There are at least a million popular culture blogs.
There are at least a million nerd/media culture blogs.
This is one more.
But it's not a blog about gawking. It's a blog about the significance of the media that is given a second-class label in terms of cultural value, despite their thousands-million-billion-dollar franchises and enormous impact on our social climate.
For movies alone, the top grossing film franchises in history have been to date: Harry Potter, James Bond, and Star Wars. Not exactly Wuthering Heights. Harry Potter alone grossed over 7.6 billion dollars; and yet, its considered a 'young adult' movie, rather than an actual mover and shaker of society.
We don't get to choose what becomes literature. We like to pretend the most important or the best art, the fine art, is our literature. But tell that to Arthur Conan Doyle, to J. D. Salinger. What we consider to be less valuable in our modern day, is going to be studied in classrooms as groundbreaking literature in a few decades. In some places, it's already begun.
The media genres that make the most money, in western culture, are often those deemed to have the least cultural significance, at least to the culture that 'matters': dismissed as low art, tv-trash, mindless video games, fluff pop top-10 hits, 'kids' cartoons, YA-lit doorstops, and the constant vibrancy of social media's exchanges radiating buzz with its own half-life moment to moment.
Our modern mythology is for sale.
We like giving these thought when they serve our needs and point. We like to analyze the advertisements, and the consumerism, how in scare headlines they're killing our culture (along with Generation Y, and cell phones, but presumably not microwaves or the Polio vaccine) and that too is mass media: that conclusion is also for sale.
This blog is not for that. It's for taking the media you're afraid to admit you watch (and you do) to your co-workers seriously. This blog is for everybody who learned to read playing Pokemon. This is for everybody who couldn't keep up with the Kardashians and now can't stop hearing about them. This blog is for everybody who begs friends for a new book to read, and everybody who's shocked and appalled by DC Comics' recent terrible stance on suicide and objectification.
All of these are meaningful outcomes and issues entangled with our 'low-art' mass-media consumer culture. The point isn't to point fingers or say that what's happening is bad or good, but to take it apart and think about what it means.
And of course we can have fun along the way.
There are at least a million nerd/media culture blogs.
This is one more.
But it's not a blog about gawking. It's a blog about the significance of the media that is given a second-class label in terms of cultural value, despite their thousands-million-billion-dollar franchises and enormous impact on our social climate.
For movies alone, the top grossing film franchises in history have been to date: Harry Potter, James Bond, and Star Wars. Not exactly Wuthering Heights. Harry Potter alone grossed over 7.6 billion dollars; and yet, its considered a 'young adult' movie, rather than an actual mover and shaker of society.
We don't get to choose what becomes literature. We like to pretend the most important or the best art, the fine art, is our literature. But tell that to Arthur Conan Doyle, to J. D. Salinger. What we consider to be less valuable in our modern day, is going to be studied in classrooms as groundbreaking literature in a few decades. In some places, it's already begun.
The media genres that make the most money, in western culture, are often those deemed to have the least cultural significance, at least to the culture that 'matters': dismissed as low art, tv-trash, mindless video games, fluff pop top-10 hits, 'kids' cartoons, YA-lit doorstops, and the constant vibrancy of social media's exchanges radiating buzz with its own half-life moment to moment.
Our modern mythology is for sale.
We like giving these thought when they serve our needs and point. We like to analyze the advertisements, and the consumerism, how in scare headlines they're killing our culture (along with Generation Y, and cell phones, but presumably not microwaves or the Polio vaccine) and that too is mass media: that conclusion is also for sale.
This blog is not for that. It's for taking the media you're afraid to admit you watch (and you do) to your co-workers seriously. This blog is for everybody who learned to read playing Pokemon. This is for everybody who couldn't keep up with the Kardashians and now can't stop hearing about them. This blog is for everybody who begs friends for a new book to read, and everybody who's shocked and appalled by DC Comics' recent terrible stance on suicide and objectification.
All of these are meaningful outcomes and issues entangled with our 'low-art' mass-media consumer culture. The point isn't to point fingers or say that what's happening is bad or good, but to take it apart and think about what it means.
And of course we can have fun along the way.
{ 1 comments... read them below or add one }
I'd also be interested in discussing how the media takes written source material, and changes the mythos behind it. For example,the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies are significantly different from Tolkien's originals; and the skew reveals something about the cultural lens through which the filmmakers reinterpret the original, in order to "please a wider audience." In other words - to pander for approval.
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