Wednesday, August 24, 2011

How Funny T-Shirts Can Show Us What Is Popular

By Benjamin Ladd


Pop Culture affects our life every day. If you don't believe me, pay close attention to the conversations you have throughout the day and take note of how many of them center around music, movies, television, or video games. You'll be surprised when you consider how much of your daily chatter is wasted on stuff that, frankly, really doesn't even matter when compared to world events, science, or politics. I you really want to see how badly pop culture has affected us as a society, you just need to get on the Internet and look at the trend of the latest funny t-shirts out there for sale.

Music is a major contributor to pop culture. Recording artists stop being just people who contribute their music to the world at large and become icons that people fixate upon. People want to know what musicians think, say, and do. I simply do not understand how these people are looked to for input on anything but music. Many of them have no upper education and there are several who even lack a high school education. Why should I care what they think of the President or foreign policy? Yet as soon as Kanye West pulled his stunt and humiliated Taylor Swift at that award show, there were hundreds of funny t-shirts about it the next day.

Movies, especially comedies, have a huge impact on the younger generations. These younger generations are also the people who are getting online and buying up all of these popular culture-inspired funny t-shirts. These shirts are usually inspired by lines from the movie that are particularly poignant, and some websites will push the issue by creating funny t-shirts as soon as the film comes out from lines that they just think will be popular.

There is no doubt that movies are the powerhouse of the media world. It would be foolish not to recognize how much pull television has on popular culture. A movie is only talked about a few times before the subject matter is dead, but most shows on TV come out on a weekly basis, which means they can be discussed with fresh information and opinions. The bad part of this is that the most funny t-shirts made from television do not focus on the quality programming, but on the worst reality shows. Seen many Jersey Shore shirts lately?

I am myself a gamer, which means that I follow video games fervently. There are more and more people like me coming out every year in support of the industry. With this emergence into the realm of popular culture, we can go online and see that funny t-shirts are springing up in support of the subject matter. If my theory of the connection between funny t-shirts and pop culture is true, then we'll see lots more funny t-shirts coming out in the coming years.

You only have to look at funny t-shirts to get a judge of what movies, television, music, and games are the most popular at any given time. Media has a strong influence on us all, even if we're aware of it. If some show that I love is mentioned in passing, I will spend time talking about it with a neighbor. I'm not sure if pop culture is a negative or positive thing on our society, but I do know that there is no way we'll ever be rid of it.




About the Author:



No comments: