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Popular culture

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Culture and Diversity;
Everyday life

   Popular culture, or pop culture, (literally: "the culture of the
   people") consists of the cultural elements that prevail (at least
   numerically) in any given society, mainly using the more popular media,
   in that society's vernacular language and/or an established lingua
   franca. It results from 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. (Compare meme.) Popular culture often
   contrasts with a more exclusive, even elitist " high culture".

   If one regards culture as a way of defining oneself (an extremely
   individualist approach), a culture needs to attract the interest of
   people (potential members) and to persuade them to invest a part of
   themselves in it. People like to feel a part of a group and to
   understand their cultural identity within that group, which tends to
   happen naturally in a small, somewhat isolated community. Mass culture,
   however, lets people define themselves in relation to everybody else in
   mass society at the level of a city, a country, an international
   community (such as a wide-spread language, a former colonial empire, a
   religion...) or even of a whole planet.

   Pop culture finds its expression in the mass circulation of items from
   areas such as fashion, music, sport and film. The world of pop culture
   had a particular influence on art from the early 1960s, through Pop
   Art.

Popular culture in the 20th and early-21st centuries

   Popular culture can describe even contemporary popular culture as just
   the aggregate product of industrial developments; instead, contemporary
   Western popular culture results from a continuing interaction between
   those industries and those who consume their products(Bennett 1980,
   p.153-218). distinguishes between 'primary' and 'secondary' popular
   culture, defining primary popular culture as mass product and secondary
   popular culture as local re-production.jkjkjh

   Popular culture changes constantly and occurs uniquely in 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 has only partial awareness; 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). But that may over-simplify the
   issue. To take the example of popular music: the music industry can
   impose any product they wish. In fact, highly popular types of music
   have often first evolved in small, counter-cultural circles ( punk rock
   and rap provide two examples).

   Since World War II a significant shift in pop culture has taken place:
   from the production of culture to the consumption of culture.
   Commentators have noted that those in power exploit consumers to do
   more of the work themselves (for example, do-it-yourself checkout
   lines), and advertising on television, movies, radio, and in other
   places helps those in power to guide consumers towards what those in
   power consider needed or important.

   Popular culture has multiple origins. In conditions of modernity the
   set of industries that make profit by inventing and promulgating
   cultural material have become a principal source. These industries
   include those of:
     * popular music
     * film
     * television
     * radio
     * video games
     * book publishing
     * internet
     * comics

   Folklore provides a second and very different source of popular
   culture. In pre-industrial times, mass culture equaled 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 via the Internet. By providing a new channel for
   transmission, cyberspace has renewed the strength of this element of
   popular culture.

   Although the folkloric element of popular culture engages heavily 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 (for example: "My favorite character
   is SpongeBob SquarePants") spread by word-of-mouth, and become modified
   in the process in the same manner that folklore evolves.

   A different source of popular culture lies in the set of professional
   communities that provide the public with facts about the world,
   frequently accompanied by interpretation, usually as vulgarisation,
   i.e. adapted for consumption by the public at large (which may lack the
   training to appreciate academic language). Such communities include the
   news media, and scientific and scholarly communities. The news media
   mines the work of scientists and scholars and conveys it to the general
   public, often emphasizing " factoids" that have inherent appeal or the
   power to amaze. For instance, giant pandas (a species in remote Chinese
   woodlands) have become well-known items of popular culture; parasitic
   worms, though of greater practical importance, have not.

   Both scholarly facts and news stories get 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 simply originated as jokes.

Criticisms of popular culture

   Given its wide availability, popular culture has attracted much
   criticism.

   Some charge that popular culture tends to endorse a limited
   understanding and experience of life through common, unsophisticated
   feelings and attitudes and its emphasis on the banal, the superficial,
   the capricious and the disposable. Critics may also claim that popular
   culture stems more from sensationalism and narcissistic
   wish-fulfillment fantasies than from soberly considered reality and
   mature personal and spiritual development. Cultural items that require
   extensive experience, education, training, taste, insight or reflection
   for their fuller appreciation seldom become items of popular culture.

   Corporations and advertisers have acquired a reputation for pushing
   popular memes in order to generate the mass consumption of their
   products and services. Some Marxists complain that popular culture —
   and its implied insistence on a necessary causal relationship between
   consumption and self-actualization — perpetuates pernicious,
   deep-seated social and economic divisions which alienate the working
   class from the ruling professional and leisure classes and result in
   general discontent and a diminished quality and enjoyment of life for
   all (compare situationism).

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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