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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 don’t really matter to our life. Most common pop culture messages we see are people must look good, wear nice clothes, have a big house, a lot 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.

Dominant corporate messages are things or ideas that we see with in our daily lives that influence the way we live. The dominant corporate messages can influence our lives by what we eat, the way we look, what we buy, how we shop, and how we live. Looking deeper in to these corporate messages we see that the way they want us to live is almost like some kind of brain wash the society has on the environment around us. These dominant corporate messages betray to be things we need in order to live a good and meaningful life, but in reality the pop culture is manipulating us to spend our money or alternate the way we want to live to keep up with today's society "hip" and "cool" things. I think that in our society today the dominant corporate messages are that materials will make you happy. We see several dominant messages being shown through television, magazines, commercials, and the internet.
While surfing the web I came across VH1.com, while looking through their website I felt as if VH1 had a main corporate message which is becoming famous, but at the same I noticed that several of these shows displayed on VH1 are reality shows. The reality shows contradicted the message because they were showing how becoming famous affected these individuals’ lives and showing how these famous people were acting irresponsible. The shows showed that we as the society should not act like these people but at the same time, the shows were making these people become some type of idolized figures, which made no sense.
I think that in our society today the dominant corporate messages are that materials will make you happy. For example in the commercial that says "Every kiss begins with a Kay". The commercial is for a jewelry store and basically what they are trying to tell the viewers is that the jewelry will make your girlfriend/ boyfriend happy and that their love for each other will become greater. People are relying on senseless items to strengthen their love relationship, instead of spending their hard earned money on their lover; they could be spending quality time with their lover which is price less.
The dominant message that materials will make one happy cause people to rely on the materials they want so that if they don't get what they want they are angry until they get that thing. I think it is sort of similar to a drug addiction. People who are addicted to heroin or cocaine try it and then their bodies rely on the drugs and the junkie must get the drug or they go into a different state where their body gets all messed up. Then to keep on getting the drugs for their system they do things like become prostitutes so they can get what they need. People who think that the materials will make them happy buy and buy then when they don't have enough money or can't get the material they rob banks and steal from people because they think they will be happy with the money.

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 persuade 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 great amount buyers. Although the corporate message is asking the society to spend money, the outcome of spending money will help or enhance our intelligence 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 aren’t things that will help our society grow or expand, but things that are truly affecting our culture and bringing us down. The United States are viewed as having the most customers 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 a 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 corporate 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.

One deeper understanding of what our culture shows us as the good and meaningful life can be seen through the various mixed messages of our holiday seasons. One holiday that is highly celebrated throughout our culture is Halloween. Halloween demonstrates several different mixed messages that can be seen in our culture. The way we celebrate Halloween is mostly through young children. Children spend the entire night going around trick or treating to several different homes to try and gather as much candy as possible. There are so many contradicted messages throughout this Halloween holiday. Several parents always tell their children not to talk to strangers, but on Halloween "it’s ok for the children to go to a stranger’s home and take candy from them." Also at the young age older adults always tell children to be themselves, but on Halloween people dressed their children up as other famous figures, monsters, killers, singers, dancers, etc. Halloween can also be seen as a customer’s holiday because we are encouraged to buy decorations, candy, costumes and several other things. I also noticed that this particular holiday doesn’t express the message that family is important, and that you should spend time with your family like most other holidays.

On Christmas Day there was nothing special on this day for my family in particular. It was more of a day where everyone had the day off and a chance to spend some time together. For the first part of my day I spent it watching the basketball game Lakers vs. Celtics that was what I really wanted to see. Because I’m getting older presents seem to come less and less every year which doesn't seem to bother me. But I could remember those good old days when I was younger waking up at like 8 o'clock just to open gifts that was my excitement then. But now I’m starting to realize that presents and gifts barely has any meaning to which why we should be celebrated Christmas. I know not as many people actually celebrate the religious part of Christmas but the actual giving of presents, that’s what many people look forward to. While watching the game there were commercial breaks about the "Christmas spirit" which made me think about this class, there was a lot of messages being sent to the audience. While thinking about class, I saw a connection with the three faces of Christmas. The corporate Christmas-corporate culture, the family style Christmas-dominant folk culture, and the religious Christmas-Big sub-culture. While watching the basketball game, the news station decided to let troops in Iraq have a "shout out" to their family. This demonstrates that family is important and the stations can air it because it is one of the dominant messages. During the holidays there are always a few classic movies that the channels choose to show, for example "Home alone". This movie has messages that involve all of these cultures. The main character, Kevin, prays before he eats and in one scene he was in a church searching for something. This suggests that there are answers held in this religion known as Christianity. In the end the family reunites and shows love and concern for Kevin which promotes the family style Christmas, where it's important that such a holiday should be spent with your entire family rather than being alone.