Misfit to Mainstream

In Fred Turner's article Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy, he talks about different ideas and inventions that start out as counterculture that are later packaged an evolved to fit mainstream media, and new economic practices. His article reminded me of a lot of different movements and ideas that started as pure that were later packaged and reshaped by the machine of society and turned into popular culture. An example he touches on, but doesn't necessarily address in the same way, is the hippie movement in the 1960's. What started as a small counter cultural movement in the periphery of the spectrum, was later packaged into a style and a particular fashion that ended up in many people's eyes defining the decade. The ideas of the first people in the movement started out pure, but was later mudded up and packaged into mainstream popular culture, through advertising and other social and economical means. I see the transformation from misfit to mainstream in movements and inventions like this as a change because of the fear that society has of counter culture and peripheral movements, that could create conflict in mainstream society. In today's age, it seems that counter cultural ideas and movements can more rapidly be transformed into artifacts of popular culture and of mainstream society, because of the ability to communicate online. Information accurate and inaccurate can be massively dispersed, and disseminated to all quarters of the globe through internet technologies, and now the huge popularity of social media technologies online. It is hard to find any artifact of our current culture that remains pure in it's ideas and remains uninfluenced by advertising and the popular culture machine.