The artifacts of popular culture include everything that surrounds our culture including cars, modes of dressing, ceremonies, and books among others. In popular culture, a basement belief includes the values that create the framework on which the particular culture is founded. These values and beliefs include convictions, certainties, and assumptions that are significant, stable, and longstanding. The Ferriss book can be considered an artifact of pop culture since it provides the reader with a blueprint on how they can live a happy life even with their current life constraints. Analysis of the content of the book shows how it highly resonates with the current lifestyle of an ordinary citizen.
Ferriss has largely promoted ideas that tie
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As mentioned, the basement beliefs in popular culture include the convictions, certainties, and assumptions that are stable, significant, and longstanding. A perfect example of where Ferriss creates ideas embedded in our popular culture is in his first chapter where he discusses cautions and comparisons and how some men spent millions of dollars in a weekend. In his introduction, Ferriss quotes oranges and lemons and describes what the difference between the new rich and the deferrers. When describing the differences between the two, Ferris quotes that ordinary people will always want to be the bosses, have tones of money, and retire early. In order to show the circle in which ordinary people live in our current culture, Ferriss provides applicable examples that differentiate between the new rich and the deferrers in their current lifestyles. Another example in which Ferriss has used current culture in presenting his ideas is in time management. In our current culture, everyone is working long and hard in order to make an extra coin to be happy. Ferriss approaches this issue on a lighter note by …show more content…
In the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert tries to debug the basement beliefs and how they affect the financial life of many individuals. Through the book, Robert states that individuals in the current culture concentrate on going to school, getting a job, and living a rat race and end up being financially unstable. In the book by David Allen, the author states that people should concentrate on stress-free productivity by focusing on relaxing, which boosts our productivity. Allen debugs on the popular belief by people that they should be very busy in order to be productive and align goals with the current operations. In the third book by Napoleon, the author notes that background is never the success to truth but the ideas, thoughts, and organized plans that lead to success. Napoleon debugs the popular belief that education, gender, ethnic affiliation among other different backgrounds has any background to success. The correlation between these books is that the current culture is not well meshed to make people successful. The point that these books are trying to make is that for us to be successful we will need to reevaluate the longstanding beliefs that society has always had on some of the values in our current
The concepts throughout this book are simple but they test self-control and patience, which in our world is uncommon because of the “want it now” attitude. Ramsey talks about how “personal finance is 80 percent behavior and only 20 percent head knowledge” (ix). This main idea is something Ramsey talks about and references throughout the whole book. Another main idea or as Ramsey calls it a “motto” that’s on each page at the bottom is “If you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else” (5). This is the theme that he refers back to on
Saved by the Bell was a fictional show about high school students. “The writers of Saved by the Bell always seemed to suggest that most adolescents are exactly the same and exist solely as props for the popular kids, which was probably true at most American high schools.” (140) What happens when one looks at culture that is ultimately not real as being representative of
“The average American home has more TV sets than people, and our TV sets are turned on an average of nearly 7 hours per day and we see about 20,000 TV commercials per year (Herr, 2007).” (Sellnow 7). This sentence alone just shows us that we are around popular culture more than we may think. In the first seven pages of “What is Popular Culture and why study it?” Deanna Sellnow talks about how popular culture influences everyone in the world. The whole passage is to explain how popular culture persuades all the people in the world. There are different ways that Sellnow explains in the passage, that popular culture shapes people from how you should act and how you should not act, to what you should believe and what you should not believe. For
Literature is the window to realizing the negatives of society and how destructive certain norms can be. Readers are brought into a completely different story than their own, but by using similar issues in today’s world, the readers can actually learn from the story and its overall message. All writers write for a purpose, whether it’s for a new meaning to life, to live a different life than our own, or to impact others on an emotional level by teaching them to see the importance of the little things. As a reader, you search for pieces of literature that interest you whether you find the story like your own, or wish you lived the life in the story. By using issues in today’s within their works, authors are able to grab the reader's attention long enough for them to get across what they wanted to get across. Often in many works of literature, writers use societal issues as their basis for the work’s themes and symbols. By doing so, this allows the reader to question the morality behind social norms and how impactful certain ideals can be in people’s lives.
In 2017 our thoughts and actions are guided and molded in large part by social media, reality television shows and pop culture. Without realizing the extent to which constructed reality and self-curated life exhibitions shape how we see the world, we form perceptions and establish standards of what our lives should look like based on stories and photos posted on Snapchat and Instagram and find ourselves reflexively belting out song lyrics that directly contradict our values. Joan Didion, a unique and relatable but brilliant author, seems to have an understanding that the challenges she faced as a freshman in college in the 1950s would still be relevant and problematic for college students almost 70 years later. In Didion’s essay, “On
Norton, Anne. “The Signs of Shopping.” Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular
In Rushkoff’s film, The Merchants of Cool, he rhetorically questions if “teenagers even have a culture to call distinctly their own.” In the late 1990’s when the documentary was made, the implication was that they do not. However, with the internet’s advancements and the accessibility of communication with massive amounts of people, teenagers today can form authentic cultures that are not contaminated by the corporate media.
Does literature accurately reflect society? Through the works of novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and film, Forest Gump it is depicted that with The American Dream, literature does accurately reflect society. Details such as, Huckleberry Finn’s quest for freedom and Forest Gump’s journey to a successful life through hard-work, sacrifices and risks show how The American Dream is depicted in the two works. The involvement of The American Dream in both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Forest Gump displayed throughout the works make it evident how literature accurately reflects society.
The fact that their parents did not provide economic outpatient care was astonishing. This means most millionaires were not financially supported by their parents. The author’s research indicates that “the more dollars adult children receive from their parents, the fewer they accumulate, while those who are given fewer dollars accumulate more”. I figured these millionaires were raised in a wealthy family and didn’t want to live any other way. I thought they were given things by their parents throughout their life. Another trait is their adult children are economically self-sufficient. The authors clearly believe that giving money to adult children damages their ability to succeed. I agree with this because if their children keep getting life handed to them on a silver platter they won’t learn the value of a dollar. They’ll think that daddy or mommy will bail them out whenever they’re in trouble which will not teach them anything about being successful on their own.
In 1984, a famous performer climbed the charts with her song, “Material Girl”, and it was a staple of the times. It showed the love for materialistic worldly things that the culture had become accustomed to. From the dawn of creation, people have used various forms of media as propaganda to promote their ideologies. Although Madonna’s song had much commercial success, the concept of using writing, whether through speech, poetry, or song, is not new. In fact, just two centuries prior to the release of this song people believed the exact opposite of the ideas it promoted. In the 17th and 18th centuries Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards believed that the love and pursuit of material possessions would only lead to destruction. While they had very different approaches on how to convince people of this the underlying message is the same.
Jenkins argues that American popular culture will be redefined by the struggles over convergence and media. With the idea of profit in mind,
In the chapter “What is Popular Culture and Why Study It?” from the novel The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture, author Deanna Sellnow deliberates on the influential supremacy of popular culture in our current society. Sellnow wrote this passage to inform those affected by pop culture on a daily basis. Everyday individuals in first world countries are somehow impacted by pop culture. Pop culture’s influential power can often times mold our outlook on the world around us. It is important to realize when pop culture is trying to reevaluate your ethical beliefs so you can have a say in whether or not you want your morals to be altered.
In “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”, George Saunders makes an important statement about the role of materialism in the American Dream, and how this materialism may not be the key to happiness many believe it to be. Saunders tells of a middle class family that strives to meet the standards of their peers and find a happier life. The father, who acts as the narrator, believes that acquiring and spending money on material objects, specifically the Semplica Girls, will improve the family’s life by improving how the family’s financial situation appears to others. The father’s primary values are that wealth and social standing are crucial to attaining the good life, and he believes the purchase of the Semplica Girls will fulfill these values. However, it is clear from the family’s ultimate situation and the disapproval of the mother’s successful father, that the narrator’s beliefs are misguided and potentially damaging to the family.
In this age in which we live, success is generally measured by the amount of money you earn, or the amount of wealth or power or number of promotions you’ve accumulated. I find that the older I grow, the more I view the people who are most happy and content with their lives as the most successful. Rich, poor or in between, they’ve tended to treat life as a journey, not a final destination. They took that trip when they were 25 even though they really couldn’t afford it, they ordered the $55 bottle of wine with their filet because they knew that even though it was expensive it would enhance the meal so much more than water would. They took a chance on a start-up company, moved to Europe or Asia and experienced things that most people only dream about. If they managed to grow wealthy from the experience, so much the better. As long as moderation with most things is practiced, things won’t spin out of control.
What pops into your mind first when you think of popular culture in today’s day and age? The latest dirt on celebrities or the latest iPhone release? The latest controversial issue or the latest iTunes hit? Regardless, pop culture encompasses all four of these concepts and many more, which consume the world we live in each and every day. Think about education. At first thought, your mind may not make the connection between the newest Taylor Swift song and the highest ACT score, but the linkage between the two becomes undeniable when you dive deeper. Ponder this: each day millions of kids walk into school buildings across the United States, each of them glued to a little slice of pop culture, a.k.a. their phone. And each day these millions