Podcast formative

Popular culture has a significant impact on our consumer identities and shapes who we are as human beings. It influences our purchasing decisions and presents an idealized image of success and happiness. Social media plays a major role in promoting popular culture and creating a narrow, mass interest culture. Globalization further contributes to the homogenization of cultures worldwide. The culture industry focuses on producing popular culture for profit, which limits artistic expression and uniqueness. The ideological state apparatus uses popular culture to encourage participation in capitalism. Social media perpetuates popular culture by constantly consuming and producing it. While some argue that alternate messages exist, popular culture still has a strong influence. Consumerism and the pursuit of social status play a role in popular culture, with people often buying things beyond their budget to appear more socially and culturally superior. This competitiveness and desire for cultu So today we're going to be discussing how popular culture changes and affects who we are as human beings. So we're going to be discussing three different topics. So the sociology take on it, the ideological social apparatus and consumerism. So first of all I'm going to introduce the more sociological side of it with the consumer self. So my idea of how popular culture influences it was that popular culture determines what we consider is worth purchasing. For instance, popular culture encourages us to buy products on a mass scale, which is seen through social media platforms such as TikTok. For example, the younger generation always see products online. Personally, I saw Hayley Bieber's road, flipped it and I was like, I need that. This is an example of popular culture as everyone's doing it so that you want to do it yourself. And because of this, this forms our consumer identities, which in turn shows who we are as humans. Because according to sociology, you are what you buy. So, this contributes to who we are. Popular culture also presents an idealised image of success, beauty and happiness. Showing celebrities that live in their best life. And I guess this serves as a model of what people aspire to be like. And this is central to shaping who we are. So we can say the popular culture that we're indulging in is affecting us. Could it be more of me like that? What are your guys' ideas on that? To do with social media, it sort of makes sense in the cultural industry that because the narrative can be translated from a few platforms, do you think our culture has become more narrow in scale? Exactly. It's not like localised, specific culture as it used to be with different hobbies. Back in older times, you'd have more local cultures where different places would have different interests. But now with social media, it's like a mass interest, but everyone's interested in the same thing. So, yes, I'm very much seeing that. So it's almost one culture. Exactly. A specific culture. Western culture as well, yeah. A specific American culture. It's very Americanised. Hollywood and big Hollywood celebrities. Now it's time for TikTok and Instagram. Yeah, I understand. They have that same kind of status. I think that's where the cultural studies first came in. The concern was that American culture was in favour of the British culture. Yeah, you could argue that that impacts who we are as human beings. We're more westernised as human beings now. We're more similar than pre-media. Even people in countries like Africa, you see the more westernised culture in there now. There's shops and stuff like that. Very Americanised. We're all becoming very similar as human beings rather than cultured. Globalisation also really impacts that. Everywhere is now interconnected. That kind of ties into the culture industry and the ISA. The culture industry is the idea that under capitalism, culture just becomes produced only for profit. It's taking the artistic element out of it and expression. It's now only produced for commodity, for quantification, for profit. It means that all that popular culture, like films, music, and even books and literature, are only mass-produced to satisfy consumer demand. It's turned into a thing of culture and vibrancy into an industry for profit. There is no such thing as a truly unique product anymore. It's all just being based off what's been done before. Because you want to make profits, you want to know what's done well before. That kind of thing. That, I guess, really ties into the ideological state apparatus, where it's this use of popular culture, like theatre, art, and even education and religion, to encourage people to participate in capitalism and reiterate it and keep it going. It's all really perpetuated through social media, like what you were saying. I think we're just constantly consuming popular culture, so we're therefore reiterating it and producing it more. We have no way out of this system. The thing is, I guess, from a social establishment, you could say against that. What pluralists say in sociology is that that's actually not true, because the amount of social media that you get loads of different content. If you search for anti-America content, or anti-anything content, you would get it, because the sale of it is massive. Even in politics, you can search for the pro-Labour bit. You can also search anti-Labour. They would argue that actually there's not one message. There's no popular culture, because that is those alternate messages. Although it looks like we're being influenced by the ISA, through certain ideologies, you could argue that there's still loads of ideologies. But I agree a lot with what you're saying. That's what they would say. I guess Paul's theory was that in 1920s, before social media, there was a lot of TV channels doing radio shows, and it was more easy to control the narrative and consumer interest and so on. But I think social media might potentially be breaking that mould, despite the arguments being given. I guess my take is that the idea of social capital, sorry, form of capital. I think quite often in modern society, as consumers, we're made to believe that if we want to achieve a higher social status, we are convinced to buy certain luxury clothes, to buy new products and so on, to appear in a social past, maybe, that we're not in. And so there comes the idea of habituacy, of wanting an environment and structuring social spaces. Consumerism looks to convince people otherwise that they can reach social status that perhaps they're not safe. I think that links to social media as well. If the popular culture is promoting Nike shoes, if you buy that, then you'll get the cultural capital of having that. And that is how the popular culture influences the cultural capital, which makes you human. You know what I mean? Because that mortgage identity, that's who you are. So I do completely get that. And I think a lot of people on social media maybe do buy things out of their scope of budget. To prove that they can, even though they can't. And that is cultural capital. Yeah, just to say they own something from Gucci or something. Exactly. And that really makes up what it is to be human. Because such of what it is to be human is this competitiveness of, I have this, you don't. I'm culturally above you. I'm socially above you. Yeah, I agree with that. It's almost sort of non-organic in the way that people sort of bought clothes for their 100th year to get on stage. Oh, no. Because of that popular culture. Yeah. That it's making you need that capital too. That's how you get the capital. Buying stuff. Again, it's the same with the consumer self. And getting you that cultural capital. It almost makes the culture not organic in itself. No. Because everything that comes just sort of naturally through generations and so on. Social media sort of stops that way, I suppose. Which sort of creates fake culture. And people pretend to be someone they're not. It's a heightened reality. Yeah. Yeah. That we even exist. I think, yeah. I think that's great. That's what it is to be human in the modern world.