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Old 09-16-2005, 01:49 PM
sugar and spice sugar and spice is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 4,575
I think that, while shows like this certainly influence our society, they started out reflecting it. Increasingly in the past five-ten years, popular culture (especially that aimed at people in the, oh, 12-30 demographic) has focused on the very wealthy. It's a trend you can see in TV, movies, books, and a number of other things. You can probably trace it back to the advent of "Cribs" or even earlier. It's just escalated.

So in some ways, it's influencing the culture -- you see those brats on "My Super Sweet Sixteen" acting how they THINK they should be acting based on previous episodes, not how they'd actually act "in real life." But a lot of it is also based off of previous stuff that's come along -- people, for some reason, are just very obsessed with the wealthy and beautiful right now, just the way they were more interested in family-based shows, diversity, and "blended" families back when we were growing up.

Popular culture can always be traced back to the politics and social mores of the era, and I don't think anyone will argue that the politics and social mores of today are quite a bit different than they were 10 or 15 years back.
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