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.