in the more modern day scheme of things there are various fandoms. One strong fan base that is quite well known for their efforts is the ‘Directioners’. They are the fandom for the British boyband, ‘One Direction’. Fandoms are people who persevere to see their idols up close and personal, people who will not give up until they have that perfect photo to post on twitter. ‘Directioners’ are a prime example of the typical ‘Crazy fan girl’ fandom. One Direction would never get a break; fans would hunt down their whereabouts and not leave them alone. This is all the characteristics that majority of all major fandoms have. “Fan/Celebrity Interactions and Social Media: Connectivity and Engagement in Lady Gaga Fandom” by Lucy Bennett is a chapter that can easily relate to media Fandoms. Lucy Bennett claims that in some instances (Such as the case with Lady Gaga and her enormous fan base) the extensive use of social media platforms by famous people is initially allowing levels of