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

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.

We all overreact sometimes, it's human nature.  But when the human populace at large start freaking out about pop culture threatening their way of life, it can set off what is referred to as a "moral panic".   The precipitating event or subject is typically related something mundane that upsets someone, but quickly snowballs into a wave of outcry from people, media being the catalyst.  In her article, Media Phobia , Karen Sternheimer describes moral panic as "fears that are very real but also out of proportion to their actual threat." In the 1980's, there was a moral panic surrounding the tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons.  The precipitating event in this case was a teenage boy from Texas that disappeared from his college for a few weeks.  The private investigator that his family hired to find him decided that the kid was a nerdy loner, that he must play D&D and the game behind his disappearance, despite absolutely no evidence to su

In his interview, Timothy Caulfield brings up several points about celebrity culture and how the American dream has changed.  Decades ago, if you asked children what they wanted to be when they grew up, they would have said doctor, astronaut, teacher, etc.  Now they would say actor, athlete, singer, or just a celebrity.  Celebrities are viewed as having obtained "the American dream," but have they?  Social media allows people to project themselves as they want to be seen by the rest of the world.  Much like Joseph Epstein says in his article, Celebrity Culture is Pervasive , that celebrity is the broadcasting of one's achievements or invention of achievement.  When he went to try-outs for American Idol , Caulfield speaks of how thousands of people showed up, thinking that this was their ticket to a better life, the American Dream, whether they were talented or not.  He mentions Kim Kardashian, who has achieved celebrity status despite not having actually achieved anything