Strengths And Weaknesses Of Popular Culture

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A social movement is loosely defined as a group action that focuses upon specific political or social issues with the objective of social change. Throughout history these acts of social change have shaped the world we know today, this course has highlighted many of these influential movements and there uses of popular culture. Which is why I agree that social movements in the 20th century have successfully used popular culture not just to fight gender discrimination, but also to draw attention to many other diverse movements. However I also hold the opinion that popular culture in itself can be very detrimental to social movements and the messages behind them. Throughout this critical analysis I hope to demonstrate the influence of popular culture on social movements discussing both its strengths and weaknesses. To start I will focus on the strengths of popular culture by discussing the suffrage movement which used theatre successfully as a platform for awareness and discussion on inequality of women. This movement used many forms of popular culture …show more content…

Cohen (2002) outlines that even though popular culture can be used to bring awareness there is also the continuing connotations that follow each medium. For example, folk music being labelled with the stereotype as “hippy” music. Another aspect of music being used as a platform for social change is the idea of commercialization. Commercialization of a song or genre can result I the transition of an impactful song addressing issues into a fame song due to popularity. A great example of this is the recent song written by Macklemore – Thrift Shop. This songs original purpose was to address the issue with consumerism and westernized values. However it caught wave online and quickly lost its value and became a “hit” song simply due to its mass spread; sadly not for its intended

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