I think the podcast touches on how truly important popular culture is in our lives today. We discussed in a previous class the role that it plays in instilling implicit biases in our lives. The reading and the podcasts both touched on the relationship between leadership and popular culture. It is ignorant of a leader to ignore the impact that popular culture has on people’s decisions and opinions in general. For my research paper, I am examining Sleeping Beauty and looking at how its ideas (along with fairytales like it) can be harmful to people even at a young age. There have been countless studies showing that kids reflect the ideas that they are reading about and seeing on the screen. One of these studies for example showed that by these children watching Disney Princesses young girls began to play with the princess dolls following stereotypical female behavior – such as thinking that cookware, dolls, and tea sets were for girls only. With this sort of influence, it is essential to review what is being shown through popular culture regardless of what form it comes in. This obviously shows the importance of diversity and limiting stereotypes in all forms of popular culture which begins with large organizations transitioning their work to empower people. This is seen within Disney through the transition of princesses from being entirely dependent and helpless from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty to then transitioning to independent strong princesses like Elsa.
Critical Thinking
I really like your commentary in the shift in Disney princess. Older Disney princesses were instilling the wrong values in young impressionable girls so I think that it is really important that they are now making princesses that reflect independence and other valuable characteristics. This is particular important because the popular culture and media we watch can have a big impact on our biases we form especially at a young age, and we don’t want children to be forming harmful biases.
I think that the give and take between culture and media is fascinating. Here, for example, young girls have been taught to be stereotypically feminine by the stories they’ve been told. As the culture has shifted however, society has begun to question the validity of these stereotypes, and in turn, the stories that are being told and distributed on a large scale about girls are beginning to change.