When I was a kid in college I frequently read on the internet about classes in popular culture. My interest in popular culture, like most students, was always more intense than my interest in business, the history of marketing, or mathematics. What drove me to seek out these courses was that during my first semester I took a course on Woodstock. Oh yes! For one glorious semester I watched documentaries about, read commentary on, and listened to music from that iconic festival. This was something that seemed surreal. Somehow it always seemed that you “lived” pop culture but “studied” everything else. There seems to be some transition in academia to highlight and give some sort of credibility to the value of popular culture.
I’ve read thesis papers on the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and recently sat through a class devoted to The Beatles. While the familiar arguments against such courses can easily be expressed (“they’re not practical” “how do they help the student get a job” “that’s not ‘real’ learning”) they are easily answered: the practicality is knowing about your own culture. These types of classes (which typically involve popular art) are valuable in the same way that a history course is valuable. The difference is that these courses track not so much events as human beings. In all of this humanity is expressed. Culture is revealed as a swiftly moving and ever-changing entity that is hard to detect while we are living and easy to simplify years later (to great detriment). These are important things to learn.
When learning about cultural events you also learn something about how mass hysteria can be orchestrated. The fainting fans, the targeted demographic (teens, twenty-somethings), and the selection of introductory material can help us understand how we can be (and still are) manipulated by frequency, advertisements, hairstyles, product placement and other created elements to support (or manipulate) cultural appeal. History is important because we can learn from it. Popular culture is a counter history often left out — and just as important.