Pop Culture: Enjoy... But Be Cautious

Stuck in Stereotypes

I once read that the majority of Americans don’t have a passport. As a European, I thought this was an incredibly shocking, if not dismaying, piece of trivia. On the other hand, presumably even those without passports know that Italians eat pizza and pasta and the typical French person cycles around with a baguette, wearing a black beret. An Irish citizen wears green and stumbles drunk down the street. Australians throw boomerangs at kangaroos. All the classic stereotypes.

These examples seem perhaps quite harmless at first glance, but what about the others---all Arabs are Muslim, all Blacks are poor, all Jews are greedy.

Stereotypes influence our decision making and are difficult to unlearn. Where do we form these ideas? How do we come to know---or think we know---so much about countries and cultures we have never experienced firsthand? The answer is through popular culture – the media of film, books, magazines, music and videos.

Mass Media: The Importance of Popular Culture

We cannot underestimate the power of mass media and pop culture in shaping our perceptions, ideals or prejudices of another culture. When it comes to ‘exporting culture’, there is both “High Culture" and "Low Culture" (a.k.a. Pop Culture). High Culture includes opera and ballet but reaches a smaller audience. Pop culture is much more ubiquitous and as a result arguably more influential. Let’s look at the most popular example---violence on our screens.

It is well documented that watching violence in film and on television could negatively influence the viewer. There is evidence to suggest this is true. Recently, a young man in the USA killed and dismembered his girlfriend after being inspired by a popular show about a serial killer, Dexter. On the other hand, Norway is regarded as a very peaceful country with low internal conflict. Is it a coincidence that the same country attempts to control, avoid and limit negative influences from its media? Crime is not sensationalized, television has little violence, boxing is banned from television. Even E.T. was rated too violent for viewers under 12.

Violence on television is a widely debated topic in the public eye. Why then, is less thought put into monitoring and researching the power of pop culture? Most people would look down at the importance of studying pop culture, believing it to be insignificant. Pop culture can be fun and educating but at the same time, it is a major factor in building prejudices and creating stereotypes. When original content is made by one culture and exported to another, we need to examine it carefully and make an educated decision on whether or not it is accurately portraying a culture’s image.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="329"] How are Asians usually represented in film? The men traditionally played the role of the villain such as Ming in Flash Gordon. On the hand, women tend to be painted as soft, feminine and desirable.[/caption]

Film: Learning about Cultures without Personal Experience

While I have yet to visit most of the countries in the world, it seems that I already know so much about them. You probably feel the same. Those who have yet to visit Paris, New York or London all have wonderful images and notions of their streets and alleys. Bustling Asian markets, piranhas in the Amazon and tribes in Africa. We are all constantly learning about cultures without firsthand personal experience. This increases the risk of misshaping our attitudes.

Through mass media, I know that India, for example, is a colorful place with a rich history, delicious food and with wonderful landscapes and locals. I do however, also know that a series of high-profile rape cases have tarnished the country’s image over the past few years. This has lead to a decrease in tourism. I know this from reading the news or watching a documentary but often it is film that is the most widespread channel in delivering gateways into other cultures. Looking at India again, the film Slumdog Millionaire was criticized by Indians for showing the country in such a dim light. Yet friends who have visited there can’t speak highly enough of such a beautiful place. Who to trust more, media sources or those who have been there and done that?

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="556" class=" "] Slumdog Millionaire presented the slums of Mumbai in a brutal but honest light. Still, it would most likely turn viewers away from India.[/caption]

Taken, the Hollywood blockbuster about human trafficking in Paris, apparently led to a decline in annual tourism in France. Parents told the movie’s leading front man Liam Neeson, “I’ll never send my kids to Europe.” To Asia, after the movie The Beach was released showing Leonardo Di Caprio’s adventures in Thailand, tourism soared there. People saw what an interesting culture Thailand had to offer with friendly locals, crazy parties and pristine beaches. They also expected shots of snake blood, shark infested-waters and drugs growing out of thin air on their arrival.

Heading north, to eastern Asia and Korea, a French actress Brigitte Bardot highlighted that Koreans eat dog in the French media prior to the 2002 FIFA World Cup. This spread across the global media and painted Koreans in a barbaric way, despite their huge advances in modern technology and innovation. The eating of dog, although a separate topic, is a custom that has lasted centuries and is ingrained in local culture here. We shouldn't compare cultures as being right or wrong, simply different. On a better note, Korean dramas have recently become huge in Cuba, of all places.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="488"] Phi Phi island in Thailand. Since the Beach, the area has received an incredible boost to tourism but local culture and the surrounding environment have taken a battering.[/caption]

Media: Objective or Subjective?

In general, we often believe that the media---whether a newspaper, a television show or a documentary---is objective and reflect their subjects much like a mirror would do. However, in fact the media is more like a window. It is mostly subjective and only offers us one viewpoint. Another window from the same building may cast a different light. This is to say that when we consume foreign pop culture we must do so with an open mind. What we are seeing, reading and hearing may not represent the true culture of a nation. The media is usually affected by local constraints that we are not aware of such as religious, political, historical or gender differences.

Korean director Kim Ki-Duk has had great success at international film festivals but his movies have never been widely appreciated in his homeland. If someone was to watch just one of his films, they would have a misrepresentation of Korea. Traditionally African-American women were portrayed as domestic stereotypes like in Tom and Jerry (which now carries a racial warning to viewers). Often media that is ‘factual’ or ‘based on a true story’ is only telling one side of a tale. Others rewrite history altogether; Disney’s Pocahontas, for example, all but overhauled the tragic history between natives and European adventurers.

[caption id="attachment_3259" align="aligncenter" width="250" class=" "] Media framing - what we see may not be a true reflection[/caption]

Keep an Open Mind

As technology improves, culture is spreading more and more. However, there is also a major global imbalance. Individuals from less populous cultural groups tend to import huge amounts of foreign content as it isn't plausible to consume only their own. Societies that watch too much foreign media may lose touch with their own. On the other hand, major nations like America, tend to view or consume little or no foreign content.

Finally, for many of us, some cultures and some nations exist only through popular culture. Mass media and pop culture are major powers in building our perceptions of other cultures and can often be only somewhat correct and educational. Those who do use media as their primary source of learning about other cultures thus need to consume as much as possible with an open mind in order to see a wider, probably more accurate picture of a nation, group or culture. Still, the best way to learn is still to get out there and mingle with real people.

Gangnam, COEX Style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCgd5bOdj_Y

 

On Saturday I took a rare trip to Gangnam with my boyfriend for a leisurely stroll around COEX Mall, the largest underground mall in the world—nope, sorry, just Asia (darn you, Canada). Short for COnvention Centers and EXhibition Halls, both of which populate its higher floors, COEX also boasts an aquarium, a movie theater, a Hyundai Department Store—with all the food court goodness it implies, as you, dear reader, shall soon see—and a kimchi museum.

Every time I muster up the energy to take the long subway voyage down to COEX (which is not often, given the high density of great shopping and, more importantly, food, elsewhere in Seoul), I swallow a laugh as I remember my first visit to the mall last summer. Mistakenly believing that it was “the largest mall in Asia” and (in)conveniently failing to realize that it was underground, I spent an hour wandering around outside Samsung Station wondering why all I could see were a bunch of hotels, some statues, and an exhibition hall. A shameful peek at my tablet confirmed my folly—and the importance of at least Googling a place before you (try to) go there.

 

We entered from Samsung Station on Line 2, following the throngs of people marching steadily through the labyrinthine tunnels between the subway and the mall proper. Along the way we passed several signs apologizing for the current construction, which had begun last summer. According to a large display near the mall entrance, the building is being remodeled to make it more environmentally sustainable, a process that apparently involves the installation of large, swooping skylights over much of its area. I imagine that these windows are somehow layered and glazed to provide “sustainable” insulation, but the display did not offer that kind of important detail.

Our first stop was Bandi and Luni’s (반디앤루니스) bookstore, a sprawling maze of literature that (almost) gives the Kyobo Mungo (교보문고) in Gwanghwamun a run for its money. I had just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami and was looking to escape the empty lost-friend feeling that comes from leaving the world of an incredible story, so I wandered over to the fiction section and picked up 노르웨이의 숲 (Norwegian Wood) and 스푸트니크의 연인 (Sputnik Sweetheart). Even though the latter was a locally published paperback it still cost over 10,000 won. I had forgotten just how expensive some stores in COEX can be, I mused as I sadly put the book back on the shelf.

Outside the bookstore was a small exposition on new games for the Nintendo DS, complete with several rows of consoles loaded with games for trial by the public as well as a large display of Luigi’s Castle trailers being presented by two women with microphones. I tried out a game called 동물의 숲 (Animal Forest), which, at least for me, involved a lot of running through different buildings and hitting townspeople with a butterfly net. Then I played through a level of Mario Brothers 2 DS, with graphics that were almost depressingly better than the original despite being run from a computer about a tenth the size. After a while the swarm of children, mostly boys, pushing and shoving around me started to jostle my activation energy of annoyance, so I managed to tear my boyfriend away from what was apparently a life-or-death match of Mario Tennis and be on our way.





We started to get a bit hungry, so we strolled over to a sign that promised 中国料理 (Chinese food) at a stand-alone restaurant not seemingly attached to any food courts. Surprised at the 6000-won 짜장면 and similarly inexpensive boiled and fried dumplings (水饺/물만구 and 煎饺/구운 만두, respectively) my boyfriend and I took a booth and ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup (牛肉汤面/우육탕면) and dumplings. The beef soup was standard—big slices of meat with scallions and mushrooms, salty, tangy base, noodles cut from dough. The fried dumplings were nothing like the ones I had seen during my nearly three years in Beijing–larger, crispier, and more reminiscent of deep-fried American-Cantonese crab rangoon than the lightly pan-fried Northern fare to which I am accustomed—but still delicious. The food came out with kimchi, pickled daikon, and a bottle of cold water. One of the downsides to eating Chinese food in Korea is that it lacked both China’s complementary looseleaf teas and Korea’s generally extensive banchan services.



After lunch we wandered through rows of small brand-name clothing shops, looking but not thinking to purchase anything. I remembered my dad storming out of a Great Outdoors in COEX the summer before after having seen the 120,000-won price tag on a spandex shirt that could have cost anywhere from $20 to $60 in the United States (and, admittedly, elsewhere in Seoul). The prices in the mall were really hit-or-miss; you could easily be put off by $11 paperbacks and $100+ undershirts, but then, the two of us had just enjoyed a delicious and filling $15 lunch at a clean and comfortable restaurant.

At one point we found ourselves inside Asem Hobby (아셈하비), a hobby store selling puzzles, action figures, and all manner of wooden and diecast model. I curled my lip at a few $50 puzzles, played a bit with a set of (really cool) predatory animal action figures outfitted as some kind of fantasy MMORPG-esque warriors, and marveled at the predesigned do-it-yourself (sort of) model cars, planes, boats, and buildings—and at the swarms of boys, slightly older than the Nintendo DS crowd but still male in depressing proportions, inspecting the merchandise. I thought back to my own childhood days building popsicle stick boats and scrap wood dollhouses in the basement and wondered whether hobby shops in the United States saw a similarly homogeneous demographic.

We wandered a bit more, finding ourselves back at the other end of the bookstore (it really was huge, with multiple entrance points) looking at various non-book items. Hardcover diaries. Pens. An eraser installed into the end of a paintbrush holder for easy handling by artists. Scraps of leather folded into various animal shapes and sold at ridiculous prices. More action figures, this time dinosaurs and unicorns.

We left from a different exit and walked past an external display of discount books (only after crying through a photograph book about rescue dogs) and meandered through a series of cafes and ever-present snack shops—yogurt, waffles, red bean shaved ice (팥빙수/pat bingsu). We stopped briefly to look inside an imported foods shop, where I got overly excited about a package of Rocky Mountain fruit-flavored pastel mini marshmallows (pink, mint green, and white) that I hadn’t eaten since I was about five, as well as about a package of Japanese sweet chewy dried seaweed snacks that I haven’t seen elsewhere in Korea.





We were starting to get hungry again (this tends to happen a lot), so we took a detour to the Hyundai Department Store in hopes of raiding its food court. We were not disappointed. As we traveled down the escalator we were graced with an extensive fiesta of myriad food stations, including several bakeries, dumpling and chicken sellers, salad bars, sandwich shops, cafeteria-style Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and fusion restaurants, and dozens of dessert oases—ddeok, mochi, gelato, cheesecakes, pastries, even a Mrs. Field’s and a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Oh, yeah, and a full-on grocery store. My boyfriend, ever the fan of European-style food (like many of the other pretzel-chowing coffee-guzzling Korean food court guests, it seemed), bought some unprecedentedly soft and chewy whole-grain-walnut-cranberry-date bread at the bakery and a modest sampling of imported sausage and cheeses at the grocery store. I chose a small seltzer water and a bottle of kiwi-kale juice, and we sat for a bit on a cafeteria bench near the Vietnamese restaurant to nurse our newfound treasures.







I checked my watch—time to go home. We had spent a thoroughly entertaining four hours inside the mall and had only partially covered two of its four zones. Granted, my boyfriend and I might share a greater affinity to food than the average mall-crawler and COEX is certainly dominated by more than its share of delicious snacks, but isn’t that precisely part of the mall’s charm? Whether you’re a money-laden fashionista, an exposition enthusiast, a book fanatic, movie aficionado, budding marine biologist, or just a window-shopping food-shoveling pig like me, COEX, enabled by its size to offer a high density of attractions appealing to all sorts of different people, is a justifiably recommended destination for anybody with a free afternoon and a thirst for some novelty.