Essay On Popularity

“Popularity is not measured by quality, it’s measured in quantity” -Unknown. The book Popular by Mitch Prinstein is a book based off of “the power of likeability in a power obsessed world”. Popular talks about how society puts labels on people and gives them a popularity image from a young age to adults. Popularity has had a drastic change within the last few years. The way it's viewed, how society portrays it, and the actual definition of “popular” has become a different type of label compared to what it was known as years ago.
Popularity is most commonly viewed to be viewed as something that is developed in middle school or high school and fades as people grow older. High schools now are very divided based on social status. In many schools, this is determined based on the involvement of a person or how outgoing they are. However, in the introduction of Popular, Prinstein states that in early childhood, the social hierarchy for popularity has already been established. This is developed as early as first grade and will last until one is dead. Popularity has become a general judgement on how people are viewed and therefore how they will be …show more content…
The actual definition can be difficult to find because of the different types and ways for the word. There are 2 types of popularity described in this book, likeability and status. The author used a story about Joe and Franklin. Both of them had the same exact position at this job. The story was based off of the idea of likeability. Franklin had a very strong worth ethic and did most of the work for the company. However, nobody in the company cared for him and always disagreed with his ideas. However, Joe had done no work at all and was loved by all of the other workers. The company chose to promote Joe even though he didn’t do any work. This shows how likeability is such an important factor in current