My friend's addiction

As I told during the first class, I do not have a pop culture addiction: I never watch the television, I am also not addicted to social media and I sometimes listen to music. It was then easier to write about one of my friend’s one.

When I met her, three years ago, we were freshmen. We had the same classes, so we became friends quickly. I learned little by little that she has an interest in some television shows - which is, I must say, totally normal. She began to tell me more and more stuff about her hobby. For example, she knew all the episodes of Supernatural and Vampire Diaries. The thing is, one day, I understood that, as the women in the text "Pop Culture addiction", her addiction took control of her life.

She has some social issues, not a lot of friends and never had a boyfriend. In addition to television shows, she watches a lot of movies, the ones where the boys are so nice and to much perfect to be real (I have a boyfriend, he is very nice but he will never be as nice as the ones in love movies). So all her thoughts about social life were constructed with these unreal movies. She thought that boys in real life are not as perfect as Zack Effron in Lucky One and she was sure a lot of girls were as mean as in Mean Girls.

Because she experienced social issues, she hid herself into this "unreal world". She created a kind of "virtual life", as gamers do. Instead of trying to build strong and real relationships with people, she plunged in this virtual world. She prefers to imagine that one day she might be Ian Somerhalder’s love. During the conventions, events where you meet actors and celebrities (the tickets are very expensive), she even paid to have some photos with him. The worse is that when she showed me these photos, she told me : "He was very nice and he accepted to hug me!" I mean, she paid for his kindness and she was not aware of it…

So, as written in our textbook, The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture, popular culture "can both reflect and shape what people believe and how we behave" (p. 1), my friend was brain-washed by all the stereotypes brought by the mediated culture and she still is.