American Traditions of Civic Faith 1. Everyday we sit in our homes desiring goods and services that we do not need or may not even want, and discussing issues that have little or no importance to our lives other than to make small talk. Everyday we work hard to buy stuff that is better or at least equal to what society considers normal. We are fashioning ourselves to be boringly equal cogs in one giant corporate machine, and in turn, are losing our culture to business and propaganda. When a new hipper culture appears, commercialists explode the popular culture across the United States like a plague. What average adult would not know what a skateboard is, what reggae music is, or what Middle East tension is. We have all been commercialized by popular culture that is tightly related with advertisements and businesses, for which we are sacrificing our beliefs, traditions, and everyday things that classify us as humans.
What is stopping future generations from becoming overweight, non-constructive, violence-promoting couch potatoes, who only move to grab something to eat or to procreate? Our popular culture is training us to become such objects, and something must be done. Due to commercialization and the societal value of wealth promoted by popular culture many crimes are committed in the United States every year concerning money; albeit drug sales, theft, or embezzlement more than half of all crimes are related to money. Low wealth causes social and psychological dissatisfaction; consider that most violent street crime concerning money is committed by those in the low middle class to poverty level area of the social ladder. Advancements in commercialization brought by popular culture has caused us to not only class ourselves according to wealth but has increased the amount of copycat crimes, violent crimes, money crimes, and drug crimes. If words are not enough just look how crime has increased ever since the development of the television, the mass media, and even crime related advertisements. Commercialism, however, can also be beneficial and functional.
The Essay on Culture And Crime
The crime rate of societies differs with each other. If the crime rates of European countries and American countries were compared, the results would be different. The same is true if countries from the East and West were compared in regards to their crime rates. This can be attributed perhaps to different norms and concepts on crime of different societies, as well as the overall way of life of ...
TV popular culture has opened a window to our imagination, yet it commercializes us even more everyday. As of 1962, ninety percent of American households had a television (Newton, 1996, p. 20).
As of 1997, ninety-nine percent of American homes had a television with the average number of TVs per household standing at 2.2. Due to its mental stimulation as well as its stimulation of the senses of hearing and seeing, TV popular culture has become the best and most costly source for advertising a product to the consumers, and due to its popularity, many Americans are dealing with social, physical, and even financial problems. This again proves how commercialization is an important problem that future generations will have to work with in order to keep the characteristics we view today as human. This also means that popular culture has a very strong influence on the society, which makes it to become more materialistic with each year.
Thanks to popular culture we are losing the diversity of our culture and traditions to the stale, hollow shell of culture that is associated with commercialism. Also consider when a consumer purchases clothing, they can either buy inexpensive clothing, or the exact same outfit with an additional brand name logo which raises the price. Not only are we losing our traditions and diversity to popular culture, but also our values. This is most easily depicted in the violence and deviance shown as socially acceptable in American media. Although popular culture is destroying our traditions, raising our crime rates, promoting violence and poor quality, there are benefits that make commercialism functional. The most beneficial is the promotion of advancement, solving the wonders of the universe and making work less time consuming, or at least, less hard labor. The most valuable benefit of American popular culture is the nations fast adaptation to change.
The Essay on Fashion and Culture among American Women in the 1920s
There are many types of people in the world today. The past has shown how the fashion has changed. Each era has their own different style and fashion. The twenties was a particularly wild decade. After WW1, it was a time for change. “Women became rebellious and shocked everyone by their new style and morals”(Louise brooks Society, 3). Women before the twenties were more conservative and were ...
Although popular culture is ruining American values and traditions, it all depends on the person whether the benefits outweigh the stigmas or vice versa. 2. Polls tend to show that Americans are a largely religious people, with something close to 95 percent claiming a belief in God, and large numbers saying they think that heaven exists, and so too do angels. But the people who respond to those polls appear to have an easier time personalizing religious concepts of good than of evil. Events like the Salem witch trials notwithstanding, this is a nation inclined more to theological optimism than to pondering literal representations of faiths dark side..
