People only learn about “the pop culture of politics” instead of in-depth goings on

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Edwin J. Viera, Opinion Editor

With an eye on the world of politics and on those cat videos, people are hopelessly glued to their screens to find out what will be happening next. Since the President could be facing indictment in the Robert Mueller investigation, many people will be looking to see what anyone will have to say about this.

Many people are attempting to understand Donald Trump and how so many people hang on every thing that CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and other news stations have to say about him. Aside from the dopamine rush that so many people feel when he becomes the topic of conversation, we have also become blind to what we really need to know about politics and everything about it.

One organization to blame for this would be Facebook because of how they used the data of their users to give them a political bubble. Since people were either looking at items written for the left, or written for the right, there was no one taking the center. Rather than give us the in-depth readings about politics and much of what has been going on, we are more concerned with the pop culture of politics.

The pop culture of [politics in this case relates to the battery of articles, television reports, books and other items that relate to the Trump administration that give us a rush whenever they are mentioned. One example of this would be the book, Fire and Fury written by Michael Wolff.

Since, Donald Trump was elected many books have been written about how he won the election and just what has happened since his inauguration. In January, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was one of the most highly anticipated books of the year. However, no one really remembers this book because of how the administration has progressed since.

When it comes to the pop culture of Trump era politics, the idea is to keep people on thinking about stuff on the surface and not really delving into too many specifics. Facebook was able to do this by giving people access to what has now been largely considered, “fake news”. Website like Info Wars, The Gateway Pundit, and the battery of other websites that fed into the illusion of ideas that Hillary Clinton is a demon or that Trump is some kind of profit.

Everyone is focused on the pop culture of politics but isn’t really concerned with the reality of it. The problem with this is that we are just scratching the surface of certain issues but aren’t necessarily getting into the nitty gritty of them. One documentary that has managed to get into the reality of the current political climate is Digital Disconnect by Robert McChesney.

This film attacks the current issue of whether capitalism has really interfered with democracy but also manages to deal with how social media has interfered in our political understanding, particularly Facebook and the culture of fake news. One important fact to note from the film is that 48 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook.

This startling figure makes sense after the 2016 Presidential Election results but considering the study was done recently, it is more startling. Many people find their news through their Facebook feds but would be better if they used an app like Apple’s News app or Clipboard. It’s strange to say but news aggregates work.

Since these apps are based on what you as the user input to the app, it will tailor the news to what you want to see. While this is also a means of putting a person in a political bubble, being able top decide what you’re going to see makes this somewhat more comforting. One interesting thing to say about Flipboard is that they have a section called, Left, Right & Center, which displays three op-ed stories which pay attention to a certain issue.

Much of the pop culture surrounding the Trump administration has dealt with the goings on or how Donald Trump is going to make America worse. These inevitably serve as a distraction for people and we never really get into the issues. Another way that social media was able to rise, as a means of people getting their news is that many people consider the mainstream media to be fake news.

CNN, which has become known for being the earliest proponent of being called fake news has since worked to bring their integrity level back to what it once was. Other news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have looked to be discredited based on the way that they report news about Donald Trump. Vanity Fair ran a story about how the Stormy Daniels news cycle seems to cancel out the Russia Investigation news cycle.

However, this is what people thrive on. Reading the information that only scratch the surface of political based issues is something that has become all too common for people. The strange thing is that none of these articles will be remembered for anything.

While some people report stories on trump and write in-depth enterprise articles, many people will forget about them in a few months or so. They all get added into the pile of pop culture of politics during the Trump administration and will be sealed away in a vault, never to be though of until that one moment when a certain Trump related issue is brought up in conversation.