The impact of pop culture on social change cannot be underestimated. Pop culture refers to ideas, thoughts, attitudes, opinions, and other related phenomena which manifest in everyday life of a majority of people of a given culture. Pop culture is part of movies, art, music, fashion, food, religious practices, language, and among others, technology (Hofstede, 1994). One thing about pop culture is that it changes regularly and is unique to a given geographical location as it tends to thrive among people who are close to each other. However, with the advances in technology and widespread Internet penetration today, pop culture can go well beyond its traditional geographical boundaries (Leat, 2005). As such, pop culture today is defined as a shared set of beliefs and practices with global acceptance.

Having defined pop culture, it is clear that it could be used to impact social change among people. Social change here refers to community-based responses that serve to address social problems at the individual, community, national, or even international levels. Social change, according to Hofstede(1994), occurs when the attitudes, behaviors, laws, policies, and/or institutions change to better reflect a given group of people’s values regarding justice and fairness, inclusion, diversity, and/or opportunity. Therefore, social change occurs only when there is a transformation in culture or social structure and such a change relies on the thought process in the human mind according to Hofstede(1994). Pop culture targets the human thought process, triggering in-depth inquiry about social problems in society and calls a given group of people to action. It shapes public opinion, for example, regarding racism, social injustice, health, and human rights protection among a myriad of other issues. It calla for cubic participation and shapes public action or attitude towards social initiatives (John, 2001). Such social change using pop culture is possible through satire and stand-up comedy as some of the forms of pop culture.

Satire and stand-up comedy addressed many social issues, including race, gender, ethnicity, and cultural imperialism. The two forms of pop culture had content aimed at large audiences comprising mostly middle- and lower-class people with varied levels of education and income (Leat, 2005). They made use of pleasure and easily understood fare to reach out to the large audiences as they still do today. Satire and stand-up comedy encompassed the most immediate and contemporary aspects of the lives of people, which made them quite impacting. Historically, politics, race, and class were some of the immediate and contemporary issues that affected the lives of many people in America (John, 2001). Stand-up comedy as satire involved contents in the three areas, sometimes challenging salient ideas and opinions being them and at other times challenging such ideas and opinions. For example, making fun of a racist in a stand-up comedy would make people laugh but trigger a thought process about the issue among the audience. On the other hand, a satire could focus on a political situation that was current, drawing people into evaluating the situation through pleasure (Leat, 2005). In the process, both stand-up comedy and satire proved to be vital tools for enacting social change by raising awareness as well as enabling people to question and challenge popular opinions, ideas, and thoughts about contemporary social issues.

The Feminist Perspective

The feminist perspective analyzes gender stratification through the intersection between race, class, and gender itself. Gender stratification refers to the use of gender differences to confer one gender more power and privileges over another. From a feminist perspective, gender stratification gives men more power over women, transgender, and other gender non-conforming groups of people in society. The feminist perspective makes use of the conflict theory to explain how gender roles and inequalities are reinforcement by society through patriarchy. According to t feminists, patriarchy is a system of a power imbalance between men and women in society in which society is organized on the assertion of male supremacy.

Furthermore, the feminist perspective also argues that various forms of oppression, including sexism and racism, do not occur independently. Instead, such forms of oppression perpetrated against women and minority groups in society are interrelated and form a system of oppression that relies on their intersection. Such an intersection is a more recent development in the feminist perspective and was first theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a feminist-sociologist best known for her work on the sociological theory to feminism. Therefore, the wave of the feminist perspective suggests that white women, for instance, face a different form of discrimination to that faced by working-class women of color. More specifically, the new understanding makes it clear that women of color, unlike their white counterparts, have to deal with racism and class oppression in addition to sexism.

Our day-to-day ideas and assumptions about gender relations in various ways to the concepts like social learning theory, cultivation theory, and single story. Social learning theory was advanced by Albert Bandura(1977). Bandura(1977) agreed with behaviorist learning theories of classical and operant conditioning but added that mediating processes occur between stimuli and response and that behavior is learned from the environment through observation. Ideally, we learn about things like gender roles as children based on our observations. Such learning is then reinforced through mediating processes of punishment and reinforcement (Bandura, 1977). As children, we were able to perform a particular gender-conforming behavior only if it was approved in terms of reward but shun away from those behaviors that attracted reprimand or punishment.

In the era of technological advances and advanced media communication, cultivation theory seems more appropriate in explaining how certain gender-based ideas are conceived. In particular, motivation theory argues that exposure to television shapes our conception of social reality, one of which is gender differences (Gerbner & Gross, 1976). Mass media today is largely responsible for shaping the perception of social reality and of the ideas we hold about femininity and masculinity. For example, it is an almost common idea that air hostess role is reversed exclusively for women because of the “beauty” aspect that is inherent to the recruitment strategy of many airlines. Still, on beauty, women are depicted as beauty pageants, and that makes beauty a key social concept that many women would want to pursue. All these pieces of information are now being cultivated among viewers by the mass media through various contents that subtly define gender roles.

The commercial contains the aspect of drama between the young girl and her mother who does not buy her Chef Boyardee she has consumed a lot during the week. It is also dramatic as they can roll from the supermarket to home and abide by the traffic rules (Bandura, 1977). Duality myth is presented in the advertisement because the product is viewed as the best and irreplaceable in children. Even when a consumer fails to choose to take it the product finds its way. The commercial fits into the patterns of “Sell & Spin” which is a documentary about how products and ideas have been sold over the years. The main aim of advertising is to entice customers to buy the product. Since there is a lot of competition in the industry and there is a substitute for any product, advertisers have to be creative by using both rhetorical devices and drama. The advert must be interesting to attract the attention of potential consumers. In this era where a significant number of people can access the internet where ads are displayed advertising has become more comfortable.

Another way that our ideas about gender differences have been shaped is explained using a single story, which creates stereotypes. Single story creates an environment in which one perspective reigns supreme over other alternatives and shapes how we perceive gender differences. For example, the single story that a woman’s role is in the kitchen and that she is subject to submission to a man has created an environment which confines women to their “defined” social role and place in society. According to TED speaker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie(2009), the problem with a single story is not that stereotypes are untrue, rather they are incomplete.  Still, stereotypes shape our perception of gender differences and the role that such differences play without taking into account the fact each individual is unique and has a heterogeneous compilation of stories.

References

Adichie, C. N. (2009). The Danger of a Single Story. TED.com. Retrieved 7 Apr 2019, from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26, 172-199.

Hofstede, G. (1994). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. London: Harper Collins Business.

John, S. (2001). What is Pop Culture? Culture Theory and Popular Culture. London: Pearson Education.

Leat, D. (2005). Theory of Social Change. Bertelsmann Stiftung.