Popular Culture

Popular culture is heavily influenced by mass media. What ever we hear on the news or see on the news or in magazines or newspapers, we tend to believe it, even if the information is incorrect.

It is said that popular culture has four characteristics: "it is produced by culture industries, it is different from folk culture, it is everywhere, and it fills a social function" (Martin & Nakayama, 190).

Folk culture is a type of culture that is practiced but not for any profit.

In the beginning of chapter 7 in our book Experiencing Intercultural Communication it has a small story about this guy who wasn't very happy about the movie business creating a movie about September 11th called United 93. He felt as though it would hurt many people and that it was in a way saying that all the other planes that had crashed weren't as important because the people on those planes didn't try and stop the terrorists. He had wanted to see the movie just to see how accurately the producer and writers portrayed what had happened, but he didn't want to pay for seeing it because he didn't want to support it. I never really thought about it being a bad movie. I did however think that it would hurt people by bringing up this tragedy again and now I am really thinking twice about if it was a good idea or not for them to make a movie about this.

Another reason why I feel as though it was a bad idea is because the writers of the movie don't know exactly what had happened on the plane and that most of it was just going to be from what they assumed happened. Yes the people on United 93 tried to stop the terrorists and what they did was brave and saved many many lives, but really that's all we know about the situation. People who see the movie are going to truly think that everything that was in the movie really happened, but in reality, we don't know what happened. That's why there are lots of positive and negative aspects to what the media says and what we see in movies that are suppose to be based off a true story. Media feeds off of being biased.