What is pop-culture? No doubt, various sociology texts have attempted to define the term. I will take a stab at deciphering its meaning. To begin with, pop-culture is an abbreviation of the term "popular culture." Defining this concept demands we understand its components.
In the context we are examining, "popular" signifies that a thing or person is in fashion or well liked by a significant portion of society, at a given point in time. That point in time being now. What is popular one year may well be out of fashion the next. "Culture" refers to the things a given group believes, how it behaves and what it tends to focus on.
Consequently, pop-culture refers to the things and people in society that are in fashion with a goodly portion of the population. This applies to such areas as music, art, literature, cinema, television, clothing, the Web, etc. Most painlessly, pop-culture embodies what's "in."
Ironically, pop-culture these days seems not so popular. Owing to the ability to disseminate information - or better yet units of persuasion - with monumental ease via the Internet, satellite television or more traditional media, individuals have emerged whose only underlying talent appears to be getting noticed. Often they are noticed because of bad behavior. And they have become pop-culture icons.
In contrast, pop-music is generated by musicians. Some musicians are better than others, yet they all have some kind of skill set. Some can sing. Some can play an instrument. In the world of clothing, designers have their skill sets. In movies and television actors have their skill sets. And so it goes.
Traditionally, the majority of pop-culture has been driven by individuals who had spent at least some time training to develop a skill and subsequently producing something: a work of art, a song, a type of clothing, a play, etc. Up until the explosion, onto the social scene, of cable television and the Internet, pop-culture was essentially product driven.
As a society, we looked at what was produced by an artist, writer, actor, dancer, etc. We then decided whether we liked it. If enough of us did, it became popular. Things have changed.
Today, pop-culture does not seem to be as product driven as it once was. We look much less at an individual's works of art and focus instead on the individual's personal life, foibles, etc. This, of course, is not completely new. Societies, through the centuries, have been fascinated with the rise and fall of individuals in public view.
In fact, the basis for much early literature -be it Greek and Roman classics or Shakespeare- focused on people being undone by their hubris. Great stories have been told which have utilized, as their principal theme, a hero's fall from grace.
What has changed is not humankind's taste for Schadenfreude. Rather, it is the ability to promulgate these kinds of stories by projecting individuals with little or no skills, and little or no artistic production, to the public. We have, since the beginning of the millennium, entered in the era of being famous for being famous. No underlying ability needed. No skills needed, other than that of getting before the cameras and gaining attention -mainly by courting scandal.
It is this brand of being famous for being famous -this component of pop-culture -which is unpopular. Well, not really. Perhaps, I shouldn't say it is unpopular so much as acknowledge that we have a love/hate relationship with it.
We allow our attention to be garnered by individuals making no real contribution to society. We fixate on them. Then, like a pack of rabid jackals, we turn on them and tear them apart. Do we end up feeling better about ourselves after this process, or do we feel like we need to take a shower?
Tellingly, most of us do not seem to be ashamed of ourselves when we tear down these paragons of non-accomplishment. We rationalize this, calling these individuals "D-listers." We tell ourselves they have no talent. We insist they never deserved our attention to begin with. We tell ourselves they merit our ire. Our wrath is righteous.
In this media driven world, we consume units of pop-culture persuasion and vomit those pieces we cannot digest. This happens because they had no nutritional-cultural value to begin with.
Shame on us all! We know what is good for us and bad for us. We know that spending our days eating cotton candy and caramelized popcorn is going to leave us with a stomachache. We should know that consuming junk culture -for that is what it truly is- is going to leave our psyche's feeling nauseous.
Western society has become a breeding ground for looking at without looking into. Critical observation has diminished. Instead, we revel in the superficial. I suspect if we gave a washing machine tons of tattoos and a green wig and reported it had cheated on the dryer with a microwave oven, we could generate plenty of clicks on an Internet website.
Spectacle has long been with humanity. Because we now have so many kinds of media vying for attention, a pact has been made with the devil trading culture for spectacle. This is mentally corrosive. Ultimately, it leads to entropy. It is time we went on a diet from this "unpopular" pop-culture.
