Can We Be Family? A Pop Culture Assignment
This one is a different post as it will be from my Master’s program learning about popular culture. This will be the first of five posts that I’ll make while studying the effects of pop culture on society.
My mom asked, “Who is Bluey?” as my sister explained what her kids could watch all day. There seems to be a generation gap when it comes to popular culture. It’s been decades since my mother had little children, so she is unfamiliar with the current shows for kids. On the other hand, my sister has three young ones at home and she feels the need to entertain them to get her housework done. Being able to discuss what is popular with kid’s shows in recent years already showed me what Chuck Klosterman described in 2007, “it is only a matter of time.”
While Klosterman was hilarious in his satirical article, he brings up several good points regarding our obsession with popular culture. He said there are three basic kinds of information:
Information that you know you know.
Information that you know you don’t know.
Information that you don’t know you don’t know.
In the example with my mom, she didn’t even know about the show “Bluey.” She didn’t know what she didn’t know. Stephen Sewell explained in his 2010 address that pop culture is a form “of exclusion. That is its primary purpose. To draw a line on the other side of which lies everybody who does not know what is hip, happening, and hot. And on this side of which lies nobody at all, because nobody can possibly know, have, and be consuming everything you need to know, have, and consume in order to be hip, happening, and hot at all.” Popular culture does exclude people who didn’t have those things growing up or in their lives currently.
Another example of exclusion is my daughter’s friend wearing a “Friends” TV sitcom t-shirt. I asked her if she liked the TV show that has been off-air for 20 years now. The poor girl was confused as she only got the shirt because it referred to her friends like my daughter. In my eyes, I saw and remembered a show that I saw on occasion and even had the opening song play through my head. On the other hand, my daughter’s friend probably thought I was crazy to ask about a TV show set in the last century and one she didn’t know existed before that moment. Pop culture is a phenomenon that needs to be studied because it can help explain why generations have different gaps in understanding. Understanding that there are those three kinds of information that Klosterman briefly talks about is a good way to help remind people of how they are being influenced.
That brings me to my questions. Does the popular culture add to family generation gap problems? How to overcome these exclusions in conversations? Hopefully, further readings and research will help me find answers, “it is only a matter of time.”