I remember my very first day of school. My mother was smiling with pride and stood on the back porch to see me off. I turned around to wave to her, then she jokingly called out, “Bye honey, make good choices!” With a laugh at her well-timed movie reference from Disney’s Freaky Friday, I jumped into my car and drove myself off to school.
Yes, I drove myself to my first day of school. It was actually quite safe.
I was 18 years old and heading to my first day of college, which was technically my first day ever of “real school.” You see, I was raised by parents who decided that homeschooling would be the best education that they could offer their children. On many levels, I agree with my parent’s opinions, but as my life went on I realized that this direction had placed me forever into a unique subculture, and perhaps a unique disadvantage.
Though an excellent choice for traditional academic education, homeschooling severely impacted my informal education of popular culture during my elementary, adolescent, and even high school years.
The author of the article Death by Harry Potter has supplied me with all the knowledge I possess about the story. Though I was the prime age for it while the novels were coming out, I completely missed that train and many others. I can’t sing a single NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, or Britney Spears song. I didn’t even see the movie Mean Girls until I was 29. Finally, it made sense why my best friend called me a ‘loser’ out of nowhere when she picked me up to go shopping years ago.
From my personal experience, it does not take long to learn that you are not in the know with popular culture. You can quickly sense a feeling of exclusion that can leave you hungry to belong and looking for ways to compensate for your cultural ignorance so you can belong.
The only popular markers that I can utilize to build a sense of belonging are Lord of the Rings, the Office, and Star Wars, which causes me to cling to them more dearly. This sense of belonging at least somewhere helps ease the dread of “not knowing what I don’t know.”
When considering popular culture, individuals can reap social benefits by being familiar with the current artifacts that belong to it, or else experience a negative consequence from their popular cultural illiteracy.
The threat of the unknown negative experience, which can include missing the well-placed reference in a conversation or not understanding a joke, or even God -forbid us looking stupid and harming our public image, helps to foster a fear of what we don't know. We are primed for what is known by the acronym FOMO, fear of missing out. The fear keeps us slaves to the need to consume to belong.
How does self-monitoring of our own pop-culture literacy impact our ability to function within our culture?
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