Pop Culture Connects

  Pop Culture Connects

We’ve all had that time when we’ve missed the punch line of a joke that everyone else seems to get. If we want to understand those jokes and memes shared in our closest social circles -- our children and our grandchildren -- we need to make an effort to stay up on it. Relationships are all about relating. If we can’t relate and we can’t connect, we will eventually give up, not caring at all whether or not we do. As Chuck Klosterman said in his Harry Potter article, if we fail to care about knowing what’s going on, we are choosing to construct our own generation gap. He said, “Ignoring a cultural phenomenon today may render you completely irrelevant in a few years.”

My husband and I met and married in the late 1970s. At that time, our access to pop culture in the form of music, movies, fashion, hairstyles, and even celebrities of that time was limited by time and the speed of communication. We depended on the radio, television broadcasts, and network news. We depended on Casey Kasem’s Top 40 and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand to keep us up on what to listen and dance to. We had basically five main television channels to choose from.

The emergence of HBO, Cable TV, and satellite broadcasting changed our home viewing options. Microwaves changed how we ate and “the information highway” known as the internet took us to heights into the future we had never known. The “Generation Gap,” as first coined in the 1960s, was widening like never before. Author and evolutionary biologist, Armand Leroi, speaking of the speed of cultural change, said, “We’re always incredibly impressed by how quickly modern culture changes, especially as we age and lose track of the new music and all the stuff that is happening.” And it surely happens!

As Deanna Sellnow explained, popular culture is everywhere and it is impossible to avoid seeing and hearing it every day. Most homes now have more televisions than they have people. She went on to say that we spend at least 20 percent of our days watching, streaming, or accessing videos via social media networks. 

Without pop culture, we have little to no way to connect with the present -- the here and now -- and our grandchildren. Learning and understanding pop culture connects us as we build relationships through relating. Connecting now will help us connect later. C.S. Lewis said, “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” 

                                        Pop culture connects us. 

What pop culture media do you find the most effective in communicating with family and friends?