Chapter 13: Power Personified: Graduate Students Negotiating Hollywood Education

Popular culture has an increasing influence on how people view their worlds and themselves. The hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1983) structuring our approaches and responses to our current state of information overload opens the door for corporations “to sell the system, to justify consumption as a way of life” (Kincheloe, 1997, p. 257). Because we are subsequently trained through this hyperreal mindset to consume the “real” in this manner, the consumption of images of education, teachers, students, and schools in America as real is a part of this process. Therefore, it becomes paramount to engage in learning and mobilizing critical media literacy in the face of this hyperreality, not only to navigate educational institutions but also our everyday lives.