The Meaning Of Popular Culture: What Is Popular Culture?

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What is popular culture?

“An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people.” (Storey, 2009:5) The aim of this essay is to explore the meaning of popular culture. By drawing upon the research of scholars such as John Storey, Jim McGuigan, and Carl B. Holmberg the essay will primarily focus on is the different ways popular culture can be interpreted rather than just being something liked by the majority. To accompany this, the essay will look into the high culture/popular culture divide as well as the youth subcultures and convergence culture in a post-modern society as a way of trying to find an answer to the question ‘What …show more content…

“In more traditional definitions of the term, culture is said to embody the “best that has been thought and said” in a society (Hall, 1997: 2). When applying this to popular culture, the assumption that could be made is if something is consumed by many people such as products, ideas, and experiences, are “popular”. Popular culture can be derived from a range of genres such as sport, music, cyberculture, entertainment, and television. A way you could monitor aspects of popular culture is through the numbers including sales, watches, and participants. One example of this would be pop music. “The official UK Chart is calculated by both sales and streams, with a streaming ratio of 150:1 (Ditto, online 2018)” with the artist calculating the highest number being awarded the UK number 1 on a Friday. Faults can be found in this idea because whilst something could be popular with a majority, it doesn't take into account the ideas and views of the subcultures. Whilst something may be accessible and enjoyed by a majority, it does not mean that this idea/experience or product is the best overall, contradicting the claim Hall made previously. In addition to this, the idea of popular culture being liked by many can only go so far which Hall also looks into when introducing the interpretation that popular culture is “the culture that is left over after we decide what is high culture” (2009: 6). By this definition, popular culture is a residual category, an inferior culture, which is “there to accommodate texts and practices that fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture

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