Gossip Girl

For this blog post, I chose to talk about the show Gossip Girl.  This show is about families that live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  Most of these families are very rich, and look down on people that aren’t in their social class.  The episodes that I watched dealt with three key themes that were money, gossip, and secrets.

Money

The cultural stereotype that I found in this show that dealt with money is that you have to be rich if you want to be happy.  This is a key theme in all of the episodes of this show because it frequently shows rich people getting whatever they want, and others being jealous of them.  It also shows how important money is to them and the people that don’t have much of it are never invited to their social gatherings.  In the book, it says “Stereotypes are powerful because they function to tell us how “we” value and judge these other groups” (Martin & Nakayama, p. 373).  This is shown by how the people that are rich judge the people that aren’t very badly.

Gossip

Another cultural stereotype that I found in Gossip Girl is that spreading gossip about your friends will make you feel better about yourself.  In this show, people constantly throw their friends under the bus again and again.  After they do this, they tend to be really happy and feel better about themselves.

Secrets

The last cultural stereotype that I found in Gossip Girl is that every family has secrets to hide.  This is shown time and time again by them not wanting their secrets to get out to the public.  They all have these huge secrets that would hurt others if they found out.  The clip below shows the biggest secret of the whole show, who Gossip Girl is, coming out (Soares, 2012, December 18).

Watching episodes of this show taught me a lot about cultural stereotypes.  I think that a lot of people watch this show because they want the life that the people in this show have.  It shows how important class is. Moving forward, I hope that people realize that money isn’t everything. 

References

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2012). Intercultural communication in contexts (6th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill. 

Soares, L. (2012, December 18).  Gossip Girl is Revealed. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbBBV2PFM6w