Pop Culture Study, So What?

So why study pop culture? After all, your favorite television show is just a show and that Reese’s ad is just an ad. But is it really just a TV show or just an ad? My answer, and hopefully everyone’s answer, is no. They are much, much more than that. Why?

Pop culture texts are complex and contradictory. They are open to many interpretations and subject to unexpected uses. People can enjoy the same television show for two totally different reasons. Pop culture’s relationship with its consumers can’t be reduced to “just a show.” According to Sellnow, there is no such thing as objectivity when it comes to pop culture. Media consumption is something we do, not something that happens to us. So why wouldn’t we want to study something that we are actively doing? (Especially because it affects us, as rhetorical critics, too.)

We construct our own personal traditions from the contents made available to use through pop culture texts. We use these media texts as ways to explore who we are, what we want, what we value and how we relate to other people (and so on). Images and symbols from these texts help us read against our perception of the world. All in all, we are greatly influenced by pop culture; therefore, we should care about it enough to know why we are so influenced.

To look at it another way - some people study the periodic table and how its elements react to other elements. If it is important to know those interactions, why wouldn’t we want to know about our interactions with pop culture and its elements?

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.