Understanding Pop Culture: Definition, History, and Impact
Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, and objects that are dominant or prevalent 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. The primary driving force behind popular culture is mass appeal, and it is produced by what cultural analyst Theodor Adorno refers to as the “culture industry”. Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday 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 highly praised perspectives such as psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, and more.
Common Pop Culture Categories
- Entertainment: film, music, television, and video games
- Sports
- News: people and places in the news
- Politics
- Fashion
- Technology
- Slang
The countries commonly thought to have the most pop culture influence are the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Other countries, such as South Korea, China, Italy, and France, are also highly influential. Popular culture in the West has been critiqued for being a system of commercialism that privileges products selected and mass-marketed by the upper-class capitalist elite; such criticisms are most notable in many Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, as well as certain postmodern philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, who has written about the commercialization of information under capitalism, and Jean Baudrillard, as well as others.
The History of Pop Culture
Once upon a time, folk culture functioned analogously to the popular culture of the masses and of the nations. The phrase “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. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain experienced social changes that resulted in increased literacy rates. With the rise of capitalism and industrialization, people began to spend more money on entertainment, such as commercialized pubs and sports. Reading also gained traction. The Guardian, in 2016, 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 newly invented 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 its distribution on a large scale. The first penny serials were published in the 1830s to meet the growing 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 the connotations of “mass culture”, “media culture”, “image culture”, “consumer culture”, and “culture for mass consumption”. The abbreviated form “pop” for “popular”, as in “pop music”, dates from the late 1950s. Although the terms “pop” and “popular” are in some cases used interchangeably, and their meaning partially overlaps, 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.
Defining Pop Culture
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 “leftover” when we have decided what high culture is. However, many works straddle the boundaries, e.g., William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Orwell. 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.” Jean Baudrillard argued that the vague conception of “Public Opinion” is a subjective and inaccurate illusion that is more complicit in populism rather than in factuality, for it attributes a sovereignty to consumers that they do not really possess.