Less Substance And All Show

Popular culture could still pass some time ago as a well meaning feast to the senses. It was embellished yet it held substance. It was solid at the base and was quite well received and deservedly so. Soon, with the society changing grilles, it became difficult for the pop culture not to lose its identity. It could live but had to change avatar. The necessity was to throw away all substance and get listed as a new whole. Collective experiences have been marred completely by the interpolation of ideas as propagated by popular culture. Today, pop culture has got a great friend and ally in television channels. The channels are not charitable institutions and while pop culture still burns, albeit to a much lesser degree, with infectious creative energy, television channels have only one goal, profit making. They do not mind any lack of creative content till they rake in money.

So, a fast rap meter with raunchy videos does better for them than a vocal concoction of a leading diva. This is how the game turns on its head. The demand and supply graph is being carefully looked on by the television channels and the pop culture propagators. With time, they have ensured that this symbiotic relationship is worth its weight in gold for both the sides and it hardly matters if they rob the collective taste of the society to any extent.

Reality shows are the newest avatar. They have rallied so strongly that all the television channels have made it a point to use one of them at least. They are TRP operators for a given channel and even here pop culture thrives in one way or the other. Be it the lewd and obscene gesturing that it has brought to the fore or the sensationalizing of events that it had started, helped of course by the channels, or the TRP drawing measures that it has introduced. Today, you have celebrities joining in the show and creating a ruckus out of thin air just for the sake of generating greater viewership. You have family programs stamped with adult footage simply because that is what works.

High culture and trash culture could have still combined to make an influential measure for the masses but pop chose to continuously distance itself from this attribute. With time, it has found its feet in the tasteless profanity of visual dynamics. Today, channels are making a sure to the tee search for pop. Celebrities endorsing tattoos make for head news. Also, something like their personal orientation, their lesbian line of thinking or homosexual traits are turned into prime time news for getting more feeds. What does it wish to achieve? The amalgam of television with pop is instrumental in creating a substance-less society that is creating a pit for the new generation.

There is an immediate need for greater censorship which can have the enhanced impact of creating a society that just does not press for the dogs but looks out for something beautiful for its development. There is no question on the importance of television or the necessity of a certain level of pop but there has to be moral policing and most surely so.