Kellogg’s to Michael Phelps: We’re just not that into you!

Michael Phelps brought this on himself; that’s what the blogosphere seems to be suggesting. As one blogger bluntly put it – “he’s an idiot.” It is through such public and private expressions that we make sense of our world, and since we learn about such events through popular culture, this is an opportunity to discuss the role that pop culture—not Michael Phelps—plays in our lives. The public criticism of Michael Phelps centers on his alleged use of an illegal substance while being a role model for young people all over the world. Some defenders of his actions assign them to mere immaturity and they offer forgiveness. Then there are those, like the blogger quoted above, who publicly want to chastise him. There are middle positions that condemn his actions, but want to forgive him because of his youth. That’s the way pop culture works – it gives us one or perhaps several versions of a story and then we measure them against our own beliefs. Of course there has to be salience and above all else relevance in order for this process to ensue. It is through that “measuring” process that we do the work of culture – producing meaning in order to make sense of the world in which we live. In that way pop culture is a sense making mechanism. We sometimes discuss situations like this one with people we actually know through what I would call authentic relationships, and sometimes our conversations extend to social networks, primarily over the Internet, which I would call virtual relationships. But there are internal musings as well – we talk to ourselves about Michael Phelps – a kind of running commentary inside our head; I call this the imaginary social world. It is the combination of the three that extends the nature of what we call reality. There is authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and an imaginary world that mimics both the authentic and inauthentic worlds. We readily acknowledge the former, and we reluctantly admit to the inauthentic, which might be represented by the hundreds of pseudo-friends you have on Facebook. But we rarely admit to the third. It is from the label imaginary social world that this blog gets its title, and it is that world in which I’m most interested, if for no other reason than the fact that action-oriented Western culture holds the imaginary world in disdain. Westerners don’t like to recognize this inner world because it encompasses thought in the form of self-talk, daydreams, and nocturnal dreams. These are aspects of everyday American life in which we are engaged, but go against the grain of being a productive citizen. Nevertheless, we spend an inordinate amount of time in the imaginary social world making sense of our authentic reality.