Popular culture, or pop
culture, is the vernacular (people's) culture that prevails in a modern society. The content of popular culture is determined in large part by
industries that disseminate cultural material, for example the film, television, and publishing
industries, as well as the news media. But popular culture cannot be described as just the aggregate product
of those industries; instead, it is the result of a continuing interaction
between those industries and the people of the society who consume their
products. Bennett (1980, p.153-218) distinguishes between 'primary' and
'secondary' popular culture, the first being mass product and the second being
local re-production.
Popular culture is constantly changing and is specific to place and
time. It forms currents and eddies, in the sense that a small group of people
will have a strong interest in an area of which the mainstream popular culture
is only partially aware; thus, for example, the electro-pop group Kraftwerk has
"impinged on mainstream popular culture to the extent that they have been
referenced in The Simpsons and Father Ted."
Items of popular culture most typically appeal to a broad spectrum of
the public; it is only occasionally that they are esoteric, as
for instance in freemasonry.
There are two reasons why broad-appeal items dominate popular culture. First,
profit-making companies that produce and sell items of popular culture attempt
to maximize their profits by emphasizing broadly appealing items. Second,
popular culture apparently is governed by the "meme"
effect, promulgated by Richard Dawkins. This is a form of natural selection: the items of popular culture which are most likely to survive are
those which have the broadest appeal and thus propagate themselves most
effectively.
A widely held opinion about popular culture is that it tends to be
superficial. Cultural items that require extensive experience, training, or
reflection to be appreciated seldom become items of popular culture.
Popular culture has multiple origins. A principal source is the set of
industries that make a profit by inventing and promulgating cultural material.
These include the popular music industry, film, television, radio, video game
publishers, and book
publishing.
A second and very different source of popular culture is the folkloric
element. In preindustrial times, the only culture was folk culture, and popular
culture did not exist. This earlier layer of culture still persists today, for
example in the form of jokes or slang,
which spread through the population by word of mouth much as they always have.
The rise of the Internet has
provided a new channel of folkloric transmission, and thus has given renewed
strength to this element of popular culture.
The folkloric element of popular culture is heavily engaged with the
commercial element; indeed popular culture might be defined as the kind of folkloric
culture that arises under heavy commercial influence. To the repeated chagrin
of the purveyors of commercial culture, the public has its own tastes, and it
cannot always be predicted which cultural items sold to it will be successful
and thus form the next ingredient of popular culture. Moreover, beliefs and
opinions about the products of commercial culture (e.g. "My favorite
character is Homer Simpson") are spread by word of mouth, and are modified in the process
just as all folklore is.
A different source of popular culture is the set of professional
communities that provide the public with facts about the world, frequently
accompanied by interpretation. This includes the news media, as well as the scientific and scholarly communities. The work of
scientists and scholars is mined by the news media and promulgated to the
general public, often emphasizing "factoids" that have the power to
amaze, or other items with an inherent appeal. To give an example, giant pandas are
prominent items of popular culture; parasitic worms, though of greater practical importance, are not.
Both scholarly facts and news stories are modified through folkloric
transmission, sometimes to the point of being transformed to outright
falsehoods, known as urban myths
(example: "the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow"). Doubtless
many urban myths have no factual origin at all, and were simply made up for
fun.
The creative workers in commercial music, film, and television, for
example script writers, are of course themselves members of the culture at
large; in fact, usually they are highly attuned members. As a result, there
often arises a kind of feedback loop, as the folkloric side of the popular
culture serves as an input to the commercial side.
To give an example: stereotypes about African-Americans, which are widespread in American popular culture, form an important
(and in the view of many, regrettable) influence on movies with
African-American characters. These movies then propagate the stereotypes
further, perhaps in exaggerated form.
A more harmless example is given above: it seems likely that the script
writers for The Simpsons learned about Kraftwerk folklorically, by word of mouth from their friends and acquaintances.
They then propagated the fame of this group to millions of others by mentioning
it in a Simpsons script.
Although popular culture is not especially prestigious, it nevertheless
gives rise to interesting and important questions, for example, how it spreads
or what traits are needed for a particular items to become a part of popular
culture. For this reason, popular culture is studied by scholars, who invoke
the usual apparatus of the scholarly association (e.g. the Popular Culture Association) and the scholarly journal (e.g. the Journal of Popular Culture). For a survey on different positions scholars have traditionally taken
to popular culture, see popular culture studies.
The Wikipedia,
written by amateur editors on a volunteer basis, has grown to include an
enormous amount of specific information about contemporary popular culture,
with articles on individual works of popular culture, their creators, their
technology, and their fictional characters. It illustrates that the
participants in a popular culture (a characterization that would include
essentially all citizens of developed nations, and all Wikipedia editors)
mentally retain a huge store of facts and aesthetic judgements about the
popular culture to which they have been exposed. It also illustrates a
particular value of the Wikipedia, since conventional encyclopedias generally
do not contain this sort of information, despite its clear relevance to
understanding the contemporary state of humankind.
This is an alphabetical list of people-or groups- that have been
recognized as teen idols,
either by an international or domestic teenage fan base, over the decades.
http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/P/Popular-culture.htm
.
Popular culture studies is
the academic discipline studying popular culture. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies. Academic discussions on popular culture started as soon as contemporary
mass society
formed itself, and the views on popular culture that were developed then, still
influence contemporary popular culture studies.