Popular Entertainment

Culture, as a way of defining oneself, 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.

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 entered art in the early 1960s, through Pop Art.

WHAT POPULAR CULTURE IS, AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND IT

One of the curious things about popular culture is that, though almost everybody spends his life immersed in it, nobody seems able to agree on what it is. We glance at the comics daily. That's popular culture. We watch television a good deal. (Statistics reveal the average family television set is on about five hours a day.) That's a heavy dose of popular culture. We go to the movies, buy rock and roll music, eat snacks, and dress in certain ways. All of this is popular culture.

Some people make a distinction between popular arts, such as detective stories, westerns, and situation comedies, and mass media, such as radio, television, film, newspapers and magazines. But since so much of the media is full of the popular arts, the distinction between the two doesn't seem to be that important.

Some people talk about mass culture, which suggests they are interested in the "culture" of the ordinary man (as contrasted with the "high culture" of the elite). But the title of an important collection of articles on mass culture, published in the mid-fifties, was Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, which suggests that mass culture and the popular arts are the same thing.

Popular culture is broader than the popular arts. It is the culture of the people -- their behavior, values, and, in particular, their entertainments, and not just certain art forms which appeal to large numbers of people. Perhaps the best thing to do is to indicate what popular culture generally is not. It is not the classic works of literature and philosophy, though curiously enough much popular culture is related directly to the same myths as Greek tragedy, for instance. It is not highly sophisticated art which appeals only to a person of highly cultivated and discriminating tastes. This kind of person may enjoy modern poetry as well as roller derby and professional football, but the average roller derby and football fan probably doesn't enjoy esoteric poetry or the novels of Henry James.

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).

WORD PUN

'''Pop' culture'' is also a humouristic 'euphemism' for .

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 Joke s 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 " Factoid s" that have inherent appeal or the power to amaze. For instance, Giant Panda s 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 Legend s. Other urban myths may have no factual basis at all, having been simply made up for fun.

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 of all individuals.

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Popular Entertainment