The Purpose of this paper is to define the term “Popular Culture” as well as identify major trends in American popular culture. After identify major trends in American Pop-culture the paper will go on to analyze the impact that each trend has on personal decision making. In order to define the term popular culture a person must first understand the meaning of the word culture. Many people believe that culture refers to the upper elite of society. However these people are simply confusing being cultured with culture itself.
Culture is a general term referring to the values, artifacts, customs, and institutions of a particular group at a particular time. Popular Culture is just a term that refers to the currant culture in a given area. The study of both popular culture as well as
...culture in general is extremely important because it allows our society to identify potentially harmful trends in American popular culture. Popular culture is everywhere. Everyone is completely surrounded by Pop-culture everyday all the time and if a person is to look closely, some interesting trends may become apparent.
Some trends are harmless and yet they are consistent trends, such as the downloading of games, movies, and applications to cell phones. On the other hand popular culture has been known for having a severe impact on the self-image of the young, particularly young girls. Each of these trends impacts the daily decisions of a separate group of people but at the end of the day each trend effects millions and has a lasting impact on the American people. A person may download a specific game to his or
her cell phone because his or her friend has it.
This is just one very small scale example. However, it is amazing how fast a small scale example can become a cultural icon, if just for a short time. A perfect example of this is the Angry Birds franchise. This franchise started as a simple downloadable game and became an American culture trend almost overnight. Soon after the first game came out, Angry Birds became more then a game. It became several games, costumes, stickers, as well as other things, and people purchased these items because it had become part of the American popular culture.
Encouraging people to spend money on useless stuff is not as bad as some other impacts of popular American culture. American Pop-culture is filled with images of the ideal woman and the perfect body. For a young girl these images can be devastating to her self-image. Anorexia has become more common among teen age girls. It’s not surprising because teen age girls tend to pay close attention pop-culture. They are influenced by the skinny movie stars and music artists that they see all around them. The idea of being perfect has become normal and people spend a lot of money to achieve that look.
After being exposed to what the popular culture displays as beautiful for a long time it is no hard to understand how this could make young girls see more imperfections in themselves even when they are not there. This paper has addressed the problem of defining the term popular culture as well as identified trends that currently exist in popular American culture. The
influence of popular culture is everywhere. It influences every decision that is making by almost everyone, every day. The true question people should ask themselves is not “does popular culture affect my choses? ”, but “how does popular culture affect my choses.
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