Pop culture is transmitted via the mass media and aimed particularly at younger people. Pop culture can be expressed through many different ways such as fashion, music, television, movies, cars and sports. Pop culture was targeted at teens for many reasons. These reasons were that teens cared how they appeared and were influenced by the images and looks. After World War 2 finished, improvements to entertainment started to happen this gave people more ideas and new trends.
To understand pop culture better, there are many different movies and songs out to better understand pop culture. One of the most famous songs by “Billy Joel – We didn’t start the fire. This award winning hit shows everyone the different stages of pop culture in one song. People to this day blame pop culture were the “undignified” reason for today’s generation. Americans blame pop culture for today’s education failures and violence. Pop culture has affected music with many different genres and styles been brought out.
Music is an important part of pop culture as music can distinguish who your friends are. Pop culture changed melodramatically by the mid-60s when Australian wages and living conditions were at its best. Since the rates were so cheap families could afford for the husband to go out and work while the wife stayed home and cooked and cleaned. Post WW2 saw most women move out of labour to become the mothers of the baby boomers. Better education was opened up for women as did the jobs and women were soon to be working part time jobs and marriage was becoming delayed till later ages.
Sports were one of pop culture’s biggest influences in Australia. Australia is considered to be a “Sports mad” country. We’re known for this because of the amount of people that play it, but also the intensity that it is played at. Participation was high in sports because young men desired the friendships they had from war time. In the 1950s one of the biggest sports or hobbies was surfing. Surfing was big because most people near water. Living near water and surfing brought the different looks in trends out that are still seen to this very day.
The “surfing hair” was a big theme back in the 1960s with the long bleached blonde hair for the guys. Surfing wasn’t the only big sport with games like Soccer, Tennis, Football and Cricket all having high participation. The world was introduced to Australia with the Melbourne Olympics to be the first ever Olympics to be broadcasted on live television. The Olympics was a great way for all the country’s to come together and form somewhat of a friendship. July and August 1962 was the beginning of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Australia’s involvement in the war was to stem the spread of communism in Europe and Asia. Australia was pinned for the war and distress was sprung about the homeland because of the participation levels. Many protests were happening at this time arguing over the feud. Instead of protesting some people wrote songs instead to express themselves about their concerns this was called “protest music”. One of the biggest protest songs was Bob Dylan; ‘Masters of War’ This song expressed how he felt about war and how Bob thought it was a pointless act.
In 1964 Prime Minister Robert Menzies told Australia that they would be implementing a new lottery system. Te lottery system was a barrel to check who would be sent up. The first drawing was in 1965 and the last in 1972. Television was introduced into Australia in September 1956. Since then it has had a major impact on the lifestyles of all Australians. Since televisions were brought out people didn’t see the need of leaving there houses to go to cinemas or to do anything else. Television played a strong part of the change in pop culture in Australia.
Television showed other people cultures and different ways of live which influenced the people. People were often spending up to four hours watching television which started to raise alarms about people’s health and wellbeing. Since the release of TVs family’s started to loose family time and obese rates became higher. Attitudes also changed with a lot more violence happening because of the screen time. TVs changed children also making kids a lot more aggressive and less active. Pop culture is a thing that binds and society together in many different ways.
Pop culture has shaped our world and was expressed through many different ways. One thing will remain the same about pop culture that is who the best and will always staying like that. Wars were happening to separate the weak from the strong to see which country would be the last standing. Equal rights played a big part with women gaining more power and rising in power. Pop culture is the different ways of how we expressed ourselves and showed everyone who we really are. Pop culture has given our society a massive beneficial impact on people in many places across the world.
