The Ubiquity Of Popular Culture In Our Lives
Many people who have a great deal of time on their hands due to the leisure nature of many societies today engage in a large amount of random musings on our popular culture. There are so many things going on in society today that would make our grandparents blink their eyes in surprise that there almost isn’t enough time in the day to catalog them all.
As a way of illustrating that point, how many of our grandparents who lived in World War II or sometime around that era could ever conceive that we would be able to make use of something called a computer that didn’t take up a whole room or cost millions of dollars. And the fact that we now paint these machines with what are called computer skins? To them, they would have no idea what a skin is.
And when it comes to personal health and fitness — or at least giving the appearance of personal health and fitness — how many of our grandparents out there would even be familiar with the term 6 pack abs? It’s probably a good guess that not many of them would think of a six pack as being much more than something beer or soda was carried around in rather than something done to buff up abdominal muscles.
And when it comes to something like tattoos, which used to be things that many people equate it with Navy sailors, the idea that one can design own tattoo art and then have a body artist put it on their skin would generally be something that most people wouldn’t have even been able to conceive of having done. Tattoos back then usually came out of Navy bases in San Diego or Norfolk, Virginia.
Popular culture these days is also continually available on a 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and 365 days per year basis. In fact, even if we wanted to block it out of our lives, there’s practically no way to do so, which just about any Amish or Mennonite adherent living somewhere in Ohio or Pennsylvania and riding in a horse drawn cart could tell you.
People like the Amish are forced to deal with popular culture and try to prevent it from trespassing on their own lives whenever they can. They probably look at us as being far too much in touch with the here and now and our own self-involvement then they usually are. However, most people not Amish probably wouldn’t dream of going back to the actual old days that we sometimes pine about.
For a fact, there is no way of ever being able to completely eliminate popular culture in our lives. But our grandparents probably pondered on that same question when they first saw Elvis Presley doing his grinding and wiggling on television. However, we look at that and wonder what all the concern was about. It’s fairly certain that people have century from now will wonder the same thing about us.
