S3Ep02: The American Dream

We are exposed to so much popular culture everyday that it's astounding. You've seen more stories than Shakespeare, you've heard more music than Mozart, you've seen more diverse images than Caravaggio. And we are more influenced by this culture than you can imagine. What would true media literacy look like?

The medium of television has some very deep concerns for psychologists. The more we learn about it, the more we know how such a powerful medium can change the way people work together. In the second half of the 20th Century, the Sitcom became the formula that designed the expectations people had for life, and masked their abilities to design their own surroundings.

The defining characteristic of our culture is the ability to tell stories. Stories have guided the fabric of our culture since our larynx became capable of speech. We learn through stories what the expectations are of our culture, who we should be, what we should look like, what values we should display. Television has taken control of this like no other force in the history of Earth.

The music industry does something really amazing: it creates identity templates and invites us to reform ourselves through them. This makes us easier to predict, easier to please, and much, much easier to sell to.

American music reflects the dichotomy of the country: great wealth and oppression. Popular music in America has always been the voice of the counterculture, the voice of the working class (or slave), and the spirit behind that culture is what makes it so powerful. In this segment, we switch gears to talk about the development of this music, and end on the note that Art and Commerce don't always agree.

Wrapping up our talk about advertising, let's go full-foil-hat and take a look at the underside of advertising that we would rather avoid. Advertisements are sneaking into our daily lives, grabbing our attention in ever more engaging ways, embedding themselves into the fabric of our days.

Why do some people consider ads "harmful?" Part of it has to do with the amazing power they have to perpetuate stereotypes. When stereotypes become powerful, they become expectations; when expectations get out of hand, they become demands. Advertising uses cultural stereotypes to deliver messages and makes the entire system stronger.

Having covered the cultural groundwork on which popular culture is built, we are finally now able to discuss advertising. Responsible for nearly 20% of the American economy, advertising is a huge presence in all of our lives. The first and more important rule of advertising is the one that you are probably not aware of: advertisements want to create a pre-cognitive link between acquiring their product and the resolution of some primitive emotion in your mind.

Our popular culture is based on a rather vague, idealistic notion that is most often called "The American Dream." It's a dream of wealth, success, and, ultimately, "more." This is the very foundation on which advertising, television, the internet, and your personality are built. We must deconstruct it if we are to take an honest look at anything else.

Most people haven't spent enough time with the question of "Who you are?" We take for granted the world that we perceive through the bodies we inhabit and the stories we've been told. This episode kicks off Season 3 with a broad look at culture and what it means to be a part of it.