Social Transformation and Class-passing in Popular Culture
From reality television to the Internet to popular films to celebrity figures or artists, evidence of social transformation and instances of class-passing are prevalent in popular culture. Famous examples of class-passers include Britney Spears, and Oprah Winfrey. Very rich individuals today, they challenge the ideas of ascribed status by birth, wealth and education.
Examples of shows like "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" to etiquette books show the new popular cultural expressions of class and the mere prevalence of these types of materials and overexposure of class-passers in the media can help explicate some of the underlying urges for social transformation.
Read more about this topic: Social Transformation
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, social, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The higher the state of civilization, the more completely do the actions of one member of the social body influence all the rest, and the less possible is it for any one man to do a wrong thing without interfering, more or less, with the freedom of all his fellow-citizens.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The best of us would rather be popular than right.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)