How to live a Good and Meaningful life Essay pt.2

What does living a good and meaningful life mean? Many people strive everyday by doing meaningful things to exceed in this goal, while others have a big misconception about what a meaningful life is. Many people get their perspectives from either their own experiences or what we see or are told by others. these ideas come from the larger pop culture, larger culture can be considered a combination of three major sources - corporate/commodified culture, folk culture, and big subcultures.

Our society has been affected or brain washed by what we see or hear from the pop culture. The marginal messages are things we rarely see shown by the pop culture. The dominant messages are things you always see commonly, almost seen as if they are enforcing one idea on society. The media tells us the things we need in life in order for us to be happy by making false meanings of things that dont really matter to our life. Most common pop culture messages we see are people must look good, wear nice clothes, have a big house, alot of money, and stay physically fit. These are just some of the corporate messages that can be found or as we call it Dominant messages.

Looking at several magazines to see what corporate messages are presented throughout different magazines, i wanted to see if exactly i could connect different messages. Ironically both magazines I looked at were incorporating the same message and also trying to presuade their audience / readers to buy or spend money. The first magazine is Titled- Oklist - Spotlight on the Arts (Fall Issue). I came to the conclusion of their pop cultures message was to influence others to buy expensive books / novels by giving brief analysis of several books that may or may not attract a great amount buyers. Although the corporate message is asking the society to spend money, the outcome of spending money will help or enhance our intellengence as well as reading levels. the second magazine i looked at was Titled - Bazzar. Nov 2008 issue, their overall pop culture message was to live a good and meaningful life you must require materialistic things in order to feel good about yourself as well as look good. From both magazines we see how pop culture is influencing the society to spend more money on useless self objects that would supposedly help us have a good and meaningful life. The products they are selling arent things that will help our society grow or expand, but things that are truly effecting our culture and bringing us down. The United States are viewed as having the most cusomers in the world, meaning several people are spending money on things that might not even importance to their life, in other words their just spending money to spend money. Several individuals fail to realize that the corporate media doesn't try to stop or help our society, but more of enforcing these messages on us. they sell us products to add an distraction to our life to stimulate our happiness, so we can forget about the miserable life we are truly living.

The "marginal messages of commodified culture" are those messages sold to us by advertisements, movies, tv, music videos, books, magazines, etc that define the good and meaningful life in a way which is unusual. These "marginal messages" expand the range of visions of a good and meaningful life both by offering new visions and also by (to some degree) contradicting the dominant corporate messages on the good and meaningful life. Marginal messages can be seen through movies, such as Foxfire, where roles of males and females are switched. The switching of roles is not as common as it may seem and sometimes the message the movie sends to the public is not as accepted by society as the main message corporate culture sends out. For example a scene from Foxfire is when there is a nude guy being photographed by a girl. In corproate culture you do not see the roles of males and females often switching. It has become part of our culture as Americans to believe that the man is stronger and the woman is weaker, the man is in control and the woman is helpless. But marginal messages often are about breaking this stereotype between men and women and giving women more power and showing that women can be a bit more masculine.