Pop Culture is the Opium of the People

Full disclosure here: I am a pop culture junkie...and proud of it. While in my youth, I always wished I was one of those people who could scoff, "I never watch TV. There are too many books out there to bother with--[barely suppressed sneer]-- television." (What can say, I was an English major in college and there ain't no snob like an English major snob--hmmm, unless you count theater majors...) But alas, it was never to be. As much as I loved books, I still heeded the call of the TV and later the internet. I couldn't help myself. I am more information junkie than snob. While I do love catching an obscure reference in literature, I love being able to catch an obscure reference in The Office even more. Do I wonder sometimes if I am the dumber for it? Sure. Sometimes I think that the part of my brain that is currently analyzing the Project Runway finale might be put to better use, but honestly, why?

Johnson makes a good point: it isn't so much about content and WHAT people think about and encounter in pop culture, it's HOW it makes people think. Some examples:

Gaming: As bad as some content is (seriously, I don't even like to be in the house when Condemned II is being played, I can feel the creep vibe), you cannot deny that there needs to be solid reasoning and decision making skills employed in order to play and win these types of games. That the games may be sexist and desenstize people to violence is something to consider, but I have always contended that if you are parenting peoperly when the game is turned off, you have less to fear when the game is turned on.

TV: Believe it or not, TV shows have prompted some of the liveliest and intelligent debate I have ever witnessed. Back in the day, I participated on a forum dedicated to a TV show. While the subject matter of the TV show often bordered on the soap opera (even sometimes on par with a telenovela), the lively analysis and debate that occurred the week after the show aired was something to behold. People wrote haiku, developed games with elaborate rules, wrote recaps and fan fiction, and used sophisticated debate techniques to dismantle an opposing viewpoint (when they weren't flaming each other). Granted, sometimes the resulting content was as amateurish as the show itself, but sometimes it transcended it. TV shows, even bad TV shows, can make people think and create and interact. It's not all about passive watching anymore.

Internet: We know it's like crack. But the collaboration and interaction it has enabled far outpaces the threat of information overload, if you ask me. Again, there's a lot of junk out there, but in order to navigate the junk, you need to develop a whole different set of skills. The real question here is when will the educational system catch up to the technology and teach the skills that are really needed, instead of what is going to be state-tested?

So is pop culture the opium of the people? In a way, yes. As Johnson pointed out, a lot of the pop activities that we pursue tap into the natural reward circuitry of our brain--whether it's getting to the next level of Bioshock or obessesively checking our MySpace/Facebook to see who friended us or wrote on our wall. No doubt, pop culture is like crack in that way. But I don't think that it is an opiate in the sense that Marx would have intended: sedating us to the pain and suffering of our reality. And I think that a lot of critics of pop culture see it that way: we use pop culture as an easy way to avoid doing the "hard stuff" of life. But for a moment consider this: the skill sets that worked well in the last hundred years may not be the ones we need for the next hundred. What if pop culture thinking, not the WHAT but the HOW, is part of the skill set we need? What if "stupid" is the new smart?