Is Pop Culture Good for You?

 

    Today pop culture is included in everyone’s lives. We’re surrounded by pop culture daily. Simply just watching tv and logging into social media platforms each day is a form of pop culture. Whether or not people agree, pop culture has brought people together. You can interact with so many people daily even if you have no one around you. Social media helps different people from all around the world interact and state their beliefs and be who they are.  People around the world are influenced by pop culture also. If you think about pop culture has helped us in so many different ways.

    Let’s start with social media, social media is one of the most popular platforms that is used daily. People all around the world have some form of social media that allows them to socialize and post whenever they want. When I mentioned that pop culture brings people together, this is one of the ways that it has brought us together. For example, if multiple people see someone post something relatable, they’ll connect and bond over it. Sometimes you can even create lifelong bonds between someone you met through a screen which seems crazy, but it happens in real life.

Pop culture not only benefits us socially but benefits us intellectually. Watching television programs and browsing the internet helps us exercise our brains. According to Steven Johnson’s article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”, a lot of television shows are made to increase cognitive activity. Johnson used the example of the show “The Simpsons”. This show was made for just laughs and fun. This television doesn’t require much thought when watching it, so it doesn’t benefit your intelligence. A quote I picked from the article for my group’s collaborative work was “They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to do to make sense of a story.” Johnson’s main point in the article was to show the benefits of pop culture through TV. When you watch a show like “The Simpsons” you don’t have to think but when you watch a show like “The Sopranos”, it requires more intellectual thought which increases brain activity.

    Some may argue that pop culture is not good for us as a society. They may think that it can promote violence, create anxiety, make us less intelligent, etc. I believe that pop culture is beneficial. Yes, violence and forms of discrimination are displayed on a lot of platforms, but people also use these platforms to spread a lot of positivity. There’s always going to be someone negative that doesn’t agree with you. For example, on social media, some people do use these platforms to spread hate and violence for the world to see. A lot of people may see it and not pay it any mind because that’s just how social media works. Social media is one of the main reasons why mental health awareness has grown which is a very positive thing to promote. Some television shows don’t require thinking like “SpongeBob SquarePants” or “The Simpsons” but there are plenty more shows going on that require analytic work from the audience to understand. Tv doesn’t “dumb us down”, our brains are always working and when watching these shows it helps parts of our brains exercise. So, overall pop culture may have some negatives to it as everything else in the world has, but this has benefited the world so much in so many different ways.