Is Pop Culture Good for You?

 Is Pop Culture Good for You?

By: Destiny Portillo

Pop culture is the arrangement of beliefs, preferences, and items that exemplify the most comprehensively shared implications of society.  After having read the articles "Watching TV Makes You Smarter" by Steven Johnson and "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" by Malcolm Gladwell; I agree with Gladwell that pop culture is not quite the best for us in some ways.  Although Johnson depicts in his article that the effects of pop culture allow individuals to become more intelligent, we don’t seem to use it to our proper and fullest advantage.

As a group, we understood and agreed more in line with Gladwell’s perspective on pop culture; being that it may have its advantages, but it does have its flaws.  Pop culture is viewed as a mass systems administration web-based entertainment stage that permits thousands to join together and support each other.  While allowing thousands to unite it does allow for those with opposing interests to intervene as well.  As Gladwell portrayed with the example of Wikipedia, anything can be written and erased at any moment.  Thousands are allowed access to alter to change the message; which is a critical flaw pop culture has.  Pop culture does open plenty of doors for individuals, but it is also viewed as a downfall for many.  This is because pop culture is constantly evolving and accessible to all ages, races, and genders.  With that being said, anything deemed “cool”, such as a new drug, is reflected upon society and creates a new ripple effect allowing thousands to want to join. Actions, objects, beliefs, etc. share a massive weight within the pop culture field and with that, we must tread carefully as it is in our best interests to evolve within society and not destroy ourselves or be the downfalls of others by “the next best thing”.

When it came to ranking our words, phrases, and sentences, as a cumulative whole we based it upon our understanding in correlation to the importance of Gladwell’s message within his article.  Our words highlighted the importance of knowing the evangelists in our pop culture references to social media.  It upholds the idea that Gladwell believed pop culture exhibits a religious effect blanketed over it due to the strong supporters within it.  With our phrases, we recognized that each signified its meaning although some were shorter or longer, we deemed the shortest phrase said it all.  Sometimes within literacy, we want to detect a larger meaning hidden within a large number of words that we tend to overlook the phrases looking right at us.  For example, our phrase “There is strength in weak ties'' allowed the message of normalizing or knowing a lot inside the pop culture phenomenon field, yet at the same time figuring out how to succeed. Having frail “weak ties” is a reference to an arms-length relationship with people. Which in reality can be seen as a strength in light of the valuable open doors these people might bring to the table.  Lastly, with our sentences, we placed once again critical attention to the details and thoughts being portrayed by Gladwell and decided upon the core of the article being displayed; that a mass movement for civil rights was made without any technology.  We as a society should uphold the importance of the impact pop culture has on thousands and use it to our advantage positively.