Popular Culture: Prompt and Symptom  





i was recently sat at the dinner table - post roast - when i asked an unknowingly piquing question about popular culture.
to give context, i was trying to understand the references people use to map out their progression in life.
nostalgia is my biggest intrigue, and it often dictates my emotions of the day.
i can find myself stuck in an emotional paradox starting with a memory that develops into a deep gripping feeling which i actively have to attack to lessen the turmoil it brings with it.
this is why i wanted to understand how other people relate to their memories and ultimately appreciate the different ways nostalgia materializes.
one route i saw into discovering this was through pop culture time stamps; moments where people were reacting and reflecting to a shared experience.
all of it: celebrity gossip, political scandals, hit songs, everyday fashions, mainstream news, new technolgies, shared entertainment.
a common avenue for people on different paths.
what was exciting for no reason?
what was something impersonal that became personal.?
what was a common thread an indivual grasped and fabricated their interests out of?
however, when i posed the question: “what popular culture references define that time for you?”, I was met with antipathy.
“i dont follow people on social media”, “who cares about the beckhams”, “i just read newspapers then”, “work was my focus”: these were the classic titbit’s that were passed around the table - sharing a similar journey to that of the bisto.
it was a social experiment of shared originality that, from the reaction i recieved, proved itself.

i realised that i had failed to remember that popular culture is threatening to the fantasy of complete induvidualism. some people do not like to think that their experiences are similar. it can be considered a malnourished form of living, and therefor, people deny being a part of it. but that is not possible.
popular culture is just common vernacular for contemporary shared experience. and shared experience is something inescapable becuase of our access to technology. we now have an imagined competition that values this ideal of the meta-virgin and breeds a rejection towards any social discorse that is processed through an online sphere.
we must ask ourselves, why do we devalue social media as a tool, like the radio, or newpapers, or even pamphlets, in nourishing society. it is a medium comparable to soil, where discourse can flow like water through the mudded dirt of unnecessary information and ultimately arrives at a bulb of community where common interest grows.
in reality, as it becomes increasingly impossible to participate in contemporary society without engaging with the metaverse, could it be argued that every piece of information is now part of popular culture - since its potential audience is infinite, and thus inherently belongs to the populace?

i understand the issue of the internet is that it is a site of struggle over meaning. it is a landscape where pleasure, knowledge and  power converge to form a mallaeble reality where all avenues can be disguised as the other. here, we cheat ourselves into believing that we have manufactured our own relationships with the things shape us as induviduals, but in reality, we have severe lack of agency over what we are given to like. accessing pre-positioned information has been disguised as choice through action e.g. clicking a follow button, or scrolling past it. 
if truth be told, our path of communal intereaction has alreadty been paved for us through popular culture and social intergration. the capital we induvidually have over sites of culture will be shared through puzzling together people, prompts and politics. for example, if i saw a report that the ex-hearthrob of a boyband from my teens had made a remark that conflicts with my view, there would be a process of connection that would make me contextualise why and how we got to this point and then, what my reaction should be. firstly, my instant reaction would indicate social sensibilities that i participate in - am i upset? laughing? astonished? unsuprised? this constitutes my next action - to share. admittely, i have been feeling quite apathetic to any cancel culture so maybe this would direct who i’d connect with over this. do i want to grieve with people who held the same sentimentality towards their teenagehood, or do i want to progress in my active interest in cultural critique and therefor send it to a peer who would be willing to do the same? either way, a web of interest starts to be spun, creating a network of context (symptom) that was inaugerated by a moment of popular culture (promt). i have learnt, and therefor, developed my induvidualism by participating in this form of social networking. as we all do.

what i’m trying to say is that popular culture is not meaninglyess fluff - it is a tool for mapping an interactive web of an induviduals life and a site of social bonding. we do not exist outside of it and the rejection of such plays as heavy of a part in social conformity as participating does. even when we think we are being unique, we are always engaging in common cultural threads.








syptoms and prompts exercise: 

give yourself a year and a month (and perhaps not a day, but instead a time of day if you feel you have a good memory)


track down (symptoms):
where you were
who you knew
who you spent time with
what did you do with your time?
what did you actively do with your time?
how did you get around?
what did you love to eat?
what is it you wore if you were feeling lazy?
what were you obsessed with?
what did you care about?

feel yourself back in this period

now:
write down the references you used to remember these things (prompts)

reflect:
are these prompts completely yours, or are they a shared experience?

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