Popular culture
From Freepedia
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 everyday interactions, needs and desires, the cultural 'moments' that make up our everyday lives. It can include any number of practices such as knitting, cooking, chopping wood, storytelling, playing cards and throwing or kicking a ball.
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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 new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas and from poor to rich nations. Increased literacy, improvements in education and public health, new industrial and scientific technology and rapidly increasing urbanisation provided the socio-economic bases of popular culture as we know it today.
Developments in transport also played a vital role in this process, with the advent of the steam locomotive and the steamship enabling 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 serialised 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 populist 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 gaslighting revolutionised 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 ukelele, 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 standardisation 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.
20th 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 technolgies 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 interactions 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)
Criticism
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. Contrary to its term, Pop culture is often at the leading edge of culture--adopted by cultural mavens or alphas--then adopted later by the laggards of the mainstream.
Sources
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 SpongeBob SquarePants") 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"). Clearly, many urban myths have no factual origin at all, and were simply made up for fun.
