Popular culture is the entirety of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.
Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and dumbed-down in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result, it comes under heavy criticism from various non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted.
Read more about Popular Culture: History and Definitions, Self-reference, See Also
Other articles related to "culture, popular culture, popular":
... Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated ... He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population ... Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no ...
... Moorhead's pioneer Prairie Home Cemetery on 8th Street is often cited as the inspiration for the name of Garrison Keillor's national radio program, A Prairie Home Companion. ...
... phrase sometimes appears in other ways, including as a popular song written in 1935 by Johnny Mercer and Matty Malneck ...
... On the popular 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life, Peekskill was the location of two fictional educational institutions Eastland School for Girls and Langley College ...
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, culture and/or popular:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Asia is rich in people, rich in culture and rich in resources. It is also rich in trouble.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)