Popular culture: The sickly bastard off spring of consumer culture. Popular Culture (Pop culture) is the face of superficial hedonism that thinly masks the demon of profit. Its whats 'in' or 'fashionable', always somehow centers around sex and wealth and is the fire that burns humanities discontent. This may sound a little hysterical but the fixation on superficiality of the present is what is always attributed to the failings of Western capitalism. As discussed in my previous post when people are eventually faced with a nihilistic perspective they have 2 choices create a purpose or cling to whatever falsehood is most easily assessable and comforting. So the fact that Popular culture seems to implicitly suggest that this is the sub-set of culture that people are most often drawn to is a grim reminder that the security blanket of denial seems more appealing than true fulfillment. A culture of "Do what you have to and go home so you can stare at Carmen Electras t*ts"
Youth culture: The baby sister of Popular culture that appears to be more about just fitting in, in order not to be ostracised by ones school mates yet probably has more to do with sex than its adult counter part. Youth culture takes the roll of fads and even would-be counter culture (Ill explore this later) and is ultimately the sad begins of the standardization of the Western populous. The irony of the current trends of youth culture is that it is tending towards kids trying to express ones "uniqueness" yet does so by standardizing "uniqueness" with popular cultural trends. As personified by the Emos and Hipsters
Counter culture: Now here is finally a concept that has a degree of merit. For every philosophy or great movement that eventually became the norm started as some sort of counter argument to the previous norm and was itself challenge and adapted into a new preposition defining human existence or conduct. However in contemporary culture, counter culture serves a some what less glorious roll in that it is a movement that attempts to challenge the status quo and give individuals a slightly different social paradigm to exist in. One such movement is the Goth movement which Ill explore next
One contemporary counter-culture: In the interest of flow Ill Quickly go to the counter culture that I researched. The Goth movement is a counter-culture that attempts to discard the social stereotypes of society by embracing the darker aspects of civilization. It creates a sort of passive nihilism that, instead of attempting to gain the state of active nihilism, that embraces the pointlessness of life where Popular culture has become the norm. From music to alternate religions, Gothic life style is dark and tortured as if to spite the superficiality of modern life, some even going so far as to dip into Satanism to express their contempt of the world and their fierce individualism. I think they are interesting because they are the ultimate hopeless paradox of identity that take nihilism to its bleakest extreme.
However even this extreme counter-culture (I would go so far as to call them anti-culture) isn't without its dark little Pop/youth culture bastard offspring complete with it own music, movies and dress sense: The F**King Emos. Short for Emotional, Emo culture chooses not to express anger toward the status quo but instead opts to express insincere self-pity and individualism as the misunderstood children of society, yet their
individualism is some what hard to take when it eventually developed into a massive youth movement and fashion trend. Also where goths generally avoided public forums, Emo children all other the world were being broadcast all over the rest of the world through global networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The Emo fad has,thank god, been disposed of in today's world but alas has again been replaced by the new contemporary hypocrites the "Hipsters", rip off artists of the former alternative group the Beatnics. Anyway this as always is a clear example of if you want to destroy and image, give it to a bunch of teenagers.
The visual generation: To reverse up the list again we now take a look at the effect of contemporary visual overflow that has come to define culture today. Whether it is for pure escapism or personal identity affiliation, the visual generation has their pick to fill the gab of whatever form boredom can take. Just between television and the internet the sheer number of visual stimulations that is at the average middle incomes persons disposal can keep one occupied for 10 life times over. The devastating effect of this global pheonmenon is that boredom is no longer illiviated through constructive means, now you can just pick up a remote and be lost in a viseral experience. Not only that but now almost all forms of education or entertainment is expected to contain some sort visual stimulus. Its like that philosophy of simulation, simulation first mimics reality but then eventually becomes reality. But since Im a graphic designer ill let this one slide.
Generation X: Ok to go back up the list to generation X, the were the generation to come after the Baby boom that happened directly after World War 2. So it was the generation to be born from 1960 to about 1980, the first truly post-modern generation and the first to be hit by a culture that wasn't convinced there was only one way of doing thing (unless you were American or Russian in which case you were either Capitalist or Communist respectively or Satan as far as they were concerned until the 90's.) So in the 60's the kids of the veterans who fought in the war were now growing out there hair and abusing marijuana and tie dye and the first truly liberal movement was starting to sing songs and hug trees all over the world.
Generation Y and Next : This was the generation after X and was the first brought up on a diet of internet, video games and cellular phones. Where the X generation was freed by many of the trappings of modernism Generation Y's young middle class had fallen into a new type of trapping in culturally based consumerism. And eventually after the exit of Ronald Reagan from the white house for the Americans, the West started to evolve a unique brand of neo-liberalism.
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