Popular Culture

One of the questions we were supposed to discuss in class today was about popular culture, what is it and is it important? I had never really thought about it before. A little bit of research (or a dictionary) will tell you that popular culture is all the cultural activities, or commercial products, reflecting, suited to or aimed at the taste of the general mass of people. So is it important? Yes, I'd say so. Whether it's good or not, our popular culture is what makes this generation different from the one before, and the one before that, etc. So back a few decades (and even a bit more recently) many of the stereotypes we've been discussing were part of popular culture. I'm not saying this makes it okay, but that's how people viewed it at the time. A lot of these stereotypes are still actively portrayed today on television and movies, which is a problem because most people use these forms of entertainment as a way to relax so they passively take in these stereotypes, even though they are slightly less obvious then they used to be. Unfortunately the hard part will be actively noticing and getting rid of these stereotypes. There have certainly been times in class when a certain movie or T.V. show was brought up and I hadn't even considered the slight racist jokes or even the complete lack of people of other races. I think we can all agree that there is no easy, fast fix for this issue.