Media Culture

I found Douglas Kellner's article, Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture, to be very interesting. He touches on this idea that media culture gives us materials in which we use to create our identity. He says, "...products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of 'us' and 'them.' " (Kellner pg. 7) He also goes on to talk about how media not only helps create our identity, but it also shapes our view of the world, and teaches how to conform to social norms so we don't "fail". After explaining the power that media has over society as a whole, Kellner goes into how in order to understand media culture we must first understand the different cultural studies. One of his points when talking about cultural studies was, "Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed and that thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics." (Kellner, pg. 8) People who are a part of popular media culture are going to kind of fit into this pre-determined group where you conform to the dominant aspects of fashion, behavior, and values. He also explains "...how cultural studies is also interested in how subcultural groups and individuals resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities." (Kellner pg. 8) I think that Kellner is right in some sense because people do conform so easily to modern media, things such as social media, politics, fashion magazines, etc, and that when people don't conform they are kind of labeled as being "different" and are  noticeably "different".