What is Popular Culture? Maybe it's whatever the Internet Tells Us

In our day and age we are tied to the internet in more ways than one. Our ever so friendly smart phones keep us tied to one another. Through mediums such as Facebook and Twitter we are at the mercy of the internet and fast streams of information. To me the ultimate symbol of pop culture is the internet. I say this because it dictates what we talk about for the day, what photographs become headliners, and what trends we should buy into. The internet powers Twitter and Facebook, two things people can’t seem to live without. These forms of social media push the content of popular culture down our throats in such a bittersweet way. We seem to crave the information waiting for us on these sites. The trending topics and hash-tags keep us in loop with what’s hot and the most talked about among users. Essentially if you don’t have one of these you’re deemed out of the loop or a social pariah. What’s not realized is that Facebook and Twitter are forms of media that just push these standards and trends on us and us as natural born consumers feed into them. We are the fuel to the fire that is pop culture. Our reading this week made an interesting correlation between pop culture and its impact on our society as a whole. “…those who refer to popular culture as mass culture want to establish is that popular culture is hopelessly commercial culture. It is mass produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass of non-discriminating consumers” (Storey, 6). From this quote it can be interpreted that pop culture of our time is a commercialized sensation that the masses can’t get enough of. In the end we are all guilty of indulging in one facet or another pop culture. I say this because as people of the modern age we all interact with the internet, whether it is Twitter or Facebook; we are being fed messages that tie us to pop culture.