The Journey of Pop Culture

      Before reading this article I didn’t realize that popular culture hasn’t been around that long and even when it was discussed in earlier years, it was frowned upon. This is really weird to me because in my opinion popular culture is everything a society bonds over and unites as a culture with. Reinhold Niebuhr thought that television was a threat to our culture and even went as far as comparing it to the threat of atomic weapons; which is pretty extreme to me because although it may have some negative impacts, such as kids always watching it and being exposed to things that they shouldn’t necessarily be exposed to, its used not only for an educational purpose but also an entertainment one. It makes since that it wasn’t until the 1960’s and 1970’s that people started experiencing popular culture because that’s when the British Invasion and all these new tv shows/radio shows came to our attention. These things were considered popular culture because the masses like it. I found Sklar’s quote of “ The movies were the first medium of entertainment and cultural information to be controlled by men who did not share the ethnic or religious backgrounds of the traditional cultural elite” to be very interesting because it puts how the class divisions were back then into perspective.  Then to push the envelope even further, Robert C Toll  provided a new look to Minstrel Shows. Minstrel shows meant to kind of made to make fun of the way african americans were treated by white people and how african americans really lived in the US. So, not only were they used for entertainment, but also for an educational purpose in how they were treated. Over all this article was fascinating to me because it explained so much about the journey popular culture has taken from being something frowned upon to something that plays a major role in society and culture today.