Blog 3 (popular is valuable)

At the same time that people claim something has lost it's relevance by becoming popular, they are also consuming said something, which in turn helps to make it popular. By joining the majority and taking part in something that has become popular, we give it "value" and "meaning" in the form of the influence it now possesses in society. In turn, this gives power to the corporations that spent the money that helped the thing become popular. 

And by the time a movie, song, TV show or YouTube video reaches the viewer it's totally compromised from what the artist intended and has picked up scores of other meanings on its raise to the top. However, the cycle of popularity allows only so much room at the top of the wheel and many artists feel a necessity to tailor their art to the fit a current trend in popular culture. This most definitely assures an overwhelming share of pop drivel. Of course, whether something's drivel or not is all relative to a person's cultural interpellation. 

I for one think that, popular or not, something has value if it makes it's viewer think, be it negative or positive, about its meaning. And the fact, which the TT textbook points out, that we have to exclude something in order to form categories in our cultural descriptions makes the hierarchy of popular and not popular an inescapable reality.