Erika Beedle Reflection #4

Erika Beedle

Comm 211

Reflection Paper #4

            Chapter nine was titled “Popular Culture and Intercultural Communication”.  As the discussion facilitator over this chapter, I really got to dig deep into popular culture and found this topic to be very interesting.  The book defines popular culture as a “new name for low culture, referring to those cultural products that most people share and know about, including television, music, videos, and popular magazines.”  I learned a lot about popular culture and its affect on intercultural communications.  The interesting concept about popular culture is that is can have both a positive and negative influences on intercultural communications.  This is especially true when referring to American pop culture.  American pop culture is found all over the world, and influences all different types of culture.

            Living in American it is hard to understand the impact we have on other countries.  People from other cultures are constantly being bombarded with American pop culture, which leads to both positive and negative outcomes.  Some negative affects are that stereotypes are brought to attention through pop culture.  People are displayed in a certain type of way in a movie, and therefore, everyone who looks that way who stereotyped into acting that way.  A positive influence from popular culture is that is raises awareness.  For example, the documentary we watched in class raises awareness of the refugees from Sudan.  Popular culture will continue to change through the ages as technology and social media changes.  Since pop culture is such a large tool that reaches a wide variety of audiences, I hope people will start to utilize popular culture to increase intercultural communications.  If we focussed even half our attention to intercultural problems as we did on celebrities or sports, I believe a big improvement would take place.