Why Should We Study Popular Culture And How Should We Study It?

So, we already know the textbook definition of “popular culture”, the everyday objects, actions, and events that shape our behaviors and beliefs. But, seeing that popular culture is a facet of our everyday life, I can’t help but feel that popular culture has to do with something called Information Overload, which was this idea proposed by computer scientist Vannevar Bush in his writing, “As We May Think” for The Atlantic in 1945. Bush proposed this idea that humans needed to create the means of managing information overload through a partnership with computers.  I find popular culture as a form of information overload, except we’re not always going to be using computers to manage the information overload.

 I think that the first step in managing this overload of popular culture, it’s important to recognize the source of the popular culture. The trouble with that, though, is that we’re living in a democratized media environment where anyone can create media, which in turn, will affect us in some way in the form of popular culture. Being able to recognize the source of popular culture can be useful to us when studying it. Similar to way we would apply rhetorical perspectives, identifying sources of popular culture makes analysis more orderly and provides both a common language and technique, which would differ across different sources. Being able to recognizing sources of popular culture and apply a rhetorical perspective is significant because we can study why and how popular culture affects our attitudes, beliefs, and opinions.