Hi everyone and welcome to my blog about Youth, Popular Culture and Texts. I haven’t spent much time with people under the age of 20 for the last few years and I don’t follow much ‘mainstream’ popular culture myself, so I must admit that I’m learning about the ever-changing world of popular youth culture as I undertake this unit as part of my Master of Education (Teacher-Librarianship). My studies of children’s literature earlier this year encouraged me to expand my knowledge about the texts that young people are engaging with, particularly in the middle grades and young adult literature. Now I’m focusing more on the effect of all kinds of popular culture on young people.
I recently completed an essay on youth engagement with popular culture. Drawing mainly on the work of Johnson (2005) and Fiske (2010), this essay argued that popular culture has always provided various productive pleasures for young people, but its increasing complexity and the rise of engaging new forms of media are transforming the way they think, learn and interact. This has created a divide between what’s valued inside and outside the traditional classroom, both in terms of the content and the cognitive processes and skills involved. Although I don’t believe it’s essential (or even feasible) to include popular culture subject matter in the curriculum, I think that teachers can no longer ignore the increasing influence of technology and new media on every aspect of the lives of young people. We need to consider how we can cultivate similar levels of engagement in the classroom.
Johnson (2005) argues that popular culture has actually become more complex and intellectually demanding over the past thirty years, in a trend he calls the Sleeper Curve. He believes that “the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today” (Johnson, 2005, p. 12). Johnson doesn’t claim that the majority of today’s popular culture will one day be revered as masterpieces or classics, but instead that the level of complexity has increased at each end of the quality spectrum, exercising our minds in new ways. Instead of focusing on the text and subject matter, he focuses on the environment which either encourages or discourages cognitive complexity (Johnson, 2005, p. 11). Fiske (2010, p. 113) also emphasises the productive process involved in popular culture, stating that “The question has to shift from ‘What are the people reading?’ to ‘How are they reading it?’” Unfortunately, the subject matter tends to dominate debate about popular culture.
Pokémon Pokedex Guide (Volume 2) by Erik Mallinson (Flickr image, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/chromatic/943242124/)
Johnson (2005) explains the increasing cognitive demands involved in television, film, video games and the Internet. Many contemporary television programs and some films weave together multiple narrative threads and relationships between a complex network of main characters, with fewer signposts to help audiences follow the storyline (Johnson, 2005). Even the often-criticised genre of reality television challenges our emotional and social intelligence, and encourages participation (Johnson, 2005). While the controversial subject matter of some video games has dominated debate, there’s no doubt that these games capture the attention of young people in unprecedented ways and develop their problem solving and decision making skills, as well as coordination (Johnson, 2005). The Internet has brought a myriad of opportunities for participation and social connection, as well as cognitive challenges due to the rapid development of technology (Johnson, 2005, p. 118). It also provides resources and forums which help people make sense of the increasing complexity of other media.
Contemporary popular culture involves the convergence of different forms of media, providing diverse mental challenges, engagement and productive pleasures for young people, which are just as important as those gained from books. The decline in reading among young people can partly be attributed to the boom in eBooks and reading online, as well as the overall dispersal of leisure time across different forms of media. However, Johnson (2005, p. 185) admits that engagement with long books involving sustained textual argument or narrative without distraction is becoming less common, which is concerning as this type of reading has historically been most valued in education. We have now become more accustomed to dealing with small chunks of text, often with images. This raises several questions: How can we encourage young people to read longer, more detailed texts when they are surrounded by so many multimodal, interactive texts? Should we just accept that this kind of reading is becoming less common as multitasking and skimming become more important in the 21st century? I don’t think so, but I think that we may need to reconsider what’s valued and why.
References
Fiske, J. (2010). Understanding popular culture (2nd ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you: How today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter. New York: Riverhead Books.
Johnson, Steven. (2008). How popular culture is making us smarter [YouTube video]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIyjQ2j_i0w
Bridging the Generation Gap 