Killer Culture

David Kupelian, in his essay "Killer Culture" does an incredible job of diving into the youth cultural movements of today. He disects them, puts his own spin on them, and ultimately evokes a wide range of emotion from his reader. His ability to make the reader completely engulfed in every word makes this piece very captivating and interesting, however; with his heavy use of cited sources, it makes the reader wonder if it his piece or just a compilation of other works.
Kupelian does a masterful job of describing and detailing some of the crazy things that are happening with the youthful culture in America. He uses language that is so vivid, lacking no detail, bringing the images he is trying to portray, to life. By using language that is not often found in academic writing he helps bring a certain attention to his words that is found more often in liesurely reading.
However, when reading "Killing Culture", it is hard to ignore the often long and frequent quotes. These quotes effectively back his argument, but the pure number and mass of them lead the reader to question whose words they are really reading. In the end, Kupelian infuses a lot of opinion which helps to give ownership back to himself, but through the heart of the essay, where it matters most, he loses some of that ownership.

Framing Class

In "Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption", author Diana Kendall writes about the power of the media, and its ability to "shape and create cultural perceptions." She discusses how media audiences perceive and ultimately "act upon popular cultural images or frames". Throughout the piece she breaks down and analyzes how each different class is portrayed in the media, giving various examples, and why they are portrayed that way. She talks about how this portrayal has influenced our country for the worst, and how dangerous this will become as more middle-class and working-class families lifestyles continue to deteriorate.
In the end, she places most of the blame on the fact that media has become basically a small piece in huge conglomerate companies, who only care about the bottom line. She states, "The profits of television networks and stations come from selling advertising, not from producing programs that are accurate reflections of social life." And, because the owners and executives of these large corporations are a part of the upper-class, they have no desire to change the status-quo.
In the best part of the piece, Kendall pleads with her readers to not let media be their one and only source of information in their lives, "For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must balance the perspectives we gain from the media with our own lived experiences and use a wider sociological lens to look at what is going on around us in everyday life." Well said. Media cannot and should not play a large role in how we perceive the world around us. We need to get off the couch, get outside, and define our own lives, and stop letting media define it for us.