5/30 Omar's Lecture and The Merchants of Cool Response

Angel Truong 5/30 Omar’s Lecture and The Merchants of Cool Video Response

            From the documentary, The Merchants of Cools and Omar’s lecture, we learned that popular culture is a tool used to spread ideology through cultural hegemony which is still practiced today. The media is a form of popular culture that shapes people by provoking ideologies such as gender roles to convey people what is right and natural in society even through it is constructed by society itself from consent and coercion. In other word, through cultural hegemony, social media like Instagram reinforces ideologies that people agree and act upon which contributes to popular culture. For example, today there is a resistance toward cultural hegemony that is a form of everyday resistance which involves comedy. For example, in the API community, the show Fresh of the Boat and Asian American comedian Ali Wong use Asian stereotypes to counteract them in their jokes. Ali Wong does standup comedy where she takes Asian stereotypes to make jokes at them but at the same time she subtly resists them by showing how she is a comedian rather than a doctor. For Fresh of the Boat, they take the stereotypes to portray how they are not the Model Minority Myth since they have conflicts in each episode that involve assimilation, racism, and intergenerational conflicts. Therefore, they practice a form of counter-cultural hegemony to resist the dominant notions of minorities. However, powerful and dominant people in media can take these trends of cultural resistance and use it for capitalistic benefits. For example, Buzzfeed has been using the K-Pop or the Hallyu Wave to their advantage by making videos relating to K-Pop or Korean culture such as videos about Korean food and beauty knowing people will watch them. Therefore, the more people click and watch, the more views and money they make. So, they are using this counter-cultural hegemony of having Asians in media to their advantage like the marketing businesses in the documentary that uses teenagers to sell their products. In the end, reflecting to Stuart Hall’s reading, popular culture will always have a power struggle.

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