Mass Media / Popular Culture Term Paper

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Other aspects of popular culture reflect this value as well, from the "roll-back" Wal-mart phenomenon to the speedy fabrication and marketing of most popular music, movies, and television shows. These trends also encouraged by the short attention spans of consumers. On the web, it has been shown that a particular site has less than seven seconds to load and attract the attention of the viewer before he or she moves on to the next Google result. (WebGuru) In the kitchen, this is evidenced by the prevalence of instant oatmeal, instant coffee, instant cookie dough, and other products promising instant gratification for minimal effort.

This fast-food culture has also helped to foster a removal from reality for consumers. Children do not understand that nuggets come from birds or that Burgers come from cows, and most adults chose to never think about the unpleasant aspects of factory-farms and slaughterhouses having anything to do with their McDonalds meal. "Roughly a quarter of the nation's population buys fast food every day - and yet few people give the slightest thought to who makes it or where it comes from. A fast-food kitchen is merely the final stage in a vast system of mass production. America's favorite foods, like its automobiles and television sets, are now manufactured by computerized, highly automated machines." (Schlosser) Once upon a time, people in a society were involved in every stage of obtaining or creating a product. Food was obtained firsthand from the earth, meals were prepared firsthand in the kitchen, and buildings were built from stone and wood. Today, products come prefabricated. Popular culture trends appear to be that how and by what means any product is manufactured is distributed on a need-to-know basis, leaving most members of society under the impression that "some assembly required" is how things are made and that "just adding water" is cooking.

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This is a society where imitation processed cheese-food is considered an ideal part of a child's lunch.

The fast-food trends of popular culture can be interpreted as indicating a deep social void. The way in which all things in society appear to be disconnected can be traced, perhaps, to a lack of universal mythology in the modern age. There is no coherent scheme for the trends of this society. "By the standards of the great classical myths, [popular culture] characters are so shallow and so glib, their imagery so stereotyped and debased, their plots so superficial and contrived. They produce neither illumination nor catharsis. They carry no parabolic conviction. They do not embody the values of a whole society." (Sheehan) Today, if one were to ask most people to identify the links between their fast-food lunch and their church, they would not have an answer. However, asking a person one thousand years ago to link their cow and their religious values, they most certainly would have had an answer. Even today's churches, one of the most likely sources for a coherent mythology, offer little more than a shallow processed religion-like substance. One individual is not the same person when watching television as when attending church or working; the person eating at McDonalds and shopping at Walmart is not the same person voting on social issues. Without a coherent world view, the universal subconscious of popular culture instead creates the mass media that reflects a mythology-free value system. Certainly, the media influences individual consumer decisions. However, it is the power of a corrupt society which propels the mass media into existence and feeds it with conformity, efficiency, imitation, and fragmentation......

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