For example, research reveals the disturbing influence of the advertising industry. In the 1950's, advertising representatives monitored television shows from the studio, vetoing material they found objectionable.
Today advertisers' influence may be less overt, but the content of TV shows remains heavily monitored. Remember the gay couple on Thirty-something who disappeared mysteriously after a few episodes? The advertisers sponsoring the show are suspected of threatening to withdraw their support.
Images of women in advertising are no less problematic. Pictures of scantily clad women next to political articles in the New York Times contrast intellectual discourse with the image of women as voiceless, passive objects.
Photographs of models, breasts taped to improve their cleavage, are plastered across the pages of every major publication in the country. These images propagate an impossible ideal of physical beauty to which women must try to measure up.
Many theorists describe the hegemonic influence of modern mass media. Sociologist and cultural critic Todd Gitlin argues that the structure and content of television programs propagate materialist values and political complacency. Historian Stuart Ewen contends that American industry spreads a consumerist ideology through advertising to maintain the authority of the capitalist mode of production.
Are these theories valid? Disagreement certainly exists about the extent and origins of popular culture's influence. But even the sharpest critics of the subject as a topic of academic study recognize its influence.
Allan Bloom, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, deplores the study of non-traditional subjects in the university--such as popular culture. Yet he is also fiercely critical of the effects of popular entertainment on modern American youth. In The Closing of The American Mind, Bloom rants against the corrosive influence of mass media, saying, "Life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged, masturbational fantasy." An interesting point--but one that would have been better informed by a knowledge of scholarly theory on popular culture.
Popular culture's influence cuts across political perspectives. As a pervasive social phenomenon, it demands study.
So tomorrow, I think I'll study for my midterm.
I'll watch The Simpsons.