Popular culture

Popular culture (also called mass culture and pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of the practices, beliefs and objects that are dominant or ubiquitous in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. Heavily influenced in lives of people in a given society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain topics. However, there are various ways to define pop culture. Because of this, popular culture is something that can be defined in a variety of conflicting ways by different people across different contexts. It is generally viewed in contrast to other forms of culture such as folk culture, working-class culture, or high culture, and also through different theoretical perspectives such as psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, and more. The most common pop-culture categories are: entertainment (such as movies, music, television and video games), sports, news (as in people/places in the news), politics, fashion, technology, and slang.Pop Culture-although big, mercurial, and slippery to define-is really an umbrella term that covers anything currently in fashion, all or most of whose ingredients are familiar to the public-at-large. The new dances are a perfect example... Pop Art itself may mean little to the average man, but its vocabulary...is always familiar.It is tempting to confuse pop music with popular music. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the musicologist's ultimate reference resource, identifies popular music as the music since industrialization in the 1800s that is most in line with the tastes and interests of the urban middle class. This would include an extremely wide range of music from vaudeville and minstrel shows to heavy metal. Pop music, on the other hand, has primarily come into usage to describe music that evolved out of the rock 'n roll revolution of the mid-1950s and continues in a definable path to today. Popular culture (also called mass culture and pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of the practices, beliefs and objects that are dominant or ubiquitous in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. Heavily influenced in lives of people in a given society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain topics. However, there are various ways to define pop culture. Because of this, popular culture is something that can be defined in a variety of conflicting ways by different people across different contexts. It is generally viewed in contrast to other forms of culture such as folk culture, working-class culture, or high culture, and also through different theoretical perspectives such as psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, and more. The most common pop-culture categories are: entertainment (such as movies, music, television and video games), sports, news (as in people/places in the news), politics, fashion, technology, and slang. Popular culture is sometimes viewed by many people as being trivial and 'dumbed down' in order to find consensual acceptance from (or to attract attention amongst) the mainstream. As a result, it comes under heavy criticism from various non-mainstream sources (most notably from religious groups and from countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, or corrupt. The term 'popular culture' was coined in the 19th century or earlier. Traditionally, popular culture was associated with poor education and the lower classes, as opposed to the 'official culture' and higher education of the upper classes. Victorian era Britain experienced social changes that resulted in increased literacy rates, and with the rise of capitalism and industrialisation, people began to spend more money on entertainment. Labelling penny dreadfuls the Victorian equivalent of video games, The Guardian described penny fiction as 'Britain's first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young.' A growing consumer culture and an increased capacity for travel via the invention of railway (the first public railway, Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened in north-east England in 1825) created both a market for cheap popular literature, and the ability for it to be circulated on a large scale. The first penny serials were published in the 1830s to meet this demand. The stress in the distinction from 'official culture' became more pronounced towards the end of the 19th century, a usage that became established by the interbellum period. From the end of World War II, following major cultural and social changes brought by mass media innovations, the meaning of popular culture began to overlap with those of mass culture, media culture, image culture, consumer culture, and culture for mass consumption. Social and cultural changes in the United States were a pioneer in this with respect to other western countries. The abbreviated form 'pop' for popular, as in pop music, dates from the late 1950s. Although terms 'pop' and 'popular' are in some cases used interchangeably, and their meaning partially overlap, the term 'pop' is narrower. Pop is specific of something containing qualities of mass appeal, while 'popular' refers to what has gained popularity, regardless of its style. According to author John Storey, there are various definitions of popular culture. The quantitative definition of culture has the problem that much 'high culture' (e.g., television dramatizations of Jane Austen) is also 'popular.' 'Pop culture' is also defined as the culture that is 'left over' when we have decided what high culture is. However, many works straddle the boundaries, e.g., William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. A third definition equates pop culture with 'mass culture' and ideas. This is seen as a commercial culture, mass-produced for mass consumption by mass media. From a Western European perspective, this may be compared to American culture. Alternatively, 'pop culture' can be defined as an 'authentic' culture of the people, but this can be problematic as there are many ways of defining the 'people.' Storey argued that there is a political dimension to popular culture; neo-Gramscian hegemony theory '... sees popular culture as a site of struggle between the 'resistance' of subordinate groups in society and the forces of 'incorporation' operating in the interests of dominant groups in society.' A postmodernist approach to popular culture would 'no longer recognize the distinction between high and popular culture.' Storey claims that popular culture emerged from the urbanization of the Industrial Revolution. Studies of Shakespeare (by Weimann, Barber, or Bristol, for example) locate much of the characteristic vitality of his drama in its participation in Renaissance popular culture, while contemporary practitioners like Dario Fo and John McGrath use popular culture in its Gramscian sense that includes ancient folk traditions (the commedia dell'arte for example).