Blog #10: Unit 2 Reflection

Reflection of Unit 2

In the first part of unit 2, I learned a little about pop culture. Pop means “of people” and culture refers to the body of beliefs, behaviors, values, and thoughts that refer on us every day. Probably, it can also call the fabric of our live because it is made up by all the objects, people, events, and places. For objects, it is something about culture icons such as objects and people that are widely recognized as symbols like fads and trends. Fads are things that became popular quick but for a short time like Fidget Hand Spinner, it was very popular in 2017 because it can relieve stress and improve concentration, but now it is not popular anymore. Flip over, trends is something that was popular for a long time and still popular until now. One of the examples is Barbie, it has been a significant toy of most of girls childhood. In the past, no matter how poor my family was, I would always beg my parents to buy me a Barbie. The barbies movie was my favorite hobbies to spend time with. Even now I still think they are entertaining and I can learn a lot from them. In Barbie's movies, you never need a prince to save your, because you can save yourself. Believe that you are the best. The category of people in pop culture as my understanding means a person or maybe a group that can represent or controversial in a specific period of time. Also, events and places are the same as what I explain before. My aha moment in this learning was I discovered that not only objects are divided in fads and trends, but also people, events, and places can be divided in fads and trends. That was something that I just realize in a weekend night ready to sleep, such a crazy idea.

Then, I have the presentation of a pop star. I choose Jack Ma as my pop star because I spend most of my time in his inventions and I think his experience is very inspirational to me. I can also say that he is my “father” and my lender even he is not on Ali company anymore. Therefore, many things has happened in his youth life and he never give up. Fortunately, He meet the Morley’s family and they decided to help him to improve himself. These are rare opportunities, so Jack Ma is smart and lucky. Know he is a very successful and rich business man. And he is not an ungrateful person, after he became successful he gave 20 million to Morley’s.

TED Talk was also a part of our unit 2. The video I watched was called “Pop Culture is Dead” by Phil Miller. This title sounds strange, but it was this strange theme that attracted me to watch this video. At the beginning of the TED Talk, Phil made an experiment. The experiment consisted of taking a casual picture and showing it to the people on their right and their left. Then, the two first lines have to stand up and decide between them who has the most interesting picture. After that, he shows the audience two pictures one of them say “TED Talk is awesome” and the other “TED Talk is awful”. It lets the audience think is true or not, and also think about is all the pictures telling the truth. By the way, he finished the speech with an excellent phrase. He says pop culture is probably dead as we know it, pop culture changes so it is dead but revived again and again.

The team presentation was the most interesting part of Unit 2. I enjoyed working with my classmates. I guess it was because I was very satisfied with this team project. However, it was a little bit harder to search for the information than other groups because They had 10 years to look for it and we only had three years. In this team project, I was the project manager, I created a group on WeChat, so we could communicate about the progress of the project. I chose to do the project in Genially because it is a very creative tool, it was a little confusing to use, but we figured it out fast. In this presentation, the parts that correspond to me are objects and people. Which I chose the Dalgona Challenge, TikTok food trends as objects, and Biden as people.

I did not know that pop culture was that complicated. It is divided into many parts and those many parts are divided into more and more small parts. It was hard to figure out what pop culture is. I need to upload more GB in my brain before I get into Unit 3.....