The Labyrinth that is Popular Culture

For decades there has been major backlash and panics over new, popular trends. Mainly by parents who are unfamiliar with the popular culture of their children's generation. In Karen Sternheimer's article titled, Media Phobia , she says, “Panics about popular culture ebb and flow throughout history. They are often masked attempts to condemn the tastes and cultural preferences of less powerful social groups.” By this she is calling out the (mainly white) parents, for panicking because they're afraid of the integration between their children and children of minorities. We are more than aware of the systematic racism and white privelage that blankets our country and a lot of adults who grew up with this privelage don't want to lose it, so they blame things like music for being too sexual or violent thus masking their true opinions. When Rock 'n' Roll first swept the country parents panicked because Rock 'n' Roll was created by people of color. As more artist

In the film Digital Nation we are taken into classroom settings in all kinds of schools across America. It's clearly apparent that technology has changed the learning atmosphere in schools drastically but is this a good or bad thing? We're taken to a college campus where students brag about their ability to multitask but we soon learn that multitasking isn't as impressive as it's made to sound. Students don't put as much effort into their work and end up half-assing everything instead of doing a solid job on each task individually. We are also taken to a middle school in the Bronx where students are each given their own personal laptop to do homework online and use it for resources to study. The gift of providing technology to these students has brought test scores up and decreased violence in the school immensly. According to an article on nsba.org titled "Creating and Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social- and Educational- Networking," 5

H ave we become zombies to the real word? Have we lost ourselves to the addiction and fast-satisfaction of electronics? While new technologies seem to appear everyday making people excited and 'happy' they're not as great as we probably credit them to be. I'm not an exception to the large portion of people eaily entertained by the little devices but I'm not so blind to the negative sides of them either. I love spending time with my friends. It's quite frankly been my favorite part of life since I was old enough to make friends. You know when you used to make up crazy games, go on wild adventures and just about die laughing all day with your friends? How could you not love that? I suppose now it's a lot harder because everyone's noses are buried in there phones and nothing exciting really happens unless someone captures it on Snapchat. Sherry Turkle gives an example of this during her Ted talk by sharing a photo of her daughter and her daughter's fri