Pop Culture: The Analysis Of Cultural Representation Of Popular Culture

It is virtually impossible to gain knowledge of everything by direct experience. Our limitedness as human beings prevents us, for example, from experiencing first-hand every place on planet Earth and, in a deeply globalised world like ours, direct experience is not necessary to get to know something. Even if we have never been to Asia, South America, Oceania, we do know something about those places and we have acquired this knowledge through various means, directly and indirectly. It is a very specific kind of knowledge, one that is often assimilated as common sense, and shapes our geopolitical imagination, i.e. the totality of our beliefs and taken-for-granted truths about places and peoples that we use to make sense of the world. In most

all cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in mainstream society. As popular culture is spread mainly through mass media, it is clear how media have a main role in this process of transmitting geopolitical knowledge through representations of the other. Unfortunately, popular culture is extremely difficult to define and, even when a suitable definition is found, it is such a broad area that it would be virtually impossible to analyse every single aspect of it. Nevertheless, the analysis of cultural representation in various aspects of popular culture can be fundamental for investigating popular geopolitical mechanisms and their impact on not only what people think of other countries, but also what they are willing to accept that is said and done about said

The importance of a study on cinema and especially Hollywood productions lies in the amplitude of this kind of product’s consumers. The great success of Hollywood movies contributed to making the United States the leading maker of global culture, especially Western popular culture. The fixed patterns and explicit ideologies encoded by the producers, even if a result of a common feeling of the local audience, affect the perceptions of not only Americans, but virtually all the people that have access to a certain movie. Spreading a certain kind of disposition is clearly part of a soft power strategy, it is not merely recreational and can have a main role in shaping the environment for policies that would not be so easily accepted otherwise, with the risk of publicising a representation of Russia in this case that is not only far from true, but can have repercussions on IR among countries outside the US, as well as on Russia’s attempt to reshape its own national