Pop Culture Reflects Time

Updated: Apr 29, 2022

popular culture has mirrored time and change by connecting society, entertainment, politics, fashion, and technology by translating experiences across space and time.

History helps us understand the world, cultures, events, and change by providing invaluable stories, lessons, and philosophies from which we learn. The past has made us who we are today. Understanding history builds better connections and broadens our capacity by allowing us to stand on the shoulders of giants. We learn from them and build on their innovations. History educates us on how society, technology, and government worked in the past to better understand how we got to the present day and how it works now. It arms us with the insights to create a better way forward.

We all exist in time, which is a progression from the past into the future, moving in one direction. Design influences society by communicating through visual, word, and sonic, changing opinions, instilling values, and translating experiences to people across space and time. It is an expression of the soul that experiences ideas and provides us with purpose and meaning. Design is a vehicle for time and social change that interconnects society, entertainment, politics, fashion, and technology, which translates into popular culture—practices, beliefs, and rituals prevalent in society at any given point in time.

Popular culture expresses society's shared experiences and is a function of what society consumes through entertainment, fashion, politics, and technology. As soon as we enter the planet, we are immersed in popular culture influencing us through the toys and games we play with, media programs we watch, brands, advertisements, and products we consume, the music we listen to, the art we make, books and comics we read, and the clothes we wear. This reflects the moment in time, life in motion, and contributes to society’s evolution by teaching us something new. It challenges us to critically consider the society we live in and empathize, by recognizing ourselves in each other and bridging our differences through providing us with a similarity of spirit and sense of community.

This is a chronological view of the last seventy years, since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, of some of the key events in popular culture that have affected society and the interaction between people in their everyday lives.