When I first told that I had to write a paper on “pop culture” I was so overwhelmed. There were so many topics to choose from ranging from music to celebrity styles. Then I took a step back and asked myself “what exactly is pop culture”. I couldn’t think of an answer at the top of my head. If I had to sum it up in one sentence it would be pop culture is in everything. This is true. We see pop culture in almost everything in every way every single day, twenty four seven.

I believe that pop culture is what a person makes it out to be, if that’s the popular taste in music at the moment or what was worn at this year’s Grammys or even the new diet ideas on Pinterest. Pop culture is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Some people may believe that pop culture is irrelevant and not important but this is simply not the case. Pop culture is in everything and believe it or not, one is inside pop culture as well.

Pop culture helps shape who a person turns out to be because we are always surrounded by pop culture. Pop culture is used to help inspire a person and help give them new ideas and new ways to do things, to help bring a person outside of the box. It’s supposed to inspire those who don’t want the inspiration, to make those feel something out of the ordinary that they don’t want to feel even when they least expect it.
E-News is not the typical news station. If one is not familiar with E-News than it is, for short, a TV show that keeps their viewers up to date with all of the celebrity gossip going on at the moment. E-News always has the inside gossip and the “behind the scene news” that isn’t released anywhere else but that TV station. If one doesn’t know already, pop culture is in E-News and E-News is in pop culture. That was not that hard to figure out because E-News is purely based upon pop culture.

There are always new TV shows coming out; some good and some not so good. Whichever TV show is considered “good” or “bad” is a straight up opinion, mine (a sixteen year old teenage girl) is completely different that a middle aged man in his forties. Why is this? Because we are both completely interested in different things so completely different types of TV shows appeal to us so completely different types of pop culture appeal to us. Pop culture is everywhere, including TV shows. I am interested in ABC Family TV shows including Pretty Little Liars and he is probably interested in home improvement shows. I have no idea which shows this man is interested in, I can just assume because certain types of pop culture can make me think and stereotype that most middle age men like these types of shows.

Pop culture is seen in the unexpected. Take the model run way for a second. We (common folk) see a skinny girl who looks like she could use a cheeseburger but another model (one who is smaller) may see a fat girl who does not meet the up to par image of a model. We might think that she is beautiful but the other models may think that she is ugly, pop culture influenced the media for us to think this way.

What even is considered “beautiful”? Is it the perfect hair on a model or the messy pony tail on a teenage girl? Is it all of the designer clothing seen on the runway or the generic sweatshirts seen in the school hallways? Is it the size zero jeans or the size 8 jeans? According to many critics the answer is always the model.

Women see pictures of models every day of their lives, if it’s on Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook or any other nameable social media site out there (which is influenced by pop culture once again. Like I stated earlier pop culture is in everything.) These models don’t have to just be runway models but anyone who has been told to pose a certain way or wear a certain type of clothing. It’s purely advertisement. These models go through a lot of Photoshop to look a certain way and normal, common everyday people try to strive to look like these woman who aren’t even real but computer generated avatars.

Models didn’t always used to look like this. They used to look like a normal human being before technology has evolved and all of these photo edit cites have been made. This has changed over the years. If we look back to the fifties when Marilyn Monroe was still alive we see a model who had curves. People say that she invented beauty and I completely agree. Now a day’s beauty is considered a stick figure, literally. Most models now a days are a size double zero, Marilyn was a twelve. If models now a days aren’t a double zero they are considered to be overweight and not fit enough to be a model which basically means they are not pretty.

This doesn’t just apply just to models. The average common day girl is considered to be overweight at a size 8, which is a basic and common size among teen girls. These girls then feel really self-cautious about themselves because they are basically being called overweight every time that they log onto their social media account. Some of these girls don’t even realize that there is a lot more photo shop going on than they know about. Almost any published picture has been photo edited. It’s a sad day to think that pop culture has made so many people feel so insecure about themselves over the years and that this is causing so many ways to make a person try to look a certain way to feel accepted.

The top 100 pop hits on the radio are purely taken from pop culturist ideas. Lady Gaga even said in an interview once that pop culture wad her biggest inspiration and she has had countless number one hits on the radio over the past few years. She has researched what the people want to her and she writes songs about it. Even the musicians other than Lady Gaga use pop culture in their songs and aren’t even aware that they are using it. If we take a look at some song lyrics we can see just exactly where the pop culture is being used and how it is being used. Some other lyrics make it that even we can’t see the pop culture being used but there is probably somewhat of a deeper meaning to it.
I even see pop culture inside of my school and I probably even see some other things that I don’t even know are pop culture. I see name brand clothing everywhere and pop culture has inspired these people to buy these things, I see model inspired haircuts and hair colors on majority of the girls and almost every single person has an I-phone because it has been promoted so much through pop culture over the past years. There is probably so much more going on that I don’t even know or don’t even realize.

Pop culture is everywhere, will people start to notice it more?