Elizabeth Mahler's Blog

  Is Pop Culture Good For You?  The question of whether pop culture is good for you or not is a hard one. Also, as a person in a generation that is addicted to their phones, but also someone that grew up very old-fashioned, I have trouble answering this prompt. So, to satisfy both sides of my opinion, I will argue that pop culture is both bad and good for society. Pop Culture IS Good For You Pop culture is good for you. Well, not you specifically, but society overall. As author Malcolm Gladwell states in his article, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted (2010), “But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger,” he shows us how pop culture had helped people connect over common topics. When we utilize pop culture and social media to breach the barriers of social activism, we can reach many more people than those in our ...

I cannot remember a time in my life as a child that did not have books in it. I was the typical girl that loved princess stories and Barbie books. I always wanted to read a book before bed with one of my parents, which usually ended up being my dad. This was because he was much more willing to climb into my child-sized loft bed with two inches of headroom and read me my fairytales than my mother was willing. I remember what my favorite book was almost 12 years later; my Pocahontas pop-up book. I would snuggle up to him and play with the picture tabs as he read me the story. My mother would make me read the story and would animate the pictures for me. Clearly, they had very different parenting and literary teaching styles for their 6-year-old daughter. PAGE ONE OF POCAHONTAS POP-UP BOOK As I got older though, I started to fall into the trap of “I hate reading” because I never got to read what I wanted and had to read these much more realistic books and novels for school. I didn’t li...