Is popular culture the strongest influence on a young person's identity?

Is popular culture the strongest influence on a young person’s identity? First of all, what do you think is the essence of popular culture? Popular culture is the accumulated store of cultural products such as music, art, literature, fashion, and others that are consumed primarily by non-elite groups such as the working, lower, and middle class people. And that means YES; pop culture is strongly influential to a young person by cause of its fancy and alluring looks or other reasons. Why do you think it would affect or can strongly influence some young person or even adult’s identity? Well, the answer is simple, it’s predominant, and when some things are predominant like fashion or music, people will emulate it simply because they see other’s doing it or it is in trend.

Why do you think some of our countrymen do not try to patronize some things like fashion or music? For me, it’s because they see it as “dated” or what we call “baduy” as a result of a certain thing for not being popular. But in other sovereign state, when they make something, it will be viral and be pursued by other countries, and we’re one of the crowd. While our country, when we do something new, they will criticize it even if they haven’t seen it, and that kind of attitude should be ousted by our fellow law abiding citizen.

We can hinder this kind of mindset by patronizing our own culture, like listening to OPM’s or what we call Original Pilipino Music. We can also promote our Filipino designers by sharing their designs on social networking sites because we all know that these mediums are powerful. Not only music or fashion should be endorsed, but also our rich culture. It is our only reserve that we should be proud of and pass it to the next generation because that’s where we came from. What do you think will the next generation be patronizing if we will not teach the kids who’s younger than us? Of course, it will be pop culture! Try it, try to listen to OPM’s, share a design of a not-so-popular designer who you know or try to invent new but little things that you can do. By doing those kind of things, we can help even if it’s a small thing. You don’t have to be extravagant just to help. We can change this while it can be hindered.