Looking back on the first semester of class I have learned a lot about popular culture. How we engage in it everyday as we go on about our lives. The media plays a huge role in popular culture and sometimes dictates how we feel about ourselves. They have false images that we can never live up to because the people themselves look nothing like that. Popular culture has us spending money on things we feel at the time makes us happy and in actuality it might not in the long run but we buy it anyway because it is what is in at that time. The thing I also learned about popular culture is that it changes over time, it is never the same. Although trends might come back out, it is never persistent throughout your life. I learned about how advertisements objectify women and how you can never be to skinny.
What I've also got out of class is how people compare their own lives to what they see on TV and will never truly be happy because they can't compare to what isn't real. A reading we did in class by Chuck Klosterman "This is Emo" would be a great example of how he told us of Hollywood making it impossible to be in love. How we measure our relationships on the prospect of fake love. We let these "couples" on TV tell us what love is supposed to look and feel like and in real life it isn't necessarily like that so we think we aren't in love or were unhappy. Once people start to realize these people are acting while they themselves are in the real world and stop trying to compare themselves to what they see on TV then they might actually be happy because how they feel is real and they won't be looking for actors to tell them how to feel.
People always compare themselves to others and what others have instead of being happy with what they have. It seems everyone always wants to either fit in or stand out by being overly popular. Popular culture had made it to were woman are expected to be sexy and guys are meant to be athletic. It defines who we are as a people and what our values are as a whole. I've learned that popular culture can be such a negative thing. Instead of living our own lives we are so influenced by what we see on TV and the things around us. We always compare ourselves to others instead of being happy within ourselves. We deny or don't want to think that we are brainwashed and have become so accustomed to the values of popular culture that it has become "normal" to us. People focus on these celebrity figures and look up to them when they don't even know them but yet want to be them. This is a crazy world we live in and everything has a label.
I agree with what you said and in particular, how we compare ourselves to other people. A lot of what we think of ourselves is based on how we think other people view us. It's kind of crazy when you begin to analyze how illegitimate it actually is.
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