Welcome to Messages: Self Help Through Popular Culture. We believe very strongly that popular culture, whether in the form of television shows (yes, even reality shows), movies, food fads and trends (even the most seemingly silly), the Internet (including Facebook and MySpace), advertising (as annoying as it can be), clothing, celebrity-watching, tattoos...everything, has something important to tell us about ourselves. As the X-Files promised us, "the answer is out there," and as Steven Johnson suggested in his 2005 book "Everything Bad is Good for You,"; so there is clearly much wisdom to be gained about ourselves and each other in all of the products of mass production and consumption. On this blog, we can reflect together on that wisdom (as we have done in our new book) and on everything popular, from the sublime to ridiculous.
