The Study of Pop Culture
Now, on the one hand, I like that pop culture has become a legitimate study. On the other hand: classes about The Matrix? Seriously?
This isn’t new. But the intersection of education and the media has become more and more common, to the point where UC Berkeley has a “Learning from YouTube” course. While this will leave a bad taste in a lot of 
people’s mouths, is there a legitimate reason why we shouldn’t study pop culture?
It’s a part of our history. And should history be more important the older it is? I can’t think of any reason why, but then again, I’m not a scholar. Believe it or not, the study of popular culture has become a 100% legitimate pursuit. There is must to be found within its seemingly trite and meaningless bounds.
Take, for example, horror movies. They portray the taboo freely, in a way that many other media can’t. But why? Is it, as some theorize, an attack on bourgeios morals? Or does it actually bolster and support these morals by portraying perversions as supernatural or bizarre? Do horror movies remind us of the evil inside, or do they push us even further from the realization that we are all a little bit monster?
Thomas Roberts, a fellow who wrote a book called An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, manages to sound even more pretentious than the title of his book when he says: “If people who read Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni and Pushkin with pleasure are also reading detective fiction with pleasure, there is more in the detective story than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have recognized.”
Hear that, Stephen King? Even you don’t understand your books. (Well, he probably doesn’t understand the books he wrote while he was drunk on Scope, but that’s a different issue.)
The idea that only a certain type of person can understand popular media is dangerous. That’s exactly what led the Catholic church to develop Latin mass so they could keep the riff-raff away from God, which - and I am no Biblical scholar - I am pretty sure is the opposite of what Jesus was always talking about.
The value of popular media is not in how it is studied. It’s inherent in the work. It’s a discourse, it’s a discussion, it’s ideas - and the way they’re presented doesn’t matter. They don’t have to scholarly, they just have to be out there. They have to reach people.
If you’re interested in the study of pop culture, here are some sites to check out.
Americana: The American Popular Culture Magazine
Wikipedia: Popular culture studies
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