Education vs. Schooling

We are exposed to so much popular culture everyday that it's astounding. You've seen more stories than Shakespeare, you've heard more music than Mozart, you've seen more diverse images than Caravaggio. And we are more influenced by this culture than you can imagine. What would true media literacy look like?

The medium of television has some very deep concerns for psychologists. The more we learn about it, the more we know how such a powerful medium can change the way people work together. In the second half of the 20th Century, the Sitcom became the formula that designed the expectations people had for life, and masked their abilities to design their own surroundings.

The defining characteristic of our culture is the ability to tell stories. Stories have guided the fabric of our culture since our larynx became capable of speech. We learn through stories what the expectations are of our culture, who we should be, what we should look like, what values we should display. Television has taken control of this like no other force in the history of Earth.

The music industry does something really amazing: it creates identity templates and invites us to reform ourselves through them. This makes us easier to predict, easier to please, and much, much easier to sell to.

American music reflects the dichotomy of the country: great wealth and oppression. Popular music in America has always been the voice of the counterculture, the voice of the working class (or slave), and the spirit behind that culture is what makes it so powerful. In this segment, we switch gears to talk about the development of this music, and end on the note that Art and Commerce don't always agree.