Popular Culture Paper

Popular American Culture
Austin Gardner
SOC/105
October 20, 2013
Matthew Szlapak
Popular American Culture
Popular culture surrounds us every day; when we go to the grocery store it’s there in the checkout line, on the car radio when you drive down the road, and on every webpage that we visit. Not only is popular culture everywhere around us, it influences nearly every decision that we make; from the television shows we watch, the cloths we wear, the food we eat, or even the cars we choose to drive. It is inevitable to be influenced by what we see every day and for it to change how we perceive the world around.
In America today we have television shows like “Teen Mom” and “Sixteen and Pregnant” were as ten years ago it would have been unthinkable to show something like that on television. While I understand the message that someone may have been trying to send with shows like this, the difficulties of being a teen mom or being 16 and pregnant, the response to these shows was much different. People began to see them as showing the glamor of the situation; some teens even seemed to be getting pregnant just for the chance to be on shows like this. It even seems like the number of teen pregnancies has go up since shows like this have come out. So called “Reality Television” has driven people in America to do things that they normally would not do just to get a little bit of fame. Reality shows have driven people to being more interested in some one else’s life than in their own.
Another common idea in America today is the idea of credit. Twenty years ago most people did not have credit cards, in fact the only thing that they would use financing for was to buy a house or a car. Today on the other hand people have gotten to the point of using one credit card to pay off another (the old saying steal from Jim to pay John comes to mind). But who can blame them with nearly every store in the country offering zero percent financing for three years. It has become so ingrained into our heads that we need the newest toys, the fastest cars, and the nicest cloths that we give no thought to what the consequences might be later on.
At the rate that it is going in this country sometime in the next twenty years people will stop being taught right from wrong by their parents. Instead they will learn everything that they think they need to know from people like the Kardashians. Cold hard cash will be a thing of the past and credit cards will not even be cards anymore, instead we will have high tech implant or something that buys what we want with just a wave of our hand. It will be interesting to see what our culture will become when we get to that point. Will family values be the same? Will we still care about what happens to or neighbors and friends? With social networking the way it is now, we might not even have to leave our houses for anything anymore.