Popular media shape values and identities amid deepening crises.

Evidence

In an era plagued by crisis—climate collapse, worsening inequality, authoritarianism and imperialism on the march, unending racialized and gendered injustice, a lingering pandemic—it might seem trivial to spend an entire book bemoaning the state of entertainment and popular culture. Are movies and TV shows and pop songs that important to our deepening, interrelated crises? Indeed, media matters for a number of reasons: it shapes and circulates values, it represents communities and experiences, it offers pleasures and connections, it educates and informs, it persuades and misinforms, it shapes identities and discourses, it creates and expresses. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 27

Categorization

• XREF: Framing rationale relates to the reader’s goal of showing form matters beyond entertainment. — connects to: Media-disseminated crises like the oil shock are simulations maintaining historical investment. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 139; The rise of mass media and consumer leisure transformed American life at century’s turn. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1315; Mass media can reset whole societies’ expectations of a normal lifestyle nationwide. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 161