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Popular culture

Popular culture, or pop culture, is the vernacular(people's) culturethat 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 livesof the mainstream. It can include any number of practices, including those pertaining to cooking, clothing, mass mediaand the many facets of entertainmentsuch as sportsand literature.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1 18th and 19th century popular culture
2 20th and early 21st century popular culture
3 Sources
4 Criticism
5 Word pun
6 See also

18th and 19th century popular culture

The growth of modern industryfrom the late 18th Centuryonward led to massive urbanizationin many Western countries and the rise of new great citiesin 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 socio-economic bases of modern popular culture.

Playing a vital role in this process were developments in transportation, such as the steam locomotiveand 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 Exhibitionof 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 newspaperand 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 industryduring 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 Dickensand the pioneering science fictionof authors like Jules Verneand 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 journalistand 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 columnand the first works of investigative journalism. The invention of the telegraphallowed 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 operaand operetta, vaudevilleand music hallentertainment. The invention of gaslightingrevolutionised 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 harmonicaand the pianoforte(soon followed by the player pianoand 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 photographyin 1851and the invention of the phonographca. 1878. Printing, photography and recorded sound provided the practical basis for a significant part of popular culture in the 20th century.

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 mediaindustries -- the film, broadcastradioand television, and the book publishingindustries, 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 productand 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 peoplewill have a strong interest in an area of which the mainstreampopular culture is only partially aware; thus, for example, the electro-pop group Kraftwerkhas "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).

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 bookand comic book publishingindustries.

A second and very different source of popular culture is folklore. In preindustrial times, the only mass culturewas folk culture. This earlier layer of culture still persists today, sometimes in the form of jokesor slang, which spread through the population by word of mouthand 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 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. 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 pandasare 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.

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 sensationalismthan reality. Popular culture is often pushed by corporationsto produce public consumerism.

Word pun

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