Wherry's Popular Culture

In the recent documentary that we have watched, "Football High", we have been introduced to the Arkansas football team of the Shiloh Christian High School, a small school with a large passion for football. We witness the lives of kids changing from being local stars, to national colleges wanting them to come play for them. The lives have not only changed in a positive way, but also a negative by the lack of funding for athletic trainers, concussions at early childhood related to football, and even the death of a teammate by overworking in the heat. Football was once a fun game to play, but has become more of an investment. From what we have recently learned in class, BIRGing; basking in reflected glory, and CORFing; cutting of reflected failure, these terms can be seen in the documentary. The first example is with Shiloh Christian Quarterback Keihl Frazier. The BIRGing side of Keihl comes from being the best player of the number one team in all of Arkansas, and now he is hi...

Media Phobia In Karen Sternheimer's article relating to media phobia, many issues, since the start of popular culture, have been accused of corrupting our society, especially with the youth. The main problem is not the idea of the media corrupting society, it is setting up popular culture as a scape goat. Sternheimer says we tend to have these fears because it is getting harder to monitor our children's activities and that the real problem is not with the media, but it is hiding something within. The inner problems are actually the lack of funding for education, child poverty and domestic problems. It is easier to blame the culture and media than it is to fix a long ridden problem in society.  One source I have related to is the most recent readings behind the Pros and Cons of Social Media. The subject I touched on was the correlation between Social Media usage and how well students were doing in school. With social media becoming more of the popular culture, where all o...

Social networking is taking the country by storm. In the recent years, instead of using social media as a place to mingle, places like schools and businesses try to use social networking for a positive purpose. With modern technology such as social networking being such a recent discovery, there are still many flaws, but also more benefits.  Pros of social networking in school: With social networking, students are able to research more easily, create blogs, and share their ideas with other students over the web. Connecting to my life, we use things such as blogger to connect with students in the classroom outside of class, expressing our ideas and our discoveries on a topic. In one study, George Middle School in Portland Oregon introduced social media to their students. Grades had gone up 50% and chronic absentee had gone down 33% since bringing social networking to the classroom (  Elizabeth Delmatoff, "How Social Media Transformed Our School Community," www.oregoned.or...

Celebrity culture is the idea of viewing celebrities as more than people but as a brand. Society has a desire to be involved in the personal lives of these celebrities and make us feel connected to them as if they are our next door neighbor. With the influence of media, we are able to be connected to celebrities, making us want to copy their behaviors, their image, and recreate ourselves to be more like them. The benefits of celebrity culture are that celebrities are seen as a new era of art work. Everyday people are exposed to everyday art that is the celebrity's life. Art comes in not just paintings and sculptures but it comes in many different forms. Celebrities give us more options of art relating to fashion, literature, beauty, film, theater, music, etc. Some obstacles that come along with celebrity culture is the lack of checks and balancing. In the reading, we learned that third world countries like Africa are taken advantage of, such as celebrities making their own laws...