Pop Culture or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Escapism

It's hard to throw a rock and not hit someone that has a tattoo, they're everywhere.  However, no everyone is accepting of this form of body art/modification.  In his article, Secret Ink, Derek Roberts talks about the history of tattoos and their place in American society.  Celebrities, athletes, artists, military...people from all walks of life and background have tattoos.  Those that are proud and unashamed of their ink freely show it off, but where do we draw the line on what is acceptable? "The media's shifting views of tattoos have been linking to greater participation in tattooing, but the sanctioning of tattooees by nontattooed individuals shows that American culture has yet to fully embrace tattoos." While more and more people have tattoos than ever before, it is still widely unaccepted in the business world.  Many businesses have stipulations in their employee dress codes either banning tattoos or requiring them to be covered at all times. "In re

The documentary, Consuming Kids , talks about the purchasing power of children.  Children have tremendous influence over what their parents buy, whether its the type of car, food, clothing, or even phone plans.  Marketers rely on this when designing their ad campaigns for children, especially when it comes to nagging.  The more a child nags their parents about certain products, the more likely the parents are to buy them. In the late 1970's, there was an attempt to ban ads on children's television under the Federal Trade Commission.  By 1984, the Reagan administration passed a law that took away authority to control ads directed at children, completely deregulating children's television.  This allowed advertisers to market directly to children.  The idea was to get to them as early and as often as possible.  In the 1980's and 90's, every cartoon had toys associated with it, insinuating the brands into children's lives through the characters.  Nowadays, chil

Playing games can teach us many things, as well as motivate us.  Gamers are stereotyped as being antisocial loners escaping into a fantasy realm.  This is far from the truth.  Games can be highly social, such as the MMO (massive multiplayer online) game World of Warcraft (WoW).  McGonigal refers to the game as a "collaborative problem-solving environment," where thousands of players come together to help achieve their "epic mission".  This ties directly into both social contact and the idea of goals, challenges, and rewards.  In WoW, players work to help each other achieve goals, overcome challenges, and are rewarded for their efforts.  Players have to communicate and learn to trust each other in order to so. McGonigal brings up that the average young person, by the age of 21, will have spent 10,000 hours gaming.  That about how much time a student will spend in school by the time they graduate.  She refers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory of success,

The concept of sports athletes as heroes and role models has been around for decades, but never so much as nowadays.  Children grow up wanting to be sports stars, people want that level of talent & celebrity that comes with it.  Take Kiehl Frazier for example - a football player recruited from a young age and even has a sports promoter. The pressure on the athletes to continue to perform at heroic levels is ridiculous.  Kiehl spent all of his time focusing on football instead of being a kid, and yet he didn't even make it into the NFL. The rules of sports are designed to be clear & coherent, so that they are easy to understand.  While football has rules for how players can act on the field, what about when they become injured?  Or when athletes are pushed to limits beyond what is healthy?  While rules for conduct exist, few rules are in place to avoid injuries such as concussions and when a player should be taken out of a game, regardless of the score.  Student athletes,

In the weddings episode of Adam Ruins Everything , he debunks several myths regarding weddings and marriage.  The first and biggest one is that your wedding is supposed to be the most important day of your life.  In reality, it's the most expensive day of your life.  The wedding industry reinforces the myth that being married is more important that anything else in your life and pressures emotional brides into paying inflated prices just because it's a wedding. Secondly, the show talks about how we're made to believe that divorce is the worst possible outcome to a marriage.  In reality, divorce to be a benefit to both parties, especially if it's an unhealthy, toxic, or abusive relationship.  People change, grow apart, even fall out of love, and because of that, divorce can be an opportunity move on. Thirdly, the show talks about weddings are supposed to be two people confessing their undying love for each other.  But really, it's a production to show off how muc

Cultivation theory is the concept that people's view of the world and how things are are affected by the media that they consume. The theory was developed by George Gerbner, a Hungarian Jew that immigrated to the US during WWII.  He went on to become the dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  He postulated that, gradually over time, media (especially television), media makes the reality that it presents seems normal to its audience. In the John Oliver video about torture, it gives examples of how we've come to believe that torture of prisoners works.  We believe this because on television and in movies, it does work.  Oliver talks about the release of the CIA report on the interrogation of prisoners after 9/11 and how it concluded that torture wasn't effective at all.  This came as a surprise to many, given that media has cultivated us to expect torture to work.