Why Study Popular Culture?

It is crucial to study pop-culture, especially its rhetorical elements. For the most part, communication experts are torn between how popular culture functions. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Or in this case, does the public influence such things as the media, or do the media influence the public?

Raymie McKerrow argues that the end-goal of partaking in a rhetorical analysis of popular culture is to go beyond Aristotle's five canons of communication, accept some of the negatives as positives, and understand how "emotion" affects communication as a whole. As for the latter, I use the term "emotion" to describe how audiences respond to a communicator beyond the address being given. Is the speaker of a specific ethnic background? How might someone respond to that information? Although we regret to admit such things can alter our thoughts, they do.

With McKerrow in mind, I believe it is crucial that we, as the pop culture audience, collect the fragmented, mediated texts and use them to discover what influence pop-culture has on us, and likewise, how much influence we have on pop-culture, especially the media. Now I come to my point.

I believe that, while it would be groundbreaking if we discovered what came first, our focus should be on what comes next. We know what influences we currently have on pop-culture and what it has on us, but we do not which entity influenced the other; therefore, we should use our knowledge to try to race ahead of the curve. By taking a rhetorical analysis on pop-culture, we may discover how it reacts to certain national/social events. If we can do the aforementioned, then I believe we can possess a stronger direct influence on what pop-culture portrays and enforces in the near future.