Orientation by Pop Culture

Orientation by Pop Culture is judging anything that is attractive by pop-culture standards to be good, and anything that is unattractive by pop-culture standards to be bad

Pop culture, these days, is mostly defined by television and music videos. If an idea looks like it would play well on TV, then it's good. Any idea that would not make high-ratings TV (or would make you look bad on TV) is bad.

In other words, the mindset that rejects an idea because: Eww, you don't want a sound-bite of you saying that playing over and over again on CNN, do you?

As Neil Postman has pointed out, the federal budget is uninteresting and irrelevant from the standpoint of television. The federal budget doesn't look like anything. You can't show it on TV and have it hold people's attention. To get some visual action going, you could show the printed version of the budget rolling off government printing presses, but that's not really what the federal budget is about. The only way to talk about the federal budget is to list facts and figures and junk like that. If you do that for more than two seconds, 90% of your market share will change the channel. Therefore, the federal budget is irrelevant as a political issue.

Old people, unattractive people, people with plain faces, people who work with facts and figures, people who aren't crackling with sexual charisma, people who just don't stand out and instantly grab most people's attention and keep them mesmerized--seen through the eyes of someone who is Oriented by Pop Culture, these people are all worthless and irrelevant.

Hypothesis: Se

Lenore often seems to make pop culture into the principal source of signs by which extraverted sensation orients.

(p. ???) "The perfect Extraverted Sensate conclusion," describing how, in Back to the Future, people come out looking blow-dried and attractive as proof that everything has worked out.

This would show up in dominant and secondary forms as the above-described ranking of people and ideas by pop-culture standards.

It would show up in tertiary and inferior forms as a fear that if I'm not attractive by pop-culture standards, I'll go unnoticed, so I'd better give in, read Cosmopolitan, and dress the way they say.

And it would also show up in secondary and inferior forms as a professed indifference to pop culture--eschewing it too vocally, protesting "too much."