Newspapers have long been an intrinsic part of our everyday culture. At one time they were the main sources of outside information for perhaps the majority of Americans. However the scant pages-long daily news sources of our grandparents have today morphed into inch-thick tomes with some articles reaching near novella length. As the American newspaper has grown larger and longer, we as a culture have ironically stopped paying but a sound-bytes worth of attention to them. The quaint print versions of the 20th century have given way to online news websites and short blurbs worked into the homepages of many search engines. The internet had changed news-writing forever. Readership of print newspapers is down as subscriptions to local printed papers are hitting an all time low, all the while websites and search engines such as Yahoo and Google have become the most looked-at news sources in America.
Not only has the mode of news access changed in the past 20 years but so also has the quality of these means of information. If one were to open today’s copy of the Dallas Morning News and read even one section of it,(for example the Metro section), there would no doubt be a dozen or so blatant spelling and mechanical errors. This may partly be the effect of low print readership as newspaper producers must work with ever decreasing budgets which leads inexorably to fewer editors and fact-checkers to verify and correct these obvious and embarrassing mistakes. Also, shockingly little of what we may read in a print newspaper is an original story; researched and investigated by a staff member of the paper, but rather a reused and recycled print version sound-byte which originally appeared on an internet news blurb.
The trend away from both print source newspapers and quality reporting are a shocking clue as to the movement of our society into the 21st century. People are less inclined to read something printed with ink on paper than they are to immerse themselves into a computer screen for their news-fix. More shocking even than this reversal is the decline in intelligent writing which may be seen in both types of new reporting. The notice of these two trends is clear enough; however what is not nearly so plain is why this trend has occurred.
Studying and understanding why and how this quick reversal and regression have happened would be enormously important to our modern society because of the way people respond to the news nowadays, which is, in a word, reactionary. A reactionary public is volatile and unpredictable. The way the public reacts to an idea in pop political culture, (which is what news articles have for the most part become), can tilt the outcome of the initial conflict in a very crucial way. If people are angry, they will not reason as rational beings and the angry mob has the potential to do a significant amount of damage.
In my own research concerning these subjects I wish to understand, for one thing, why are print newspapers struggling so badly to keep up amid the internet new boom, and is there anything which may be done about it? But besides the overall academic quality of news writing, I wish to better understand the methods and reasons, whether they are employed subliminally or fully intentioned, that news writing incited the public so hotly. Specifically, I plan to research the hysteria behind the many media fueled disease scares, for example the Swine Flu scare of 2009 and the Bird Flu and Egg-Salmonella type of media-fueled panic.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Criticism in Popular Culture
We study popular culture because we are surrounded by it all the time. There is no escaping the multitude of retail, food logos, drug advertisements and entertainment which bombards the average American every day. We see the evidence of the influence of culture in our lives everywhere; on the commute to work, in the vending machines, on the TV, the radio, even the food we eat and the clothes we wear are each a product of our consumer culture. The only way one could exorcise the influence of popular culture would be to renounce anything mass produced, advertised, or sold to us. This feat is not entirely impossible, certainly at least a few religious organizations have achieved exactly this, however even they are confronted occasionally by the cultural logos and icons associated with their neighboring communities. It is, essentially, impossible to eradicate the influence of popular culture while remaining an inhabitant of this earth.
We study popular culture then, because it is the most accessible thing to us and also because we still have the latent ability to change or influence it. Popular culture is largely associated with the right-now. It is dynamic and often takes on a life of its own, usually under the direction of a few, (or many), critical observers. Take for example the popular social networking website Facebook. Its founding was only a few years ago, yet the site has hundreds of millions of members, many of whom log on at least once a day. More importantly Facebook, though it was not the first social network to make it big, has changed the way people interact with the internet. The infamous Status Update has taken on its own proverbial life-force as its users have taken the status update and turned it into a form of mass communication. Other websites have even capitalized on the concept of mass communication in a public, online setting with somewhat extreme word limits, the most well-known of which is Twitter.
Whether we agree that a mass-produced and filtered form of communication such the facebook status or twitter updates is an intelligent use of our time and technology, we as a society should be able to recognize these changes as a positive for the media critic. The freedom to change ones environment is what cultural criticism is ultimately all about. It is wasteful and useless for a critic’s ideas of what the world should be, (for popular culture is truly an outlet for our worldly ideals), to remain only theoretical and rhetorical. If one harbors an argument for reform or change never expecting it to come to fruition, then we as a society are opening the door for oppression. Criticism is the frontlines through which laymen may communicate with the status quo, and it is a right which is meant to be exercised by those with the proper ability. Proper ability to criticize means simply that for the sake of keeping criticism a useful tool, one should only make serious arguments concerning subjects which they are familiar with.
My own goal, so to speak, for this course is to become knowledgeable enough the broad scope of political culture to be able to comment and criticize American popular culture by the standards explained above.
We study popular culture then, because it is the most accessible thing to us and also because we still have the latent ability to change or influence it. Popular culture is largely associated with the right-now. It is dynamic and often takes on a life of its own, usually under the direction of a few, (or many), critical observers. Take for example the popular social networking website Facebook. Its founding was only a few years ago, yet the site has hundreds of millions of members, many of whom log on at least once a day. More importantly Facebook, though it was not the first social network to make it big, has changed the way people interact with the internet. The infamous Status Update has taken on its own proverbial life-force as its users have taken the status update and turned it into a form of mass communication. Other websites have even capitalized on the concept of mass communication in a public, online setting with somewhat extreme word limits, the most well-known of which is Twitter.
Whether we agree that a mass-produced and filtered form of communication such the facebook status or twitter updates is an intelligent use of our time and technology, we as a society should be able to recognize these changes as a positive for the media critic. The freedom to change ones environment is what cultural criticism is ultimately all about. It is wasteful and useless for a critic’s ideas of what the world should be, (for popular culture is truly an outlet for our worldly ideals), to remain only theoretical and rhetorical. If one harbors an argument for reform or change never expecting it to come to fruition, then we as a society are opening the door for oppression. Criticism is the frontlines through which laymen may communicate with the status quo, and it is a right which is meant to be exercised by those with the proper ability. Proper ability to criticize means simply that for the sake of keeping criticism a useful tool, one should only make serious arguments concerning subjects which they are familiar with.
My own goal, so to speak, for this course is to become knowledgeable enough the broad scope of political culture to be able to comment and criticize American popular culture by the standards explained above.
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