Popular culture

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Popular culture, or pop culture, is the vernacular (people's) culture that prevails in any given society. The content of popular culture is determined by the daily interactions, needs and desires, and cultural 'moments' that make up the everyday lives of the mainstream. It can include any number of practices, including those pertaining to cooking, clothing, mass media and the many facets of entertainment such as sports and literature.

Culture, as a way of defining ones self, needs to attract people's interest and persuade them to invest a part of themselves in it. People like to feel a part of a tribe and understand their identity within that tribe. This works well in small communities and people feel needed and special in their small world. Mass culture however lets people define themselves in relation to everybody else in mass society. In a sense it 'makes the ball park a lot bigger' and we have to fight harder to find and keep our identity.

1 18th and 19th century popular culture
2 20th and early 21st century popular culture
3 Sources
4 Criticism
5 Word pun
6 References to popular culture in popular culture
7 See also
8 External links

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18th and 19th century popular culture

The growth of modern industry from the late 18th Century onward led to massive urbanization in many Western countries and the rise of new great cities in Europe, America, Australia and other regions as economic opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities and the developing world to rich cities. This urbanization, combined with increased literacy, improvements in education and public health, and new technology, provided the socioeconomic bases of modern popular culture.

Playing a vital role in this process were developments in transportation, such as the steam locomotive and the steamship, which enabled both cultural products and their performers, producers and consumers to be distributed further, faster and more widely than ever before. Related advances in building technology saw the construction of the first large-scale public exhibition spaces (e.g. the Crystal Palace) and ground-breaking public events such as the famous Great Exhibition of 1851.

During the late 18th and 19th centuries, entirely new genres of popular culture arose from the many new forms of communication that appeared and proliferated. These include the illustrated newspaper and magazine, the novel, printed sheet music, political pamphlets, the postcard, the greeting card, children's books, commercial catalogues, photography, and the phonograph.

Developments in the print industry during the 19th century — notably the advent of the illustrated newspapers and the periodical magazine — led to the appearance of many new genres of text-based popular culture, including the detective story, the serialized novel (e.g. Charles Dickens and the pioneering science fiction of authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells), as well as the mass-market book genre nicknamed the "Penny Dreadful", which later evolved into the pulp fiction genre. These innovations also created new categories of work and employment, such as the commercial artist, the journalist and the photographer.

Facilitated by law reform and changes in social attitudes, newspapers and periodicals began to feature new forms of social reportage and commentary, such as the editorial, the gossip column and the first works of investigative journalism. The invention of the telegraph allowed newspapers to gather news and other information more rapidly and widely than ever before, enabling the rise of the daily newspaper and the news agency.

The performing arts likewise underwent radical changes in this period, with the emergence of many new genres including modern grand opera, comic opera and operetta, vaudeville and music hall entertainment. The invention of gas-lighting revolutionized the theatre and made regular night-time mass entertainment a practical reality.

Music, at all levels of culture, was also drastically reshaped by new technology and techniques: the mass-production of musical instruments such as the guitar, the banjo, the ukulele, the harmonica and the pianoforte (soon followed by the player piano and reproducing piano); the invention of the saxophone; the evolution of the symphony orchestra; the standardization of concert pitch; and the advent of cheap printed sheet music.

The two most profoundly influential developments in this entire period were without doubt the invention of the collodion 'wet-plate' process of photography in 1851 and the invention of the phonograph ca. 1878. Printing, photography and recorded sound provided the practical basis for a significant part of popular culture in the 20th century.

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20th and early 21st century popular culture

In modern urban mass societies, popular culture has been crucially shaped by the development of industrial mass production, the introduction of new technologies of sound and image broadcasting and recording, and the growth of mass media industries -- the film, broadcast radio and television, and the book publishing industries, as well as the print and electronic 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 those 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. Some argue that broad-appeal items dominate popular culture because profit-making companies that produce and sell items of popular culture attempt to maximize their profits by emphasizing broadly appealing items. (see culture industry) And yet the situation is more complex. To take the example of popular music, it is not the case that the music industry can impose any product they wish. In fact, highly popular types of music have often first been elaborated in small, counter-cultural circles (punk rock or rap would be two examples).

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Sources

Popular culture has multiple origins. A principal source is the set of industries that make profit by inventing and promulgating cultural material. These include the popular music, film, television, radio, video game, and book and comic book publishing industries.

A second and very different source of popular culture is folklore. In pre-industrial times, the only mass culture was folk culture. This earlier layer of culture still persists today, sometimes in the form of jokes or slang, which spread through the population by word of mouth and the Internet. This has, by providing a new channel for transmission, renewed the strength of this element of popular culture.

Although the folkloric element of popular culture is heavily engaged with the commercial element, the public has its own tastes and it may not embrace every cultural item sold. Moreover, beliefs and opinions about the products of commercial culture (e.g. "My favorite character is SpongeBob SquarePants") are spread by word of mouth, and are modified in the process just as 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. These include the news media, and scientific and scholarly communities. The work of scientists and scholars is mined by the news media and conveyed to the general public, often emphasizing "factoids" that have inherent appeal or the power to amaze. For instance, 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 popular transmission, often to the point of outright falsehoods. At this point, they become known as urban legends. Other urban myths may have no factual basis at all, having been simply made up for fun.

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Criticism

Popular culture, being so widely available, has been opened to much criticism. One charge is that popular culture tends to be superficial. Cultural items that require extensive experience, training, or reflection to be appreciated seldom become items of popular culture. Another claims that popular culture is rooted more in sensationalism than reality. Popular culture is often pushed by corporations to produce public consumerism. A critique from some marxists is that the divisions created from popular cultures separates the working class.

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Word pun

'Pop' culture is also a humouristic 'euphemism' for physical punishment, as pop is also an onomatopoeia for a swat or lick given with an implement, as in the title of this article on CorPun.

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