Hello everyone and welcome to Communication and Popular Culture. This is our class blog--the place for you to post all of your reflections and add your voice to our class community. As a reminder, don't forget to label your entry with your name!
I'm looking forward to a great semester!
In our reading last night, I read that a rhetorical argument is a message sent through a text that challenges a behavior about what is appropriate or inappropriate, or good or bad. Hours after reading about that, I watched the Video Music Awards. My jaw literally dropped when Miley Cyrus performed her hit, “We Can’t Stop”. All I could think about was how inappropriate she was being.
ReplyDeleteI’ve seen the music video, and it’s crazy. Who eats bread and money sandwiches, dances with giant teddy bears on their backs and makes skulls out of French fries?
Her performance at the VMA’s was not much different. She came out in a tiny teddy bear costume, twerked with black girls and stuck out her tongue every five seconds. At the end of her song, she ripped off what little she had on and was standing in a little nude number (much like the naked girls in Robin Thicke’s music video.) Unfortunately, she was given a foam finger and she used it to stroke her privates every ten seconds.
She then danced and sang with Thicke for a duet of “Blurred Lines”. At one point, she bent over in front of him and grinded on him. Another time, Cyrus groped him and acted like she was kissing his neck. Towards the end of the song, she used her foam finger on Thicke’s privates. The performance left many people shocked and, for me, very disturbed. My timeline on all social media was filled with Miley comments for the next hour.
After going through and analyzing her performance, I can’t help but think this is exactly what Cyrus wanted. Twitter went crazy with over 300,000 tweets per minute during her performance. She was interviewed on the red carpet before the event saying her performance was going to be crazier than Britney and Madonna’s kiss. I guess she was right.
In response to the question, "Should we study popular culture?", I believe it is a necessity. It explains and gives clear reasoning as to why we think certain things are within a social norm. It generates the way we think and view things whether we consciously are aware of it or not. It is often times the natural source of our thoughts and actions. I believe that studying popular culture gives us a better sense of the question, "Why?".
ReplyDeleteSIGNS: A POP CULTURE INVASION
ReplyDeleteWe know popular culture impacts us and how we live our daily lives, but just exactly how much? Some would go as far to say it affects EVERYTHING we do, and others would limit it to clothing and trends. I never thought I was heavily impacted by T.V., radio, social networking, movies, music, video games, and internet. After introducing myself to various Communication courses and the reading material provided, I began to think otherwise.
In this week's reading assignment, Sellnow starts to explain how we can understand popular culture. She states that "culture" is often defined with elitism and diversity in mind, such as the desire to "improve one's station in life" and the diversities of various demographics. However, these common descriptions are noted by Sellnow as "insufficient" in determining a definition for popular culture.
On the contrary, popular culture is comprised of hundreds of signs, or "everyday objects, actions, and events that influence people to believe and behave in certain ways". These signs tell us of what is to be thought of as "good" and "bad" or "appropriate" or "inappropriate".
Whether we realize it or not, I think we pick up on these signs and engrave them in our subconscious. Important issues like sex, marriage, illegal activities, drugs and alcohol are all very much influenced by the media and the culture surrounding it. Critics interpret the material presented by authors and artists and try to distinguish the subtle signs that the author himself might not have noticed.
Popular Culture is filled with an ever growing amount of signs that are used to express proper behaviors, ideologies, and etiquette. Whether we realize it or not, every time we are exposed to any form of popular culture we are influenced on how we should think and act. This reveals questions like: Is anything we do actually original? Can we leave the house without acting out of influence by a show we've seen or song we've heard? Do we even have any control over how we think? I suppose these are questions to be answered in another post!
-Stuart Cowen