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The Undeniable Link Between Pop Culture And Funny TShirts

By Matthew Ladd


Pop Culture affects our life every day. If you don't believe me, pay close attention to the conversations you have throughout the day and take note of how many of them center around music, movies, television, or video games. You'll be surprised when you consider how much of your daily chatter is wasted on stuff that, frankly, really doesn't even matter when compared to world events, science, or politics. If you really want to see how badly pop culture has affected us as a society, you just need to get on the Internet and look at the trend of the latest funny apparel out there for sale.

Music is a major contributor to pop culture. Recording artists stop being just people who contribute their music to the world at large and become icons that people fixate upon. People want to know what musicians think, say, and do. I simply do not understand how these people are looked to for input on anything but music. Many of them have no upper education and there are several who even lack a high school education. Why should I care what they think of the President or foreign policy? Yet as soon as Kanye West pulled his stunt and humiliated Taylor Swift at that award show, there were hundreds of funny shirts about it the next day.

There is a very small minority of people who do not watch movies, which means that film is a very dominate form of media. When a movie comes out, there are always moments in the movie that are memorable. Without fail, there will be funny t-shirts made from those memorable moments. You can almost tell how well a flick has done by a measure of how many funny shirts were made about that money.

Television is quickly taking over as the king of pop culture, and not for the right reasons. I honestly feel like we are experiencing a television renaissance with all of the excellent programming out there right now. At the same time, the reality programming is what has seemed to grab hold of the hearts and minds of people to the point of ridiculousness. Have you seen how many funny t shirts are dedicated to "Jersey Shore?" If there is any show that should just disappear, it is most surely that one before our youth start believing that's how people should act.

Video games are growing every year without pause. There are homes all across the country that play games obsessively, and there are several that don't look to any other forms of media for their entertainment. Recently, funny tshirts have been popping up on the Internet all about video game culture. If we look to the way that funny tshirts have followed other popular media sources, the increase in funny t-shirts may indicate the upcoming dominance of games in the near future. This would prove the link between funny tshirts and popular culture without doubt.

Funny tee shirts follow popular culture, and sometimes try to predict it in an effort to have the next big-selling shirt first. I don't know how to accurately gauge the level of popularity of something just by how many funny tee shirts are made of it, but if I could I would make a census of what is hot and what is not. It's too bad that I'm not a scientist, and just a desperate and lazy media addict.




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