Finally Blogging

Hi everyone, I feel like I'm the class laggard at blogging but I'm finally on board. When brain storming for ideas for my research topic, I knew that I wanted to tackle issues of modern day contemporary American culture. You know, something that's a relatively modern phenomenon that we see in almost our everyday lives but don't pay too close attention to. One of the first things that came to mind was the practicing of new age religions i.e. Crossroads here in Cincinnati. There was also the potential topic of media bias but I kind of felt that this is a subject that's been done to death. However, there is one subject matter that I can never seem to get over and that's how much of a consumer based society that we are. Recently I watched a George Carlin stand up special in which he stated "Baseball used to be America's past time. Now it's buying s@#*". It often befuddles me the lack of emphasis people (families in particular) place on creating their own recreation, and as a result it seems that countless people default to packing up the car and driving to the closest outlet malls and spending money they might not actually have on things they don't really need. America seems to have lost it's romanticism. A time in which a family would take a country drive and have a picnic. In my paper, I intend to delve into such issues as consumer psychology, exploration of marketing and other underlying consumerism issues.