Popular culture

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 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.

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 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 locomotive and 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 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 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 ukulele, 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 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).

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.