Marx and My Super Sweet Sixteen

After reading Berger’s Marxist Analysis and thinking about the ways in which the upper class and popular culture influence how we think and what we buy, I started to think about the shows My Super Sweet Sixteen and Cribs. Cribs shows the houses of our favorite celebrities and My Super Sweet Sixteen shows the journeys of upper class teenagers planning their 16^th birthday parties. In these shows, people that are considered to be in the upper class of society basically show off what they have and how much it costs. They show the rest of society what is acceptable to have in order to be a social elite. The people that watch these shows in turn aspire to have the lives of the people that they see in these shows and go out and buy certain things that they probably don’t need in order to feel as if they too are in some way upper class citizens. These shows are giving people a false consciousness that these are the things that a person has to have in order to be famous and elite and that these are the types of parties that you have to have when you turn sixteen if you want to be socially elite amongst your friends.