Interesting Popular Culture Essay Topics

NOTE: These questions should lead to a more detailed prompt. Use them as inspiration as you work on your own writing. 

1. How does the music we listen to dictate who we are friends with? Music is very important for socializing and maintaining an identity, so the choices made can affect ones social life. How is this?

2. What value do people put in counterculture for the sake of it? Are movements sometimes embraced because they, perhaps childishly, are designed to anger one's parents?

3. 4chan, disco, and other popular cultures have something called the little brother effect. An old group of people create a niche pop culture movement, such as disco or an image board, and younger siblings of those in it think it is cool and want to participate. When they do, they end up not understanding and destroying the original movement. Discuss.

4. How does the Internet change our tastes in popular culture?

5. What kind of ethical responsibility do artists have when they make pop culture, and they responsible for what it causes people to think?

6. Discuss the decline and soon to be the death of the American Soap Opera.

7. What does celebrity worship do to our brains, and how does this effect our general worldview? How does celebrity worship differ from hero worship?

8. How pervasive are racism and sexism in our popular culture, and what can we do to combat this?

9. Is popular culture the way we define the social ideals of each generation, and how can pop culture promote social change?

10. It seems that it would be easy to churn out low quality pop culture, and many companies are accused of doing this. Is there any validity to these claims?

11. Why do we have artists like Ke$ha, who are obviously musically talented but sell out to pop music distributors to make low quality repetitive music?

12. It is often noted that the discerning taste in a media is very different form the popular taste. For example, consider 50 Shades of Grey, the most popular book in the world, but all reviews decry it as garbage. Why does this happen?

13. How does social media effect what movies we want to watch and who we see it with?

14. Piracy has a weird relationship with popular culture, what is the ultimate effect of it on our media?

15. What is the best popular culture, objectively?

Prompt Worksheet - Argument Essay:

Instructions: Complete this worksheet and bring it to your one-on-one conference.

What is a prompt? A prompt is the direction your essay will take to discuss your opinion/topic. Since you are writing an argument essay, your prompt should include words and phrases such as "take a stand," "argue," "what is your opinion?" etc.

Sample Prompt: American pop culture is known to be associated with flash and superficiality as opposed to quality. Packages are oftentimes considered more important than products and people; commercials are regularly viewed as more significant than the actual programs they sponsor; and celebrities are frequently deemed more worthy of admiration than the average American. What do you think? Do images and impressions have too much of an effect on people in current American society? Take a stand on the issue.  

Sample thesis: Media images are the most significant contributor to the rampant identity crises in current American culture. Now, come up with two possible prompts and thesis statements for your final essay for our class. You may choose any topic you would like as long as it is related to American pop culture and it is argumentative.

Essay Structure -

1. Introduction

2. Body

a. Background

b. Support for my claim

i. Support 1:

ii. Support 2:

iii. Support 3 (optional)

c. addressing the opposite side

i. Opposing view 1;

1. Refutation;

ii. opposing view 2: (optional)

1. Refutation

d. conclusion

Assignment File -

https://www.dropbox.com/s/szbkh90yj0f8kk6/Assignment%20Files.zip?dl=0