does pop culture have value essay

Essay on Pop Culture

Students are often asked to write an essay on Pop Culture in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Pop Culture

What is pop culture.

Pop culture means popular culture. It’s made up of ideas, images, attitudes, and creative works that are well-liked by many people. Pop culture includes music, movies, fashion, and slang. It’s what we see on TV, hear on the radio, and talk about with friends.

The Role of Media

Media, like television and the internet, plays a big role in spreading pop culture. They show us new trends and famous people. Social media platforms help us share and talk about pop culture with friends and even strangers.

Changes in Pop Culture

Pop culture is always changing. What was cool yesterday might not be cool today. New artists, technology, and ideas come in and change what we like and do. Pop culture keeps evolving with the times.

Impact on Society

Pop culture can influence how we dress, what we listen to, and how we act. Sometimes it can even shape our beliefs and opinions. It’s powerful because it reaches so many people and can bring them together.

Pop culture is a big part of our lives. It’s fun, always changing, and helps us connect with others. Understanding pop culture can help us understand the world around us better.

250 Words Essay on Pop Culture

Pop culture is the collection of ideas, images, and attitudes that are known by the mainstream of a society at a given time. It includes music, movies, fashion, technology, and slang. Pop culture is often seen as fun, easy to understand, and enjoyed by many people.

Music and Movies

In pop culture, music and movies are very important. Popular songs and films spread quickly and can be known by people all over the world. Artists like Taylor Swift or movies like “Avengers” are part of pop culture because they are widely recognized and shared.

Fashion and Technology

What we wear and the gadgets we use are also parts of pop culture. When a certain style of clothing or a new phone becomes popular, it becomes a trend. Many people follow these trends, which makes them a big part of pop culture.

Social Media’s Role

Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok help spread pop culture. They let people share pictures, videos, and thoughts quickly. This helps new trends and ideas become popular very fast.

Why Pop Culture Matters

Pop culture is important because it brings people together. It gives them something to talk about and enjoy with each other. It can also show what a society thinks is important at a certain time. Pop culture is like a mirror that reflects what people in a society like and think about.

500 Words Essay on Pop Culture

Pop culture is short for popular culture. It includes all the ideas, images, trends, and objects that are liked by many people. Think about the music you hear on the radio, the shows you watch on TV, the latest fashion trends, or the newest viral video everyone shares. These are all examples of pop culture. It is a mirror that shows what a lot of people are interested in at a certain time.

Music and movies are huge parts of pop culture. They can bring people together and make them feel all sorts of emotions. When a song becomes a hit, it’s because lots of people enjoy listening to it and it often gets stuck in their heads. Movies that are popular can make people laugh, cry, or sit on the edge of their seats. Sometimes, the characters from these movies become so loved that they appear on T-shirts, lunchboxes, and all sorts of things.

Fashion and Style

What we wear is also a big piece of pop culture. The clothes that are in style change all the time. One day, everyone might be wearing bright colors, and the next, it could be all about black and white. Fashion is not just about clothes, though. It’s also about hairstyles, shoes, and even the kind of backpacks kids carry to school. When a famous person wears something new or different, often many people want to wear the same thing.

Technology and Social Media

Technology, like smartphones and tablets, has become a part of everyone’s life. It changes how we talk to our friends, how we play games, and how we learn new things. Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are where a lot of pop culture spreads. These are places where people can share pictures, videos, and ideas with others, and where new trends often start.

Sports and Games

Sports stars and the games people play are also important in pop culture. When a sports team wins a big game, they can become heroes to many people. Video games are just as important. Some games become so popular that millions of people play them. They can even be a way for people to make new friends and learn about teamwork.

Pop culture is important because it brings people together. It gives them something to talk about and share with each other. It can also show what a society values and what it finds interesting or funny. Sometimes, pop culture can even lead to important changes in society by discussing big ideas and problems in a way that is easy for many people to understand.

In conclusion, pop culture is all around us. It’s in the music we listen to, the movies we watch, the clothes we wear, and the games we play. It helps shape who we are and how we see the world. Pop culture is like a big conversation that everyone is a part of, and it helps us connect with each other in fun and meaningful ways.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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What is Popular Culture and How It Impacts The Society

Categories: Pop Culture

About this sample

Words: 1737 |

Published: Jul 10, 2019

Words: 1737 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

Introduction: what is popular culture, impacts of pop culture in the society today, works cited:.

Bartz, G. K. (1997). Michelangelo: The complete sculpture, painting, architecture. Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Bull, G. (2020). Michelangelo: A life in six masterpieces. Penguin.
Campbell, S. (2005). Michelangelo: critical studies. Wiley-Blackwell.
Cole, B. (1992). Italian art, 1250-1550: The relation of Renaissance art to life and society. HarperCollins Publishers.
Condivi, A. (2005). The life of Michelangelo. Penn State Press.
Goffen, R. (1999). Pieta, in Michelangelo's Three Pietas: http://www3.nd.edu/~ggoiffon/htdocs/papers/pieta.html
Harris, B. (1998). Michelangelo's David: Florentine history and civic identity. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 61, 1-54.
Mundy, J. (1996). Michelangelo. Bantam.
Parker, H. (2016). Michelangelo: Complete works. Taschen.
Seymour, C. (2012). Michelangelo’s sculptures: The finest quality cast reproductions. Titan Books.

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Pop-Culture Power

By Rachel E. Teixeira (’22) in the Fall 2021 Issue

A photo of a man with black glasses and a paisley shirt balances a boom box on his shoulder.

Communications professor Scott H. Church (BA ’05) liked the ’80s before it was cool. One of his favorite TV shows is Freaks and Geeks , a cult classic about high schoolers in the 1980s.

The show made him laugh—and helped him navigate challenging experiences. That’s the power of entertainment we love, says Church, who’s turned pastime into academic pursuit, researching and teaching about pop culture .

How do you define popular culture?

A: Popular culture is entertainment for the masses: movies, TV shows, music. But pop culture is also hairstyles, outfits, even buildings. It’s so prevalent that references work their way into our lexicon. Tell someone, “May the Force be with you,” and they’ll catch the Star Wars reference—even if they haven’t seen the saga.

What are the benefits of pop culture?

A: Pop culture adds more to our lives than an escape from boredom. Authentic portrayals of events and people make us more empathetic, exposing us to new perspectives and building bridges. It can be cathartic, helping us purge strong emotions and work through past experiences. It also helps us connect: you see someone wearing a T-shirt with your favorite band, and you think, “Okay, we’re kindred spirits.“

Does pop culture have a dark side?

A: We consider it mere entertainment, which gives pop culture power to persuade us to accept messages we wouldn’t otherwise consider. Pop culture can define our perceptions of what is normal and abnormal, what is funny and not funny, what is beautiful and not beautiful. If we aren’t careful, it can influence our attitudes, values, beliefs, and judgments negatively.

How can we make sure that our entertainment influences us for good?

A: Be willing to think critically about your entertainment. What questions does it raise? What impact does it have on you? As a father of five young daughters, I am always mindful of the standards of morality promoted by what we consume as a family. I also try to vet my personal entertainment on sites like Rotten Tomatoes to make sure it’s worth my time.

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Hospitality Industry

Society's values: Decoding the impact of pop culture on Hospitality

November 13, 2023 •

4 min reading

The intersection of hospitality and popular culture is a dynamic space where societal values, norms, and human interactions are vividly depicted and often critiqued. From television series to classic films, pop culture has consistently provided a mirror through which we can examine our own behaviors and beliefs. In this article, we'll explore how hospitality in pop culture serves as a reflection of society's ever-evolving ethos.

Hospitality venues are more than just background scenery

Imagine a world where the elegance of Spanish TV series "Grand Hotel" converges with the gritty allure of "Sweetbitter." Just as "Grand Hotel" provides a peek into the concealed intricacies of a luxury establishment, "Sweetbitter" immerses viewers in the rollercoaster life of Tess, a young woman navigating the intoxicating chaos of a prestigious New York restaurant.

Both places show the fine line between loyalty and deception blurring, and where the quest for success breeds moral dilemmas. These narratives, whether set in the polished hallways of a luxury hotel or the bustling atmosphere of a restaurant, invite us to recognize that hospitality venues are not mere backdrops; they are vibrant stages where tales of love, betrayal, and ambition play out behind closed doors.

Hospitality movies: exploring excess and luxury

In the world of cinema, narratives surrounding hospitality often serve as a reflection of society's values and the human experience. Take, for instance, "The Menu," "Triangle of Sadness," and "White Lotus." These films thrust viewers into the opulent realms of luxury, challenging societal norms and ethics.

"The Menu" delves into the gastronomic world, where culinary experiences border on the absurd, raising questions about the moral implications of indulgence. Meanwhile, "Triangle of Sadness" embarks on a tumultuous journey aboard a luxurious yacht, highlighting the excesses of the super-rich and the superficiality that accompanies lavish hospitality. As the characters navigate this world, their desires and insecurities come to the forefront.

"White Lotus" presents a contemporary exploration of luxury hospitality against the backdrop of a Hawaiian resort. The show dissects the complexities of social privilege and the simmering tensions that lie beneath paradise. In this setting, entitlement clashes with the often-invisible labor of the hotel staff, spotlighting societal inequalities.

Each of these narratives, while set within the lavish confines of luxury, offers a unique perspective on the human experience. They challenge us to examine our own values and desires, reminding us that hospitality is not just an industry but a mirror reflecting our ever-evolving ethos.

Similarly, the Thai Netflix series "HUNGER" introduces audiences to the culinary world through the eyes of a passionate street-food chef debuting in Bangkok’s trendiest restaurant. This series explores the passion for cooking and the pleasure in sharing the food. Viewers witness hospitality transcending high-end restaurants, with the informality of street-food allowing to share a meaningful experience.

Cultural identity: Pop culture as an educational vehicle

Hospitality in pop culture transcends the realms of service and comfort; it serves as a profound reflection of cultural identity and values. Take, for example, the cinematic masterpiece "The Hundred-Foot Journey," where the clash of Indian and French culinary cultures unfolds with the opening of an Indian restaurant in a picturesque French village. This culinary journey masterfully serves as a metaphor for the broader themes of cultural integration and acceptance. Within the tapestry of pop culture, encompassing films and TV shows, the exchange of hospitality is often a signifier of characters' cultural backgrounds, traditions, and deeply held values. These depictions, while entertaining, also possess the power to educate viewers about the richness of diverse cultures, fostering a deeper sense of cultural understanding and appreciation.

Turning to the intriguing interplay of gender in pop culture's hospitality narratives, we find a thought-provoking arena where media has the capacity to both challenge and reinforce gender stereotypes and expectations. In some instances, we witness female characters embracing commanding roles as hotel managers or chefs, boldly challenging traditional gender norms. However, the same media landscape can sometimes inadvertently perpetuate stereotypes, particularly in historical or period dramas where women are portrayed as subservient. This nuanced portrayal underscores the ongoing conversation around gender roles and the ways in which pop culture navigates and shapes these narratives.

Moreover, pop culture narratives skillfully harness hospitality settings as a vehicle to address pressing social issues, often leaving a lasting impact on audiences. A prime example is "Hotel Rwanda," a poignant film that recounts the heroic efforts of a hotel manager during the Rwandan genocide. This harrowing narrative underscores the paramount significance of compassion and humanity in times of unfathomable crisis. Furthermore, contemporary pop culture is progressively amplifying its engagement with critical social issues such as discrimination, diversity, and inclusion. By situating these complex challenges within a hospitality context, media captivates and involves viewers in compelling dialogues about equity and social justice, weaving these discussions into the very fabric of our cultural discourse.

Embracing innovation

Hospitality in pop culture reflects our society's values, challenges, and aspirations. It has the power to entertain, educate, and provoke critical conversations. As we consume and engage with pop culture narratives, let's approach them thoughtfully, recognizing the insights they offer into the ever-changing world of hospitality and the broader issues that shape our lives. As technology continues to transform our lives, it also influences how hospitality is depicted. With the rise of digital platforms, guests in pop culture often expect seamless experiences that blend the physical and digital realms. Pop culture will bring innovative portrayals of hospitality as it explores the implications of automation, artificial intelligence, and contactless service. These depictions will prompt discussions about the evolving role of human interaction in the hospitality industry.

In an era where pop culture reaches a global audience, the way we depict hospitality in media can contribute to a more inclusive and empathetic society. As we enjoy our favorite shows and movies, let's remain open to the lessons they provide about who we are and who we aspire to be in the realm of hospitality and beyond.

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Breaking the Academic Stigma Surrounding Pop Culture Studies

Joe darowski argues that pop culture can have as much literary value as traditional canon..

Funko Pop figurines and comic books—not what most people expect to see on a professor’s office shelf. But these are the tools of the trade for Professor Joe Darowski (English). The English Department’s recent decision to add Media and Culture Studies as one of the new English major tracks has sparked interest in the legitimacy of studying pop culture in a university setting. Dr. Darowski’s expertise in this area as an adjunct professor specializing in contemporary American pop culture and media studies gives him a unique perspective to comment on these debates. He believes that pop culture deserves to be seen as a legitimate academic field, and that students will find value in studying it at the university level.

What Does Pop Culture Contain?

Pop culture includes any mass-produced and mass-consumed entertainment. Darowski explains that academics who study pop culture apply the same critical and analytical skills and theories to pop culture objects such as graphic texts, film, and merchandise as they would apply to a traditional text.

Many cultural aspects of society disappear over time: clothing trends, current events, slang, types of humor, popular sentiment. Pop culture preserves those aspects like a time capsule, showing the culture of a specific time and place that mainstream media of the time often misses. Pop culture tends to address taboo topics and be more representative of what people really think. It also includes new forms of media that haven’t become commonly accepted yet, such as comic books, graphic novels, and slam poetry. The study of pop culture can reveal all this preserved information about society.

What Is the Debate Surrounding Pop Culture?

Many academics question if pop culture merits dedicated scholarship and teaching. There are always quite a few English classes that focus on classic works that have been granted a place in the Norton Anthology —Shakespeare, Chaucer and so on. Classes that teach about pop culture specifically are less common. Some scholars are hesitant to teach pop culture because of its popularity, implying that what is appealing to a large audience must not be technically difficult or worthy of deeper analysis.

Professor Jamie Horrocks (English) became interested in pop culture studies when Darowski moved into the office next to hers. When she heard that Darowski studied comic books she became curious about the academic legitimacy of Darowski’s work. Through many back-and-forth discussions, Dr. Horrocks came to accept the value of pop culture. She and her colleague Professor Dennis Cutchins (English) discussed the value of pop culture, and Horrocks brought up how all literature began as pop culture. She used the genre elevation of the novel as an example. The novel was not always the legitimate form of literature that we see it as today. Horrocks says, “Novels were so trashy. When the novel was first invented it was the equivalent of a TikTok video. But today they are the primary literary format genre.” In this same way, pop culture that we see as trashy today may become a respected piece of literature in the future.

Why Is Pop Culture Valuable?

Darowski says, “[Pop culture] is such a force in American culture that it would be strange not to talk about it. The sheer number of people watching Marvel movies is impressive. Such movies start to become deeply personal for fans through repeated viewing, cosplay, and so on. Trying to understand why those movies are resonating to that degree with audiences is worthwhile.”

In considering why pop culture is worth studying, Dr. Cutchins points out that Shakespeare wrote plays the common man could enjoy. Both Shakespeare and Chaucer were the great pop artists of their contemporary cultures, yet we still find their work has literary value today. Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (another pop culture icon) became American literary canon that we still study. Cutchins believes pop culture has an inherent value that is often obscured by its initial popularity.

Drawing an example of what he means from a classic Star Trek scene, Cutchins explains that “Spock returns to earth in our time (hundreds of years in his past) and sees a trashy novel, picks it up, and says, ‘Ah, the classics.’” A movie, comic book, or other form of pop culture may not be seen as valuable in the moment of its creation. But over time, it may rise in critical value. Darowski’s specialty is that he can see the value in a work at the time of its creation and popularity.

How Do We Measure Value?

Cutchins says, “It is bizarre and unaccountable how certain texts become important over time.” He explains that we measure the value of a piece of media in several ways, including the number of viewers, the profit generated, the time since creation, inclusion in literary anthologies, and the number of college courses taught about it. But how does the authority of seven million viewers stack up against the authority of the Norton Anthology ? Both indicate value in different spheres, academia versus public opinion, and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Some texts cross the divide and become both popular and seen as legitimate; for example, Maus is both a graphic novel and canonized in the Norton Anthology .

Darowski mentions how pop culture’s value can also be measured by what it teaches us about the time period of its creation. For example, why has Superman survived for over eighty years as a pop culture icon, and what does each new incarnation of his character say about us? Studying the Superman story told during World War II, the Superman story told during the Cold War, and the Superman story told post-September 11 reveals different values in each generation. Enduring stories share important messages about the people who perpetuate them, and these messages give pop culture value. Analyzing current pop culture can teach us valuable lessons about ourselves.

Why Should You Study Pop Culture?

When Darowski hands out his final paper assignment in his Writing 150 class, in which he emphasizes pop culture, he says, “There are probably a dozen different majors in this class. You are all going to do different things with your lives. I can’t give you a final assignment that is going to be applicable to every one of your majors, but most of you are going to go to a movie or watch TV again in your life after this. I’m giving you a tool set to think more deeply about the media that you are consuming, the entertainment you are choosing to pass your time with. I think that is a tool set everyone should have.”

Pop culture is everywhere—in our news media, film, music, advertising, local restaurants and grocery stores, on the radio, and in conversations with friends. So when you do come across pop culture, treat it like canonical literature, take a long look to see the nuanced messages it shares. You might be surprised at what you find.

You can learn more by listening to Joe Darowski’s weekly podcast called The Protagonist Podcast , where he discusses great characters from great stories.

How Does Pop Culture Influence Society: A Comprehensive Analysis

By: Author Valerie Forgeard

Posted on Published: June 25, 2023 - Last updated: September 8, 2023

Categories Society

Pop culture has quickly become a pervasive aspect of modern society, permeating nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s a crucial component that shapes our opinions, beliefs, and behaviors, often without our awareness. In today’s world, understanding the relationship between pop culture and society is more critical than ever. Whether it’s music, movies, social media, or fashion, pop culture has the power to influence our lives in countless ways. That’s why it’s essential to explore how it influences our perceptions and values to understand the dynamics of this complex relationship.

The Power Of Media Representation

The power of media representation cannot be underestimated; it shapes perceptions, challenges stereotypes, and even triggers backlash when certain groups feel misrepresented. In today’s pop culture climate , there is increasing pressure for diversity in a variety of forms-from, from more inclusive casting to direct engagement with critical social issues.

This evolution is exciting and necessary because when consumers use their freedom to explore different perspectives, they become part of a larger conversation that can change hearts and minds – screen by screen.

So the next time you cozy up with popcorn to watch your favorite show or jam out to a chart-topping hit, remember that these seemingly simple pleasures have far-reaching consequences that shape our understanding of the world around us.

Fashion Trends And Self-Expression

In the fashion world, pop culture significantly impacts how we express ourselves. Our choice of clothing says a lot about our personality, taste, and values.

Pop culture-inspired fashion trends allow us to show our individuality and creativity. Designers draw inspiration from various pop culture phenomena such as movies, TV, and music each new season to create new and exciting styles.

The fashion industry has seen the rise of numerous fashion icons who make a statement with their clothing choices and inspire their fans. Lady Gaga’s unconventional style has made her a trailblazer in the industry, pushing boundaries and challenging traditional gender roles.

Harry Styles’ gender-neutral fashion has also attracted much attention and sparked discussions about the importance of breaking away from societal norms. Rihanna’s bold and daring fashion choices have inspired many people and shown that fashion isn’t just about clothes but also about attitude and self-confidence.

Pop culture and fashion trends have become essential to expressing ourselves and allowing us to communicate our values and beliefs through clothing choices. By embracing our individuality and drawing inspiration from pop culture icons, we can use fashion to express ourselves and connect with others.

Shifting Perspectives On Gender Roles

While we flaunt the latest fashion trends and express ourselves through our unique style, pop culture shapes society’s view of gender roles. There has been a significant shift in recent years towards a more inclusive and diverse portrayal of gender, especially in media and advertising.

There is also a growing rejection of harmful stereotypes, as evidenced by the declining prevalence of ‘gendered advertising’ Awareness of the negative impact of such advertising on perpetuating limiting ideas about what it means to be male or female has increased. As advertisers adapt their messages to changing attitudes, consumers welcome brands that champion diversity and equality.

In addition, pop culture icons redefine masculinity by pushing boundaries and challenging conventional notions of being a man. Celebrities like Jaden Smith and Billy Porter have become symbols of change by defying expectations on and off stage. By showing vulnerability, emotional depth, creativity, and nonconformity – traits considered “ unmanly” in the past -, these personalities inspire others to embrace their authentic selves regardless of societal pressures.

The evolution in pop culture is an encouraging sign of future progress, but much remains to be done before true equality is achieved in all areas of life.

Impact On Language And Communication

Pop culture profoundly impacts language and communication, shaping how we speak, write, and interact. It introduces new words, phrases, and expressions that quickly become part of our everyday vocabulary. From slang to memes, and social media platforms to television shows, pop culture has created a language that constantly evolves and influences how we communicate.

One example of pop culture’s influence on language is the use of emojis. These small digital images have become integral to online communication, visually representing our feelings and thoughts. Another example is the increased number of slang words and phrases that have become mainstream through pop culture. Terms like “lit,” “on fleek,” and “woke” have entered the lexicon, tracing their origins to popular songs, TV, and social media.

In addition, pop culture has also significantly influenced the way we communicate through technology. The rise of social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter has created a new space for people to communicate and express themselves. These platforms haven’t only changed how we communicate and the speed and tone of our communication.

Pop culture significantly impacts language and communication by creating new words, expressions, and modes of expression. It influences how we communicate, primarily online, and provides a way of connection and understanding between different cultures and communities.

Celebrities As Role Models

In today’s pop culture, celebrities greatly influence society and often serve as role models for fans who admire and emulate their lifestyle, fashion, and even moral values. From philanthropy and activism to overcoming adversity, many celebrities exhibit traits that can inspire people to strive for personal growth and social consciousness. However, it’s essential to realize that celebrities, like everyone else, are human and can make mistakes. As we navigate the complex world of pop culture, it’s essential to balance admiration and critical thinking to ensure that we choose positive, genuine role models who can truly inspire and uplift us.

The Intersection Of Politics And Entertainment

Pop culture and entertainment have become intertwined with politics in recent decades, creating a unique intersection that significantly impacts society. The influence of pop culture on politics and vice versa is becoming increasingly evident as celebrities and politicians use their platforms to promote their views and values.

One way pop culture influences politics is through using celebrities as advertisers. Celebrities in the entertainment industry can use their influence and popularity to endorse political candidates, issues, and causes, influencing the opinions of their fans and followers. In addition, politicians often use pop culture references in their speeches and campaigns to appeal to younger generations and make themselves more likable.

In addition, pop culture has become a powerful tool for social and political commentary: Movies, TV, and music often tackle important issues and advocate for social justice. The television series “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the movie “Get Out,” for example, use science fiction and horror elements to speak out on real-world social and political issues such as gender inequality and racism.

On the other hand, politics also influences pop culture. For example, some celebrities support politicians or political ideals.

The intersection of politics and entertainment has become increasingly crucial as pop culture influences politics and vice versa. The influence of celebrity endorsements, social and political commentary in movies, TV and music, and content regulation shows the complex relationship between pop culture and politics.

Normalization Of Diverse Lifestyles

The influence of pop culture on cultural acceptance in our society cannot be overlooked. The portrayal of different lifestyles in mainstream media, such as movies, TV shows, music, and fashion, has led to a greater acceptance and appreciation of what was once considered taboo or alternative.

Pop culture has provided a platform for those previously marginalized to tell their stories and live their lives authentically. This newfound representation and visibility have given many people, especially members of minority groups, a sense of validation and encouragement.

The power of pop culture to shape societal norms and values is evident in the increasing acceptance of previously stigmatized lifestyles and identities, such as the LGBTQ+ community. TV Shows like “Pose” and “Queer Eye” have made LGBTQ+ individuals visible and helped increase acceptance and understanding among viewers.

In addition, pop culture has also challenged traditional beauty standards, with models and public figures breaking barriers and promoting body image and diversity. This has helped combat the harmful effects of unrealistic beauty ideals on mental health and self-esteem.

Overall, pop culture has given people a new level of freedom to live authentically and has helped move societal norms and values in a more inclusive and accepting direction.

Influencing Consumer Behavior

Pop culture has a significant influence on consumer behavior. Companies use advertising psychology to create brand loyalty and influence our decisions. Pop culture icons are often used in advertising campaigns to create associations between products and pop culture, making them more desirable to consumers.

For example, companies often work with celebrities to promote their products – everything from sneakers to fast food dishes. This connection between pop culture and consumer products exerts a powerful pull on consumers. They’re attracted to the latest trends and fashions their favorite pop culture icons promote.

The persuasive power of these marketing tactics also impacts society by shaping trends, influencing political movements, and even changing public opinion on important issues. For example, a celebrity promoting a particular social cause can create a groundswell of support for that cause and raise awareness among the general public.

In addition, the influence of pop culture on consumer behavior also has an economic impact, as consumer demand drives the market and shapes the products and services offered. For example, this influence can be seen in the fashion industry, where trends spread by pop culture icons influence the styles and designs of clothing and accessories produced.

The influence of pop culture on consumer behavior is of great importance to society. Using pop culture icons in advertising campaigns creates strong associations between products and pop culture, influences consumer choices, and shapes trends. As pop culture continues to evolve and shape society, its influence on consumer behavior will likely continue.

The Role Of Social Media In Amplifying Trends

Social media has become an indispensable tool for amplifying trends and catapulting ideas and movements into the global spotlight with unprecedented speed. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok serve as virtual incubators for new trends, allowing users to share and participate in content that matches their interests.

As these posts gain traction, they can quickly become viral, influencing consumer behavior, shaping public opinion, and even driving social change. The role of social media in spreading trends hasn’t only democratized information dissemination and changed how we consume and interact with pop culture.

However, the role of social media in influencing trends also poses a danger. Fake news and misinformation have spread harmful and misleading information with potentially disastrous consequences. Social media algorithms that promote content based on user engagement can also spread extreme and polarizing views, further deepening societal divisions.

In addition, the emphasis on aesthetics and image in social media has led to a culture of constant comparison and unrealistic expectations, especially among younger users. This can lead to negative body image, self-esteem, and mental health problems.

In summary, social media has changed how we consume and interact with pop culture, spreading trends and ideas at an unprecedented rate. While this has democratized the dissemination of information and empowered individual users, it has also created new dangers, such as the spread of misinformation and harmful content and the perpetuation of unrealistic expectations and a negative self-image.

Balancing Pop Culture Consumption With Critical Thinking

Pop culture has a tremendous impact on our lives and society. From TV to movies and music to social media, we spend a lot of time-consuming entertainment. We must balance our consumption with critical thinking because what we see, hear, and engage with can shape our perceptions, values, and behaviors. With so much information and entertainment available, it’s essential to pay attention to the messages and values being conveyed in pop culture. When we’re more aware, we can make more informed decisions about what we engage with and ultimately live more fulfilling lives.

Here are three ways we can achieve this:

By incorporating these practices into our daily routines, we can ensure that we’re not only enjoying ourselves but also fostering an environment where critical consumption thrives.

In conclusion, pop culture undeniably plays a significant role in shaping our society.

From fashion to language and everything in between, it’s a force we can’t ignore.

After all, the beauty of pop culture lies not only in its ability to entertain but also in its potential to unite people from different walks of life.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is pop culture.

Pop culture, short for popular culture, refers to a wide range of ideas, images, trends, and expressions recognized and shared by a large group. It encompasses various aspects of society, including music, movies, television, fashion, slang, and technology. Pop culture often reflects the current values and interests of the masses.

How does pop culture influence society’s values and beliefs?

Pop culture shapes society’s values and beliefs by reflecting and reinforcing prevailing attitudes, norms, and preferences. Through various forms of media, pop culture can reinforce or challenge traditional ideas and stimulate discussions that lead to changes in society’s views.

Can pop culture influence political views?

Pop culture can influence political views by introducing political issues and characters into mainstream entertainment. This can spark discussions and debates that shape public opinion and influence political engagement.

How does pop culture influence consumer behavior?

Pop culture influences consumer behavior by setting trends and preferences. When certain products or styles become popular, people are more likely to buy or adopt them to conform to social norms.

In what ways does pop culture contribute to social change?

Pop culture can contribute to social change by raising awareness of important issues and promoting progressive ideas. When influential personalities and creative works address issues such as racial equality, gender representation, and environmental protection, they can inspire audiences to challenge existing norms and advocate for change.

What impact does social media have on the spread of pop culture?

Social media plays a critical role in disseminating pop culture by enabling rapid sharing of content and engagement with it. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok allow users to discover and interact with trends, contributing to their virality and reach.

Can pop culture hurt society?

While pop culture can positively impact society, it can also perpetuate negative stereotypes, promote harmful behaviors, or contribute to trivializing serious issues. Thinking critically about pop culture is essential to recognize its potential impact on society.

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Pop Culture

Pop culture: an overview, tim delaney sets the scene for our philosophical consideration of popular stuff..

The term ‘popular culture’ holds different meanings depending on who’s defining it and the context of use. It is generally recognized as the vernacular or people’s culture that predominates in a society at a point in time. As Brummett explains in Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture , pop culture involves the aspects of social life most actively involved in by the public. As the ‘culture of the people’, popular culture is determined by the interactions between people in their everyday activities: styles of dress, the use of slang, greeting rituals and the foods that people eat are all examples of popular culture. Popular culture is also informed by the mass media.

There are a number of generally agreed elements comprising popular culture. For example, popular culture encompasses the most immediate and contemporary aspects of our lives. These aspects are often subject to rapid change, especially in a highly technological world in which people are brought closer and closer by omnipresent media. Certain standards and commonly held beliefs are reflected in pop culture. Because of its commonality, pop culture both reflects and influences people’s everyday life (see eg Petracca and Sorapure, Common Culture ). Furthermore, brands can attain pop iconic status (eg the Nike swoosh or McDonald’s golden arches). However, iconic brands, as other aspects of popular culture, may rise and fall.

With these fundamental aspects in mind, popular culture may be defined as the products and forms of expression and identity that are frequently encountered or widely accepted, commonly liked or approved, and characteristic of a particular society at a given time . Ray Browne in his essay ‘Folklore to Populore’ offers a similar definition: “Popular culture consists of the aspects of attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, customs, and tastes that define the people of any society. Popular culture is, in the historic use of term, the culture of the people .”

Popular culture allows large heterogeneous masses of people to identify collectively. It serves an inclusionary role in society as it unites the masses on ideals of acceptable forms of behavior. Along with forging a sense of identity which binds individuals to the greater society, consuming pop culture items often enhances an individual’s prestige in their peer group. Further, popular culture, unlike folk or high culture, provides individuals with a chance to change the prevailing sentiments and norms of behavior, as we shall see. So popular culture appeals to people because it provides opportunities for both individual happiness and communal bonding.

Examples of Popular Culture

Examples of popular culture come from a wide array of genres, including popular music, print, cyber culture, sports, entertainment, leisure, fads, advertising and television. Sports and television are arguably two of the most widely consumed examples of popular culture, and they also represent two examples of popular culture with great staying power.

Sports are played and watched by members of all social classes, but (tautologously) the masses are responsible for the huge popularity of sports. Some sporting events, such as the World Cup and the Olympics, are consumed by a world community. Sports are pervasive in most societies and represent a major part of many people’s lives. Showing allegiance to a team as a means of self-identification is a common behavior. Further, cheering for a sports team or a favorite athlete is a way any individual can become part of popular culture, as I and Tim Madigan explain in our new book The Sociology of Sport .

Many people watch numerous hours of television everyday. It is such a prevalent aspect of contemporary culture it is difficult to imagine life without it. There are those who believe TV is responsible for the dumbing down of society; that children watch too much television; and that the couch potato syndrome has contributed to the epidemic of childhood obesity. The globally popular TV show The Simpsons provides us with an interesting perspective on television. In the episode ‘Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming’ (#137), while doing time in prison, Sideshow Bob becomes a critic of television. Although he was once a regular on The Krusty the Clown Show , Bob has become obsessed by television’s harmful effect on society. Bob argues that everyone’s lives would be much richer if TV were done away with. As a result, he devises a scheme to detonate a nuclear bomb unless all television is abolished in Springfield. Unable to locate Bob, Springfield’s city officials meet to discuss Bob’s demands of abolishing TV. A panicky Krusty proclaims, “Would it really be worth living in a world without television? I think the survivors would envy the dead.” Although there are people who agree with Sideshow Bob, the masses would more likely agree with Krusty: that living in a world without television is not really living. It is even more difficult to imagine a world without popular culture.

Folk and High Culture

Popular culture is usually distinguished from folk and high culture. In some ways, folk culture is similar to pop culture because of the mass participation involved. Folk culture, however, represents the traditional way of doing things. Consequently, it is not as amendable to change and is much more static than popular culture.

Folk culture represents a simpler lifestyle, that is generally conservative, largely self-sufficient, and often characteristic of rural life. Radical innovation is generally discouraged. Group members are expected to conform to traditional modes of behavior adopted by the community. Folk culture is local in orientation, and non-commercial. In short, folk culture promises stability, whereas popular culture is generally looking for something new or fresh. Because of this, popular culture often represents an intrusion and a challenge to folk culture. Conversely, folk culture rarely intrudes upon popular culture. There are times when certain elements of folk culture (eg Turkish rugs, Mexican blankets and Irish fairy tales) find their way into the world of pop culture. Generally, when items of folk culture are appropriated and marketed by the popular culture, the folk items gradually lose their original form.

A key characteristic of popular culture is its accessibility to the masses. It is, after all, the culture of the people. High culture, on the other hand, is not mass produced, nor meant for mass consumption. It belongs to the social elite; the fine arts, opera, theatre, and high intellectualism are associated with the upper socioeconomic classes. Items of high culture often require extensive experience, training, or reflection to be appreciated. Such items seldom cross over to the pop culture domain. Consequently, popular culture is generally looked (down) upon as being superficial when compared to the sophistication of high culture. (This does not mean that social elites do not participate in popular culture or that members of the masses do not participate in high culture.)

The Formation of Popular Culture

Through most of human history, the masses were influenced by dogmatic forms of rule and traditions dictated by local folk culture. Most people were spread throughout small cities and rural areas – conditions that were not conducive to a ‘popular’ culture. With the beginning of the Industrial era (late eighteenth century), the rural masses began to migrate to cities, leading to the urbanization of most Western societies.

Urbanization is a key ingredient in the formation of popular culture. People who once lived in homogeneous small villages or farms found themselves in crowded cities marked by great cultural diversity. These diverse people would come to see themselves as a ‘collectivity’ as a result of common, or popular, forms of expression. Thus, many scholars trace the beginning of the popular culture phenomenon to the rise of the middle class brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

Industrialization also brought with it mass production; developments in transportation, such as the steam locomotive and the steamship; advancements in building technology; increased literacy; improvements in education and public health; and the emergence of efficient forms of commercial printing, representing the first step in the formation of a mass media (eg the penny press, magazines, and pamphlets). All of these factors contributed to the blossoming of popular culture. By the start of the twentieth century, the print industry mass-produced illustrated newspapers and periodicals, as well as serialized novels and detective stories. Newspapers served as the best source of information for a public with a growing interest in social and economic affairs. The ideas expressed in print provided a starting point for popular discourse on all sorts of topics. Fueled by further technological growth, popular culture was greatly impacted by the emerging forms of mass media throughout the twentieth century. Films, broadcast radio and television all had a profound influence on culture.

So urbanization, industrialization, the mass media and the continuous growth in technology since the late 1700s, have all been significant factors in the formation of popular culture. These continue to be factors shaping pop culture today.

Sources of Popular Culture

There are numerous sources of popular culture. As implied above, a primary source is the mass media, especially popular music, film, television, radio, video games, books and the internet. In addition, advances in communication allows for the greater transmission of ideas by word of mouth, especially via cell phones. Many TV programs, such as American Idol and the Last Comic Standing, provide viewers with a phone number so that they can vote for a contestant. This combining of pop culture sources represents a novel way of increasing public interest, and further fuels the mass production of commodities.

Popular culture is also influenced by professional entities that provide the public with information. These sources include the news media, scientific and scholarly publications, and ‘expert’ opinion from people considered an authority in their field. For example, a news station reporting on a specific topic, say the effects of playing violent video games, will seek a noted psychologist or sociologist who has published in this area. This strategy is a useful way of influencing the public and may shape their collective opinions on a particular subject. At the very least, it provides a starting point for public discourse and differing opinions. News stations often allow viewers to call or email in their opinions, which may be shared with the public.

A seemingly contradictory source of popular culture is individualism. Urban culture has not only provided a common ground for the masses, it has inspired ideals of individualistic aspirations. In the United States, a society formed on the premise of individual rights, there are theoretically no limitations to what an individual might accomplish. An individual may choose to participate in all that is ‘popular’ for popularity’s sake; or they may choose a course of action off the beaten track. At times, these ‘pathfinders’ affect popular culture by their individuality. Of course, once a unique style becomes adopted by others, it ceases to remain unique. It becomes, popular.

Tim Delaney is a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Oswego. A member of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association, Delaney is the author of Seinology: The Sociology of Seinfeld and is currently writing a book on The Simpsons that is scheduled for publication in February, 2008. Visit his website at www.booksbytimdelaney.com .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Popular Culture

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Popular Culture by Dustin Kidd LAST REVIEWED: 08 February 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 28 February 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0193

Popular culture is the set of practices, beliefs, and objects that embody the most broadly shared meanings of a social system. It includes media objects, entertainment and leisure, fashion and trends, and linguistic conventions, among other things. Popular culture is usually associated with either mass culture or folk culture, and differentiated from high culture and various institutional cultures (political culture, educational culture, legal culture, etc.). The association of popular culture with mass culture leads to a focus on the position of popular culture within a capitalist mode of economic production. Through this economic lens, popular culture is seen as a set of commodities produced through capitalistic processes driven by a profit motive and sold to consumers. In contrast, the association of popular culture with folk culture leads to a focus on subcultures such as youth cultures or ethnic cultures. Through this subculture lens, popular culture is seen as a set of practices by artists or other kinds of culture makers that result in performances and objects that are received and interpreted by audiences, both within and beyond the subcultural group. Holistic approaches examine the ways that popular culture begins as the collective creation of a subculture and is then appropriated by the market system. Key issues in the sociological analysis of popular culture include the representation of specific groups and themes in the content of cultural objects or practices, the role of cultural production as a form of social reproduction, and the extent to which audiences exercise agency in determining the meanings of the culture that they consume.

Classical sociologists spoke generally to the concept of culture and culture’s role in shaping human social life, but without distinguishing the specific form of popular culture. The Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, discussed in Classic Works , fostered interdisciplinary analyses of popular culture that include a number of sociological perspectives. The general overviews listed in this section offer broad social and sociological analyses of popular culture. Storey 2015 has used cultural studies to open new lenses for the study of popular culture, and this book is now in its seventh edition. Grazian 2010 and Kidd 2014 are both written as introductory texts for the sociology of popular culture, but they also serve well as field guides for scholars studying popular culture. Similarly, Holtzman 2000 and Danesi 2012 provide an introduction to the study of media and popular culture from the perspectives of communications and anthropology, respectively. Gaines 1998 is a study of youth music cultures in the 1980s, while Gaines 2003 is a memoir of writing a sociological analysis while also participating in the rock and roll culture of New York City in the 1980s. Gamson 1994 provides a detailed history of the celebrity concept in American culture. Lopes 2009 provides a broad historical account of the development of the comic book industry.

Danesi, Marcel. 2012. Popular culture: Introductory perspectives . London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Anthropologist Danesi presents a broad introduction to the study of popular culture organized around specific media formats such as radio, television, film, and music.

Gaines, Donna. 1998. Teenage wasteland: Suburbia’s dead end kids . Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

This ethnographic analysis of rock youth subculture began as a Village Voice article about a suicide pact among four teens in suburban New Jersey.

Gaines, Donna. 2003. A misfit’s manifesto: The spiritual journey of a rock & roll heart . New York: Villard.

Gaines presents a unique memoir about becoming a sociologist, studying your subculture, and participating in the rock culture of 1980s New York.

Gamson, Joshua. 1994. Claims to fame: Celebrity in contemporary America . Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Gamson unpacks the concept of celebrity in American popular culture using both historical and sociological lenses. He then takes the concept to the audiences to unpack the varied ways that audiences respond to or utilize celebrity fetishes.

Grazian, David. 2010. Mix it up: Popular culture, mass media, and society . New York: Norton.

This widely used introductory text to the study of popular culture emphasizes foundational theories and concepts from sociology.

Holtzman, Linda. 2000. Media messages: What film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation . Armonk, NY: Sharpe.

Holtzman presents a series of studies about representations in popular culture, focusing on race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Kidd, Dustin. 2014. Pop culture freaks: Identity, mass media, and society . Boulder, CO: Westview.

This book focuses on issues of identity in the labor force, representations, and audience for commercial popular culture.

Lopes, Paul. 2009. Demanding respect: The evolution of the American comic book . Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.

Lopes examines the origins of the comic book and its evolution across the 20th century. He focuses on how comics moved from the margins of nerd culture to the center of American popular culture.

Storey, John. 2015. Cultural theory and popular culture: An introduction . 7th ed. New York: Routledge.

Storey’s texts on popular culture have helped move the study of popular culture into the classrooms of colleges and universities. This book applies a range of social and literary theories to the analysis of popular culture objects as texts.

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Popular Culture: We Are What We Consume

Is popular culture really popular.

Posted December 8, 2009 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

In a recent post , I railed against popular culture as being an unhealthy force in our lives. In response, Lawrence Rubin, a fellow blogger who studies popular culture, commented that, "If we simply consider popular culture as banality, it certainly seems meaningless ... even potentially destructive. However, if instead we recognize that it is simply an expression of our collective experiences, its importance becomes more clear."

I would have agreed with that statement 30 years ago when popular culture was, in fact, an expression of our collective experiences. But I think it's time for those who study popular culture to wake up and smell the Starbucks (popular-culture reference intended): popular culture is not popular!

As TerryS, another commenter, noted, there is nothing popular about popular culture these days: "90% of what is considered popular culture is churned out by corporations ... with the sole purpose ... that we can be converted into voracious consumers ..." We didn't demand, for example, Desperate Housewives, Grand Theft Auto, or Facebook . They were created to make money and then marketed as "must-haves" which, admittedly, the masses then embraced.

I believe in truth in advertising , so we should stop calling popular culture popular culture because, well, it no longer is a reflection of popular sentiment. I think a more accurate phrase is "synth culture" because it is a synthetic product created by corporate conglomerates rather than being an expression of the shared experiences of real people.

We Are What We Consume

TerryS also offered a wonderful metaphor for popular culture. She likened authentic popular culture to organic food, which is grown and consumed by people who have a deep respect for themselves and healthful living. In contrast, synth culture, like processed food, is largely artificial, unhealthy, and driven by the profit motive. And entire generations are being force-fed this unwholesome diet while the synth culture is sating its own rapacious appetite .

She concludes her metaphor beautifully, suggesting that "pop culture is fast food for the soul." American Idol, People Magazine, iPods, and Brangelina (just to name a few) are tasty and addictive. But, extending her metaphor further, just as fast food isn't healthy for the body, synth culture isn't healthy for the soul. Neither provides real "nourishment;" in both cases, our bodies, minds, and spirits remain hungry for real sustenance.

A "Diet" of Empty Calories

So what happens when a genuine popular culture is replaced by a synth culture? Well, what happens when you replace an organic diet rich in nutrients with one that is artificial, calorie intensive, and nutrient-poor? The answer is self-evident, yet we continue on this diet without realizing that it may very well be slowly killing us individually and collectively.

Why would we not recognize this unhealthy diet and make a change for the better? In the face of global instability, economic uncertainty, and unsettling societal change, synth culture offers us mighty fine "comfort food;" it's delicious, fills us up, and makes us feel good. Synth culture really has become the new "opiate of the masses," dulling our existential and all-too-down-to-earth angst with a diet of tasty, though empty, calories.

And what is really scary is that the current generation of young people is the first to be raised entirely in this synth culture with no experience of what an authentic popular culture is.

The Real Harm

Most people think of popular culture as the most common forms of entertainment, whether television, movies, music, or what's on the web. But popular culture is grounded in expressions of shared experiences that are much more fundamental to our society, including the values and beliefs that have shaped it, for example, integrity, community, compassion, courage, sacrifice, respect, hard work, and justice.

Here's what worries me: if our popular culture is no longer this deeper expression of our collective experiences, then something important is being lost. We may be entertained by The Biggest Loser, Knocked Up, or Jay-Z, but we are also unwittingly influenced by the messages that underlie this popular entertainment and which form the basis of synth culture, messages of greed, consumption, schadenfreude, win at any cost, and misogyny, just to name a few.

Collectively, a popular culture that is an expression of a society's shared experiences has essential value and a beneficial function to that society. It is an important contributor to the formation and growth of a healthy society. Perhaps as much as the rule of law, an authentic popular culture acts as a societal truth, a shared bond that holds societies together and communicates that "we are one." And maybe more powerfully than the top-down government-provided glue, a genuine popular culture, created "of the people, by the people, and for the people," acts as the real, bottom-up glue that unites diverse people into a cohesive society.

As individuals, a genuine popular culture instills a sense of ownership and empowerment in our society because each of us knows that we contribute to that culture. We are more likely to act in our society's best interests because we know that those best interests are also our own. An authentic popular culture also gives us a sense of shared identity , meaning, and purpose that transcends differences in geography, race, ethnicity , religion, or politics . All of these then encourage us to lead a life in accordance with our culture's values and norms because they are our own.

Tyranny By Any Other Name

Consider other societies where a genuine popular culture was suffocated. Until now, the only examples have been found in totalitarian societies, such as those under Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler. What we saw in these societies, when the lid finally came off, were deeply injured populaces that took years of freedom to recover from the individual and societal damage and reestablish their authentic popular culture. And, sadly, the people of Cuba and North Korea have yet to have this opportunity.

Jim Taylor, Ph.D. , teaches at the University of San Francisco.

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How 'pop culture' defined the 20th century

Pop culture is the heartbeat of modern society, from the catchy tunes that get stuck in our heads to the blockbuster movies that captivate millions.

It is an ever-evolving phenomenon that has reflected and influenced the zeitgeist of the last few generations. It's a mirror held up to society, capturing the trends, attitudes, and values that define each decade's hopes and fears.

What is 'pop culture'?

Pop culture, short for popular culture, encompasses the ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, particularly 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 people in society.

Pop culture includes the various forms of media that are consumed by a large portion of a society's population, such as television, movies, music, and the internet.

It also extends to things like fashion, trends, and slang. Pop culture is constantly evolving, driven by changes in technology, media, and public interests.

It has the power to shape societal norms, influence political opinions, and inspire individual behavior.

A quick history of popular culture

One of the earliest forms of pop culture was the serialized novel, which became popular in the 19th century.

These novels were published in installments in magazines or newspapers, reaching a wide readership and creating a shared cultural experience.

The advent of cinema in the late 19th and early 20th centuries further revolutionized pop culture, offering a new form of entertainment that was accessible to the masses.

The 1920s, known as the Roaring Twenties , marked a significant period in the development of pop culture, characterized by the emergence of jazz music, flapper fashion, and the Hollywood film industry.

The post-World War II era saw an explosion of pop culture, fueled by economic prosperity and technological innovations.

The 1950s and 1960s were marked by the rise of television, rock 'n' roll music , and youth culture.

Icons like Elvis Presley and The Beatles became symbols of this new cultural era.

The 1960s also saw the emergence of counterculture movements that challenged mainstream values and norms, further diversifying the landscape of pop culture.

The global spread of pop culture

As the world became more interconnected, cultural products and ideas easily transcended national borders, leading to a more homogenized global culture.

The influence of Western pop culture, particularly that of the United States, has been particularly pronounced.

Hollywood movies, American television shows, and popular music genres like hip-hop and pop have found audiences worldwide, shaping global tastes and preferences.

The advent of the internet and social media has democratized access to cultural content, allowing anyone with an internet connection to share and engage with music, film, television, and other forms of entertainment.

This has led to a proliferation of content and a shift in the power dynamics of the entertainment industry, with traditional gatekeepers such as record labels and movie studios losing some of their control over what becomes popular.

Social media platforms have become central to the dissemination of pop culture, enabling viral trends and memes to spread rapidly across the globe.

They have also given rise to a new breed of celebrities, known as influencers, who leverage their online followings to shape trends and promote products.

This has blurred the lines between advertising and entertainment, with branded content becoming a ubiquitous part of the pop culture landscape.

The growing concern about pop culture

Pop culture is not without its criticisms. One major concern is its role in promoting consumerism.

The constant exposure to advertisements and celebrity endorsements in pop culture can drive materialistic values and create unrealistic standards of beauty and success.

This can lead to negative impacts on self-esteem and body image, particularly among young people who are heavy consumers of social media and other pop culture platforms.

Another criticism is the homogenization of culture. As global pop culture becomes more dominant, there is a fear that it may erode local cultures and traditions, leading to a loss of cultural diversity.

Additionally, the commercialization of pop culture often prioritizes profit over artistic integrity, leading to formulaic and superficial content that lacks depth and originality.

The representation of marginalized groups in pop culture is also a contentious issue.

While there has been progress in terms of diversity and inclusion, critics argue that many pop culture products still perpetuate harmful stereotypes and fail to provide accurate or nuanced portrayals of different communities.

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Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture

William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia (eds.), Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture , Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 297pp., $28.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780742551756.

Reviewed by Sarah Worth, Furman University

Much has been written about the relationship between philosophy and pop culture in the last few years. Beginning with William Irwin's edited collection Seinfeld and Philosophy: A book about Everything and Nothing (Open Court, 1999), adding The Simpson's and Philosophy: the Doh of Homer (Open Court, 2001) and on to Buffy the Vampire Slayer , the Matrix , Superheroes, Baseball, Star Wars , Harry Potter , and South Park among many others, the field has exploded with philosophical interpretations of our favorite popular topics. All told at this point there are thirty-five collections on various aspects of popular culture and its relationship to and interpretation of philosophical issues (twenty-five by Open Court and ten by Blackwell). These books are indeed very popular as well, being some of the first philosophy titles to hit the best seller list. I became painfully aware of how well they have permeated even the lay reader when I was teaching an Introduction to Philosophy course recently. I asked a student if there was anything she knew for certain as we started talking about Descartes. She replied "I have read the Matrix and Philosophy , so I know what you are looking for -- of course I don't know anything for certain ." Whatever one's liking is for relating the substantive, serious, classic philosophical issues to the fluff of popular culture, these books have made some serious inroads to connecting philosophers and philosophy to the "real world."

Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture is an edited collection resulting from a conference on the topic held in Buffalo in April, 2004. From the list of contributors alone it is clear that this is an issue that is getting some serious attention by the world of academic philosophy. Heavy hitters such as Noël Carroll, Ted Cohen, Richard Shusterman, Jorge Gracia, and Gareth Matthews are all contributors to the volume. What I think is especially notable about the list of contributors more generally is that they are not all aestheticians, but are well-known philosophers in an array of fields. But this collection is not just another group of essays connecting various aspects of popular culture to philosophical topics. This is meta-philosophy of pop culture -- philosophy about philosophy of pop culture. For this reason, it stands apart from the other books, which examine philosophy through some particular aspect of pop culture. As Irwin says in the introduction, philosophy as a discipline has "had a public relations problem for a couple of centuries now, so engagement with popular culture is not an opportunity we can afford to miss" (3). This collection examines carefully how we might best cultivate this developing relationship between philosophical insight and popular culture in an interesting and effective way.

The book is divided into two sections: the first on "Philosophy and Popular Culture," and the second on "Interpretation and Popular Art Forms." The first deals with the theoretical issues, concerns, and limitations of the interaction of the two fields, and the second includes essays in which philosophers deal with a specific artistic medium of popular culture. These media include television, horror films, children's literature, comic books, Rock' n' Roll, and photography. I found the first section considerably more interesting and useful than the second, as it dealt with the meta-issues of what the possibilities are with the courting of philosophy and popular culture in general. The books on the various popular topics "and philosophy" for the most part do not deal with the theoretical issues that concern the limitations of the philosophical use of popular culture, so these essays are particularly helpful in considering the value of doing this kind of philosophy. The second half of the collection focuses less on theoretical issues generally than on issues of interpretation that arise within particular genres of popular art. Although some might assume that popular art might be more transparent than high art and is in no need of interpretation, Irwin suggests in his introduction that this view is mistaken. The hermeneutic issues raised here are not necessarily novel ones, but as they are raised here they give the reader a good sense of how some of the classic problems in philosophy (and in particular in aesthetics) get fleshed out when applied in a new way. These essays are particularly helpful in understanding the unique issues connected with each medium. I will give a short summary of the issues dealt with in each of the essays in what follows.

Carolyn Korsmeyer, in her essay "Philosophy and the Probable Impossible," deals with the epistemological question of whether art itself (or in this case popular entertainment) can do philosophy. She questions specifically the kinds of examples from which we might learn. She suggests that it is not only the classic literary texts that we might gain ethical and aesthetic insight from, but the "probable impossible" plots that we get from popular culture. She develops an extended analysis of the television show Angel (the sequel to Buffy the Vampire Slayer ) as an example of a successful analogy of Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity . Korsmeyer argues that "the closer union of [stories and philosophical positions] is indicated by the fact that a well-developed philosophical position in a story makes the story better -- not just more educational, but better narrative art " (27). She continues by suggesting that "if philosophical essays are clarified and made persuasive with the judicious inclusion of illustrative examples to explain and convince (and most certainly they are), it is also the case that a story is made stronger and more compelling if the philosophy it evinces is presented thoughtfully and thoroughly as well as clearly" (27-8). I think this essay is by far the strongest in the collection. Not only does Korsmeyer show her reader what use popular culture can be to philosophers, she does interesting and effective philosophy herself while making her argument.

Bill Irwin's contribution to the volume, beyond his general introduction, does a good job of establishing the terrain over which the relationship between philosophy and popular culture has, will, and could tread productively. He uses the essay to define a number of terms relating to this burgeoning relationship between philosophy and popular culture. He discusses the relationship between high, low, popular, mass, bad, intellectual, and classical art. Ultimately, his essay is very useful for defining the terms, both literally and figuratively, of the discussion and use of popular culture by philosophy. Irwin also makes an excellent case for why we, as philosophers, can use popular culture to get people interested in and excited about philosophy. Philosophy is not popular culture, but Irwin argues, we can "start with popular culture and use it to bring people to philosophy" (47).

Ted Gracyk discusses allusion and distinguishes between artistic and non-artistic kinds of references. He suggests that artistic allusion does not have to be intentional, although it can be. He employs the standards in the field, positioning himself in reference to Beardsley, Pucci, and Grice on theories of reference. Gracyk argues that "allusions involve both illocutionary and perlocutionary intentions, and the pleasure that comes from recognition of an illusion is not always resolved in the immediate recognition of its significance" (82). In the end, Gracyk points out that it may be a familiarity with alluding that gives many people an entrance point into art to which they might not otherwise have any cognitive access.

Noël Carroll's contribution doesn't stray far from his standard positions on narrative and our engagement with fictional characters. In this essay he argues clearly and effectively against the theories of identification and of simulation as explanations of how we feel for the fictional. He dismisses both on the basis that they assume that "the audience's relationships to fictional characters, especially protagonists, involve sharing the self same or nearly the same emotions that the characters suffer" (109). Carroll argues that this is rarely, if ever, the case. He suggests alternatively that we have a "pro-attitude" (one that is made of care, concern, or sympathy) toward the fictional characters with whom we engage.

In questioning what it means to have good taste and whether it can be meaningfully applied to pop culture, or even high art, Ted Cohen inquires into what it means for us to make a judgment of aesthetic preference which includes the phrase "better than." For example, is there aesthetic justification for saying that the Goldberg Variations are "better than" the Simpsons? Cohen argues that the claim is groundless since there is not necessarily anything in common between the two to be used as a basis of comparison. Ultimately, Cohen argues a familiar point (one he has made well in "High and Low thinking about High and Low Art" in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51:2, Spring, 1993): that what connects us to various and varied works of art is not that there is something common to all of them that we like (we have, he suggests, little consistency of taste); rather, aesthetic communities connect us to one another. The community that connects me to the other appreciators of the Goldberg Variations is not the same community of appreciators that connects me to the Simpsons. Since the connection is among the appreciators and not the objects of appreciation, the basis of comparison of works is limited at best. Although this is a familiar argument for Cohen, I think the article is particularly effective in fleshing out some of the current thinking about aesthetic judgment.

Appealing to his pragmatist roots, Richard Shusterman draws helpful analogies between intrinsic and instrumental values, and entertainment (pop culture) and high art. Ultimately, he argues for a "transactional" form of value which changes (sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly) as the culture changes. Music of the 80s, for example, was fresh and exciting at the time. Now it is considered "retro" and our ability to appreciate it may not have lessened, but the context has changed. Shusterman does a nice job problematizing the concept of "entertainment value."

In his essay on television, Paul Cantor deals with some of the philosophical problems related to joint authorship. With television and movies there is anything but a single author. So how are intentions to be ascribed? How is praise and blame to be handed out? This essay, based largely on his book, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), points out that the notion of the single creative genius has been passed down to us from the Romantic era, but also from what Cantor calls the "perfect plan." That is, the Christian tradition of a single creator. Cantor explains that "according to this view, for any kind of meaningful structure to come into being and function, it must be the work of a single designer, who can bring all its elements into harmony" (175). Cantor argues effectively against this "central planner" and for what he calls "spontaneous order." The essay is a nice justification for the philosophical effectiveness of television shows that are commercially successful.

Jorge Gracia's essay on six different film interpretations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) was a bit much to take for a non-Dracula fan. He addresses three questions of interpretation: first, do the six films he discusses justifiably get classified as interpretations? Second, if they are interpretations, what kind of interpretations are they? And third, what can the answers to the first two questions provide for understanding other kinds of interpretations of popular works (187)? Although the questions of interpretation are important ones, the depth of the philosophical significance gets lost among the details of the six films Gracia discusses. Ultimately Gracia grapples with a question that many movie-going-non-philosophers grapple with every day: how and in what way is the movie related to the text it was based on, and what do we make of the interpretive choices that do not belong to the literary author?

Gareth Matthews is one of the founders of the field known as philosophy for children (P4C). In his contribution he spells out some of the standard positions of P4C. First, children's stories can be used as vehicles of and for philosophy. Second, we have to give up the illusion of "adult authority." And third, no one is better equipped than Socrates to be a teacher of such a method. That is, listening to those around us (both children and adults) we flesh out meanings for ourselves. Matthews' contribution is effective and elucidating concerning some of the most basic philosophical problems that parents deal with every day.

James South follows nicely Matthews' essay with one of his own on the related topic of comic books and graphic novels. South uses the example of Batman's Gotham City to question how it is that we can or should live under "conditions of damage" (corrupt government). He appeals to "fugitive ethics" according to which, "promises are paradigmatic" (236). Ultimately, South shows how Batman, Batgirl and Catwoman, who have no particular superpowers (just gadgets and costumes), are able to subvert the dominant paradigm of a corrupt capitalism to do the morally difficult but decent thing.

Although rock'n'roll is not known for its self-reflective, contemplative nature, Michael Baur uses Don McLean's 1971 anthem "American Pie" to show that this does not necessarily have to be the case. I found this article interesting, but it seemed to me to be too much the analysis of a single, unique song, rather than a demonstration of how the argument about popular music, and rock'n'roll in particular, can be applied more widely.

The last contribution to the volume considers the role of photography in relation to reality. Peter Hare fleshes out the question of how, epistemologically, one can know or learn from a photograph. Photography has been "popular" since its inception, primarily because of its accessibility, and as our ability to manipulate images has become ever so much available, the truth in pictures has become more "flexible," as Hare explains.

In the end, I think this collection is a worthwhile companion for philosophers who might question the merit of appealing to popular culture or those who are looking for explicit philosophical defenses for the proliferation of books which use popular culture to address philosophical problems. I would definitely add this to a collection of popular culture and philosophy resources, or use it to start a collection that all philosophers -- especially those who want to be able to relate to their students -- need to start.

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Should pop culture be studied academically?

Courses+on+pop+culture+and+the+figures+in+it+are+gaining+popularity+throughout+colleges+and+universities.+Photo+Credit%3A+mctcampus.com

Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny typically don’t come to mind when thinking of public figures to study in a college course- but it’s happening. Popular culture includes but is not limited to media, entertainment, fashion, and arts. Studying pop culture and those who play a strong role in it can have beneficial outcomes like opening doors for discussion and more engagement among students.

San Diego State University announced they will begin to offer a graduate course on Bad Bunny in Spring 2023 focusing on how he uses the media to build his brand and bring awareness to social and political issues. Texas State University also announced their approval for a course next spring named “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture.” NYU now holds a course on the entrepreneurship and music of Taylor Swift. The influence of Kendrick Lamar’s music, fashion and activism is taught in a course that explores his work at Montreal University. These courses used to be less common but are gaining popularity and interest on university campuses as they realize people are drawn to what they can relate to.

The educational value of courses with curriculum based on pop culture and more specifically, music artists, is starting to become more appreciated by professors and scholars. Cultural aspects of society are constantly changing and evolving. For example, music, art, and fashion, in a way, acts as a time capsule showing different trends from a certain time and place that may have otherwise been missed or overlooked by the media.

Topics that have been considered taboo are often displayed and addressed throughout different categories in pop culture. Many musical figures have bent gender norms and encouraged others to be comfortable to freely express themselves. The list of artists goes on from earlier people like Prince and Freddie Mercury to more recent ones like Miley Cyrus, Harry Styles and Bad Bunny. In a world so diverse, popular culture can provide a sense of commonality.

The study of pop culture academically should not be dismissed but some examples why include: the incredibly high interest in movie and book franchises that rake in millions a year, the sold-out shows and tickets that sell out in record times, and seas of people who line up outside events and hotel rooms of artists and celebrities in hopes to maybe get a glimpse. Or what about the comics that were created over 70 years ago and still maintain a large fan base? Courses on pop culture can offer an understanding as to why all of this attracts society so strongly. It can create a path to thinking more about the media and entertainment that is consumed.

There’s no escaping the influences of pop culture because it’s everywhere. Maybe we should start treating it like the “timeless” literature and historical figures we study now. It should not be a bad thing to gain a deeper knowledge on a person or topic in order to speak on it correctly in today’s age, even if it means Bad Bunny and Harry Styles.

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American Pop culture: Its Influence and Impact on the Global Stage

Pop Culture's Global Impact - 🌍 Influencing the World

Kai Nakamura

Table of contents, the evolution of american pop culture: a historical perspective, pop culture icons: the faces of american influence, american pop culture through the decades: a journey from the 50s to 2024.

The Global Impact of American Pop Culture: A Worldwide Phenomenon

Japanese vs american pop culture: a comparative analysis, current pop culture trends 2024: the american influence, top pop culture trends 2024: predictions and insights.

Beyond Anime: Uncovering the Lesser-Known Gems of Japanese Pop Culture

The Global Language of Memes: Understanding Cross-Cultural Internet Humor

From the Oscars to the Razzies: How Award Shows Shape Pop Culture's Best and Worst

Never miss a post, share this article, recent post, neon and nostalgia: a closer look at pop culture references in stranger things, pop culture trivia: quizzes to test your 90s pop culture knowledge, decoding pop culture references in today's blockbuster movies, more articles.

90s Pop Culture: A Flashback to the Era of Grunge, Boy Bands, and Tamagotchis

Pop Culture Halloween Costumes: How to Create Your Own Iconic Look

Community questions.

What are some examples of American popular culture?

How can I expand my knowledge in pop culture?

What is popular culture?

How has Jeopardy! influenced popular culture and trivia?

What does pop culture mean to you?

Is pop culture as popular as people make it out to be?

What makes popular culture popular?

How was pop culture different in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s compared to today?

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Pop Culture, Subculture, and Cultural Change

Discuss the roles of both high culture and pop culture within society
Differentiate between subculture and counterculture
Explain the role of innovation, invention, and discovery in culture

It may seem obvious that there are a multitude of cultural differences between societies in the world. After all, we can easily see that people vary from one society to the next. It’s natural that a young woman from rural Kenya would have a very different view of the world from an elderly man in Mumbai—one of the most populated cities in the world. Additionally, each culture has its own internal variations. Sometimes the differences between cultures are not nearly as large as the differences inside cultures.

Popular Culture

The term popular culture refers to the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in mainstream society. Popular culture events might include a parade, a baseball game, or the season finale of a television show. Rock and pop music—“pop” is short for “popular”—are part of popular culture. Popular culture is often expressed and spread via commercial media such as radio, television, movies, the music industry, publishers, and corporate-run websites. Unlike high culture , reserved for the elite, popular culture is known and accessible to most people. You can share a discussion of favorite football teams with a new coworker or comment on American Idol when making small talk in line at the grocery store. But if you tried to launch into a deep discussion on the classical Greek play Antigone at a subway station, few members of U.S. society today would be familiar with it.

Subculture and Counterculture

A subculture is just what it sounds like—a smaller cultural group within a larger culture; people of a subculture are part of the larger culture but also share a specific identity within a smaller group.

Thousands of subcultures exist within the United States. Ethnic and racial groups share the language, food, and customs of their heritage. Other subcultures are united by shared experiences. Biker culture revolves around a dedication to motorcycles. Some subcultures are formed by members who possess traits or preferences that differ from the majority of a society’s population. The body modification community embraces aesthetic additions to the human body, such as tattoos, piercings, and certain forms of plastic surgery. In the United States, adolescents often form subcultures to develop a shared youth identity. Alcoholics Anonymous offers support to those suffering from alcoholism. But even as members of a subculture band together, they still identify with and participate in the larger society.

Sociologists distinguish subcultures from countercultures , which are a type of subculture that reject some of the larger culture’s norms and values. In contrast to subcultures, which operate relatively smoothly within the larger society, countercultures might actively defy larger society by developing their own set of rules and norms to live by, sometimes even creating communities that operate outside of greater society.

Cults, a word derived from culture, are also considered counterculture group. The group “Yearning for Zion” (YFZ) in Eldorado, Texas, existed outside the mainstream and the limelight, until its leader was accused of statutory rape and underage marriage. The sect’s formal norms clashed too severely to be tolerated by U.S. law, and in 2008, authorities raided the compound and removed more than two hundred women and children from the property.

Skinny jeans, chunky glasses, and T-shirts with vintage logos—the American hipster is a recognizable figure in the modern United States. Based predominately in metropolitan areas, sometimes clustered around hotspots such as the Williamsburg neighborhood in New York City, hipsters define themselves through a rejection of the mainstream. As a subculture, hipsters spurn many of the values and beliefs of U.S. culture and prefer vintage clothing to fashion and a bohemian lifestyle to one of wealth and power. While hipster culture may seem to be the new trend among young, middle-class youth, the history of the group stretches back to the early decades of the 1900s.

Where did the hipster culture begin? In the early 1940s, jazz music was on the rise in the United States. Musicians were known as “hepcats” and had a smooth, relaxed quality that went against upright, mainstream life. Those who were “hep” or “hip” lived by the code of jazz, while those who were “square” lived according to society’s rules. The idea of a “hipster” was born.

The hipster movement spread, and young people, drawn to the music and fashion, took on attitudes and language derived from the culture of jazz. Unlike the vernacular of the day, hipster slang was purposefully ambiguous. When hipsters said, “It’s cool, man,” they meant not that everything was good, but that it was the way it was.

A group of young men wearing suits, including a guitarist, are shown in a black and white photograph in front of the awning of a nightclub.

By the 1950s, the jazz culture was winding down and many traits of hepcat culture were becoming mainstream. A new subculture was on the rise. The “Beat Generation,” a title coined by writer Jack Kerouac, were anti-conformist and anti-materialistic. They were writers who listened to jazz and embraced radical politics. They bummed around, hitchhiked the country, and lived in squalor.

The lifestyle spread. College students, clutching copies of Kerouac’s On the Road , dressed in berets, black turtlenecks, and black-rimmed glasses. Women wore black leotards and grew their hair long. Herb Caen, a San Francisco journalist, used the suffix from Sputnik 1 , the Russian satellite that orbited Earth in 1957, to dub the movement’s followers “Beatniks.”

As the Beat Generation faded, a new, related movement began. It too focused on breaking social boundaries, but it also advocated freedom of expression, philosophy, and love. It took its name from the generations before; in fact, some theorists claim that Beats themselves coined the term to describe their children. Over time, the “little hipsters” of the 1970s became known simply as “hippies.”

A young woman in brightly colored clothes are carrying an owl handbag is shown standing in front of a vintage blue bicycle, a large hedge, and a town house.

Today’s generation of hipsters rose out of the hippie movement in the same way that hippies rose from Beats and Beats from hepcats. Although contemporary hipsters may not seem to have much in common with 1940s hipsters, the emulation of nonconformity is still there. In 2010, sociologist Mark Greif set about investigating the hipster subculture of the United States and found that much of what tied the group members together was not based on fashion, musical taste, or even a specific point of contention with the mainstream. “All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties,” Greif wrote. “Pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world. Yet the habits of hatred and accusation are endemic to hipsters because they feel the weakness of everyone’s position—including their own” (Greif 2010). Much as the hepcats of the jazz era opposed common culture with carefully crafted appearances of coolness and relaxation, modern hipsters reject mainstream values with a purposeful apathy.

Young people are often drawn to oppose mainstream conventions, even if in the same way that others do. Ironic, cool to the point of noncaring, and intellectual, hipsters continue to embody a subculture, while simultaneously impacting mainstream culture.

A graph showing market share and consumer adoptions

As the hipster example illustrates, culture is always evolving. Moreover, new things are added to material culture every day, and they affect nonmaterial culture as well. Cultures change when something new (say, railroads or smartphones) opens up new ways of living and when new ideas enter a culture (say, as a result of travel or globalization).

Culture lag can also cause tangible problems. The infrastructure of the United States, built a hundred years ago or more, is having trouble supporting today’s more heavily populated and fast-paced life. Yet there is a lag in conceptualizing solutions to infrastructure problems. Rising fuel prices, increased air pollution, and traffic jams are all symptoms of culture lag. Although people are becoming aware of the consequences of overusing resources, the means to support changes takes time to achieve.

This video was taken from the “Sociology Crash Course” series of videos http://thecrashcourse.com and created by Cindy Hager in collaboration with the Alexandria Technical Community College.

Sociologists recognize high culture and popular culture within societies. Societies are also comprised of many subcultures—smaller groups that share an identity. Countercultures reject mainstream values and create their own cultural rules and norms. Through invention or discovery, cultures evolve via new ideas and new ways of thinking. In many modern cultures, the cornerstone of innovation is technology. Technology is also responsible for the spread of both material and nonmaterial culture that contributes to globalization.

Section Quiz

Short answer.

Identify several examples of popular culture and describe how they inform larger culture. How prevalent is the effect of these examples in your everyday life?

Consider some of the specific issues or concerns of your generation. Are any ideas countercultural? What subcultures have emerged from your generation? How have the issues of your generation expressed themselves culturally? How has your generation made its mark on society’s collective culture?

What are some examples of cultural lag that are present in your life? Do you think technology affects culture positively or negatively? Explain.

Popular culture meets counterculture in this article as Oprah Winfrey interacts with members of the Yearning for Zion cult. Read about it here: http://openstaxcollege.org/l/Oprah

Greif, Mark. 2010. “The Hipster in the Mirror.” New York Times , November 12. Retrieved February 10, 2012 ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/Greif-t.html?pagewanted=1 ).

Ogburn, William F. 1957. “Cultural Lag as Theory.” Sociology & Social Research 41(3):167–174.

Rogers, Everett M. 1962. Diffusion of Innovations . Glencoe: Free Press.

Scheuerman, William. 2010. “Globalization.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by E. N. Revised 2014. Zalta, Summer. Retrieved February 10, 2012 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/globalization/ ).

mainstream, widespread patterns among a society’s population

the cultural patterns of a society’s elite

groups that share a specific identification, apart from a society’s majority, even as the members exist within a larger society

groups that reject and oppose society’s widely accepted cultural patterns

the gap of time between the introduction of material culture and nonmaterial culture’s acceptance of it

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Pop Culture

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How Pop Culture Reflect Our Society’s Values

‘Hip-Hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of ‘I am’ from the youth of the world.’ James McBride. Popular culture is the entirety of ideas, views, attitudes, images, and other events that are in the mainstream of culture. It is intended to all people of all age groups and influences our thoughts, behaviors, trends, etc., and can include songs, movies, celebrities, food, and literature. It is a defining aspect of most people’s lives. As a result of this, it can create a lot of pressure to adapt and to fit in. Everyone has at least some amount of desire to fit in, a search for self-approval. Our social media reflects this as nearly every site has some way of gaining self-approval. The fact of the subject is that we grow up with it, and we shape it, it defines our generation. Popular culture is capable of influencing one’s attitude toward certain topics and cultures.

Popular culture is the combination of all the aspects such as beliefs, attitudes, and ideas that are found in a particular culture. Music has been an essential part of our lifestyle and culture for many years. Music is what people adapt to their lives resulting in the change of their own culture and adopting a popular culture. Various cultures use music for many perspectives of their lives, for religious purposes, for celebrations, for sorrow, for relaxation, and comfort. Music connects with many people and reaches them in ways that words cannot. James McBride, in his essay, Hip-Hop Planet, reveals how he spent his life disliking the culture of hip-hop, but after some research and personal knowledge, he had a change of heart. McBride’s purpose is to shine positive enlightenment on hip hop culture and move his audience to have a shift in perspective like him. He adopts a thoughtful and relaxed tone in order to consider the many effects of rap and hip hop. McBride attempts to persuade readers to listen to hip-hop music. He reveals how hip hop music is important in history and how it has taken over the music world. He came to realize that hip-hop, a genre that he didn’t believe was music, became one of the most known genres in the world.

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Popular culture has an undeniable impact on how society perceives itself. An aspect of pop culture that may serve to explain society significantly as both the affecter and the affected is the genre of magazines of celebrity’s bodies targeted at young women. Daniel Harris, in his essay, Celebrity Bodies, reveals the negative effects of Hollywood and society on each other. Harris’s purpose is to inform the audience of the negative effects and blames society for what happened as people see ‘beauty.’ He adopts a critical tone in order to show what has happened in society and seems displeased about what Hollywood has become. Though these advertisements are targeted as the representation of our society’s adolescent females, they have a significant influence on how teens view and construct. Almost everyone is exposed to social media and is passionate about learning about every aspect of a celebrity’s lives. Popular culture has also negatively impacted society by how it makes women view their bodies. Many women that are young and older suffer from body image issues because of the advertisements they see in magazines, social media, and Televisions. The author Daniel Harris writes about how absurd Hollywood can be. Hollywood affects young, and people of all ages in ways they don’t realize. It isn’t only Hollywood’s fault, but the everyday Americans that watch these people and idolize them.

When examining the mass cultures, one needs to keep in mind the balance between how much as a society affects the way popular culture is assembled and to what extent popular culture impacts the way we view ourselves and shapes our beliefs. David Denby, in his essay, High School Confidential, reveals how teen movies and how they relate to reality and how pop culture reflects our society’s values. Denby’s purpose is to talk about the stereotypes that are cast in movies directed towards teenagers and what that effect has on teenagers in reality. He adopts an informative and critical tone by finding fault in the teen movie genre. The high school movies have an impact on popular culture by the style they are wearing, commercial products, lifestyle, language, and images portrayed in the film. Most teen movies follow certain criteria that some may feel has little reflection on what high school is truly like, while others may feel these movies are exactly what high school is like.

Popular culture is characterized by different groups of people and a constant change. The documentary Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock discusses that food is very much a part of popular culture and the beliefs and customs in culture influence eating habits. This Documentary explores the United States growing epidemic of both obesity and diabetes. McDonald’s is the development by philosophies of fast-food restaurants that are experimenting with more parts of the American community as well as the rest of the world. The film director Morgan Spurlock attempts to capture a pop culture phenomenon on film. His objection to McDonald’s is clear, and his argument is considerably for accusing McDonald’s as the cause of American obesity. Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s, three times a day for thirty days, and imitated the exercise sample of an average American by only walking a few thousand steps a day. It reveals the increase in obesity in America and, more importantly, the influence of fast food on popular culture was often challenging to take on board. For example, more people had a difficult time remembering the Pledge of Allegiance than McDonald’s advertising, referring to the ingredients of a Big Mac. Spurlock has captured a pop culture trend on film but in tackling the subject of America’s obsession with fast foods. The significance of having a healthy diet and an active lifestyle after watching the Super Size Me documentary has significantly changed. The restaurant’s advertisements target people of every age, and they also send a powerful message that is affecting the health of many children and adults. They have attracted the attention of adults by offering a list of choices at low cost, resulting in a very advantageous position for these companies. Since many people pay more attention to how they can save money than to how damaging it can be for one’s health, the Super Size Me Documentary shows how misleading restaurants can be, by promoting a product without informing the effects that it can have.

Individuals in modern society are highly exposed to the media, and most of them want to be like the celebrities they watch on the media. Nevertheless, popular culture impacts society in both a positive and negative manner. Positively, hip hop music is significant in history and how it has taken over the music world. Negatively, the society has made both women and teenagers idolize some celebrities imitating unacceptable behaviors, and change the way they view their bodies and the way they eat. All that pop culture should influence the thoughts, trends, actions, and tastes among other living style aspects of the people in society in a positive manner.

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The Interplay of Religion and Popular Culture in Contemporary America

alternative spirituality |
American religion |
Clifford Geertz |
Embodiment |
Popular Culture |
March 12, 2016

In exploring the interstices running along the contours of religion and popular culture researchers must not neglect the embodiment and praxis of religious expression in popular culture and vice-versa. There was a time when the realms of popular culture and religion did not meet — at least in an academic or analytic sense. The space betwixt, between, around, and interpenetrating each was relatively unexplored. Into that gap came God in the Details: Share this response

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Ken Chitwood holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, where he wrote on Puerto Rican Muslims and the idea of cosmopolitanism with the Department of Religion and the Center for Global Islamic Studies. His academic work focuses on Islam and Muslim communities in the Americas, American religion, religion and culture, Christian-Muslim relations, and ethnographic methods and manifestations of religion-beyond-religion in a global and digital age. Additionally, he has published work on Judaism in Latin America and the Caribbean and the idea of global heroism. Ken is also an award-winning religion, travel, and culture newswriter with bylines in Newsweek, The Washington Post, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Religion News Service, The Houston Chronicle, and many other publications. Currently, he is a Journalist-fellow with the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s “Engaged Spirituality” Project, teaches courses on religion and theology with Concordia College New York, and is conducting research under the auspices of a grant with the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World at Shenandoah University. He is based in Germany.

Ken Chitwood

Popular Culture Studies and Bruce Springsteen: Escaping and Embracing Religion

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How Do We Talk About Race and Pop Culture Without Going Insane?

Pop culture has been in a state of upheaval and growth in recent years, leading to fascinating art and even more complex conversations. When Wesley Morris’s essay “ The Morality Wars ” was published by the New York Times yesterday, it set off a renewed conversation about pop culture today — how it is consumed, how it has changed, what we feel comfortable critiquing, and where it may be going in a fraught atmosphere in which politics are pointedly important and beloved stars are “canceled” in the wake of various moral missteps and failures. While some critics praised the piece , others felt it painted an incomplete, even disingenuous picture of the modern media landscape. Vulture gathered a group of critics — our own Angelica Jade Bastién and E. Alex Jung, Vulture contributors Jasmine Sanders and Miriam Bale, and BuzzFeed critic Alison Willmore, to consider a host of questions. Namely, what is the responsibility of critics — particularly critics of color — in an age in which representation and cancel culture have become intrinsic to conversations around art?

Let’s start by talking about what brought us all here in the first place: Wesley Morris’s recent critical essay about social justice, morality wars, and what they mean for art right now. One of his main points is that it’s nearly impossible to critique art made by people of color in today’s climate. What are your thoughts on the essay? Do you think Morris grapples with this tangled issue well?

Angelica Jade Bastién: Wesley Morris taps into a very fascinating topic that I have been talking about amongst friends and colleagues in private. We are in a very interesting place in regards to how we discuss art in which our expectations of it — particularly politically — has changed in dramatic and necessary ways. But I found his essay to be improperly framed. Part of the problem is he casts a wide net of examples that don’t quite work when discussed together. The other issue is, there are in fact a lot of writers of color giving complex, nuanced conversations of, say, work like Insecure (which I hope I did in critiquing the failures of this season ) on aesthetic and political levels; they just aren’t always happening in the New York Times . Didn’t Robin Givhan write a fairly nuanced critique of Beyoncé’s Vogue cover ? There’s also something oddly conservative about discussing this as an era of “morality wars.” Let’s be real — people aren’t really getting canceled. Louis C.K. has wormed his way back into the spotlight . I also found Morris’s hand-waving of the very valid critiques of Zadie Smith’s Get Out essay to be reductive. In discussing these works, Morris reflects the same myopia he is trying to critique.

Jasmine Sanders: I thought the essay began with a compelling premise: Wesley, a black man and black cultural critic, offering a critique of a prominent black work, Insecure . It was interesting to see Wesley posit the critique, and ensuing melee, within a personal context — he’s at a dinner party, among friends. It’s a reminder that criticism isn’t isolated to the internet, or even writing. After that opening bit, the essay got a bit unwieldy for me — an interpretation of certain cultural phenomena that felt a bit misrepresented or mischaracterized.

Miriam Bale: Angelica, it’s interesting that you refer to it as Zadie Smith’s Get Out essay (which it was) when Morris did not really cover that aspect of the essay. He focused entirely on her reaction to Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” painting of Emmett Till. Which is interesting because he’s been very supportive of Get Out , while Smith, months after it had been in the theaters, gave one of the first prominent negative reactions to the film (or negative reactions to the positive reactions) — that is, after Armond White . He also mentions the critical reaction to her use of the word “quadroons.” Was that your fault, Jasmine?

JS: I am claiming responsibility for the quadroon discourse, Miriam. I think that what Wesley took to be a “canceling” (which I’m not sure I believe to be an actual thing; that the term has a pithiness, an air of finality, that the thing does not) was largely just disagreement and discussion. I don’t recollect there being a call for Zadie’s “canceling.” My fascination with Zadie referring to her children as “quadroons” is that it pointed to how deeply race/racism has rendered us all completely insane. This biracial black woman has married a white man and is referring to their progeny, albeit cheekily, by antebellum slave terms. Quadroon, mulatto, etc. are funny to see online because they’re so anachronistic, you know? But they also conjure the history of sexual violence inherent in slavery. Seeing Zadie invoke them was so wildly intriguing.

Alison Willmore: Morris’s flattening of everything into “canceling” is maybe the most frustrating thing about that essay to me, and echoes in an unfortunate way other pieces I’ve read that want to posit that various things have “gone too far.” As you pointed out, Angelica, he cites a lot of examples that don’t feel like they belong together. Ian Buruma was “canceled” because of what many felt were failures in his role as editor of the New York Review of Books . Insatiable was “canceled” because the internet hated it, except, as he notes, Netflix renewed it for a second season. Zadie Smith was “canceled” because people disagreed with what she wrote and how she wrote it.

JS: He also rubs up against one of the more prickly aspects of so called “cancel culture”: Bill Cosby still has ardent supporters. It’s so, so subjective. One can be “canceled” in one niche community of the internet and be perfectly fine in another. Wesley revealed a lot of his own biases in this essay.

MB: The problem with the essay, for me, came from the idea of “goodness.” Not just Morris’s device of “good work” versus moral goodness. But focusing on the idea of “good” versus “bad.” His focus on quality leads him to support The Cosby Show as objectively good art! It is entertaining and memorable, yes. But what are the show’s implicit values? They’re quite conservative. And of course it came to define a generation (maybe generations?) of respectability politics. Those respectability politics and conservative values are something not tied directly to Cosby’s rapes, but are, in a way, tied to his obsession with and abuse of power.

E. Alex Jung: Someone texted me and said that the essay would have been a good cocktail conversation, but not a written piece. To that end, Morris used a lot of compelling, but slightly glib arguments that certainly would have gone down better with an Old Fashioned in hand. The only thing I’d add is that his historical comparison to the panic of the “Moral Majority” of the late ’80s and ’90s struck me as a selective reading of history. Yes, the religious right was attacking the NEA and major art institutions, but the white liberal critical establishment was also attacking works by people of color and dismissing it as “identity politics.” There is the game-changing Whitney Biennial in 1992 that featured works by predominantly people of color that was a critique of the art institution itself and made (white) critics practically apoplectic. It was also when Bill T. Jones staged “Still/Here,” which Arlene Croce at The New Yorker famously refused to see and yet still decided to review, calling it “victim art.” This is to say, we were having the same exact conversations back then that we are now. The major difference is that people of color have slightly more power today in shaping mainstream discourse.

AW: Oh, it was definitely a cocktail conversation — I think there’s a reason it started with that anecdote about the dinner party, and that’s why it felt like it was building a wide-reaching and messy argument on top of something very personal. It’s something I have no doubt we’ve all talked about in private, which is what it feels like to not like, or not relate to, something that is supposed to be for us, or for some larger group under whose umbrella we fall.

That’s a good lead-in to the next question, Alison. Do you think there’s some truth to the points Wesley’s raises? For example, have the conversations around politics and morality affected or ever made you doubt your own voice as a critic? Was there ever a movie or show you wanted to critique, but felt you couldn’t because of the larger swell of public support and marketing surrounding it (i.e. Crazy Rich Asians, Get Out , etc.)? Basically, are you ever scared of critiquing certain things because you’ll get attacked online for it?

JS: As a person who dislikes everything all of the time, I now err on the side of caution with what I publish. There’s also the fact of the media milieu making that decision for you. Black women are already so rarely called upon to critique films. I’m trying to gauge the likelihood of a “critical take” being accepted, and I don’t think it’s very high. It feels like we’re in an era where everything black… is amazing. BlacKkKlansman is amazing. Sorry to Bother You is amazing. It kind of makes my head spin. I went to a screening for a movie, in which I was one of four black people in the theater. The movie ended and the white audience members literally stood and applauded. Afterwards, in the bathroom, I ran into another black woman who basically said, “Okay, what did you really think?” Criticism can feel like that. I’m also a very new critic so I’m prone to second-guessing, self-doubt, etc.

AJB: For me that movie is Get Out. I never wrote about the film in-depth mostly because I felt burned-out by the conversation and was worried I would get intense backlash. I have critiqued beloved works by black people and gotten intense backlash from all corners — both from black fans and white critics. Sometimes I feel like the risk isn’t worth it. Jasmine is so right. We are in a strange era in which everything black is being considered amazing out of some odd corrective measure. But guess what? Black people can make trash, too. I mean y’all saw Sorry to Bother You with its 101 politics and horse dicks all throughout the third act!

EAJ: To Wesley’s credit, I do think the anxiety he’s feeling is one that we feel when it comes to these questions of when to critique something, and how vociferously. Many of you have written really thoughtful and provocative criticism of the shows that have that air of untouchability around them. (Angelica, I’m thinking of how you critiqued The Handmaid’s Tale during season one of all times.) I do feel like what I end up doing is a calculus over whether something is worth it or not — both for whatever personal blowback I might get and whether it seems like a valuable conversation to have. And the fact that, for instance, I do have an investment in Asian-Americans representing and making good work means that whatever critique I make will be coming from a place of knowing just how little we’ve had. So maybe it’s not such a terrible thing that I think extra hard about whether it’s worth dunking on Dr. Ken . (And I have!)

JS: I thought Wesley’s expression of anxiety was incredibly relatable.

AW: I definitely felt relief when I liked Crazy Rich Asians . There have been so few American movies with primarily Asian casts, it creates the added pressure that to critique a movie like that might somehow hurt the future of Asian-American studio film.

AJB: That’s a good point, Alison. I often feel the pull to be kinder to works starring and made by people of color, particularly black and Latinx folks, because of my background. But I always end up deciding that doing so would be a disservice to myself as a critic and to my readers.

AW: It’s funny — when I didn’t like Ocean’s 8 , someone claimed I was using “Gamergate language,” which I thought was hilarious. Part of the challenge here is that creators and studios and networks have started to use language about representation in talking about their own work — and they should! — but it becomes a kind of shield. Like, it’s possible to think Ocean’s 8 is a bad movie without wondering if you’re dealing with internalized misogyny.

JS: The temptation to be the one brave enough to say, “No, I certainly did NOT like Frozen ” and publish some polemic is also real. I try to weigh/consider all of these things.

EAJ: I think some of the problems in criticism are coming less from “cancel culture” and more from stan culture, where a lot of us (I include myself) are performing an undying fealty to some person, place, idea, or thing. (Yes, those are two sides of the same coin.) Generally, I sense quietness now when something doesn’t quite land. When people don’t really like something, they just don’t say much about it. That’s been very telling.

AJB: I’m glad you brought up stan culture, Alex. Fandom and stan culture has become one of the most myopic and often nastiest aspects of the modern pop-culture landscape. People are nearly religious zealots about what they love to the point where even a measured critical essay about something is taken as being a “hater” and can get a writer death threats. A lot of this comes down to how what people love has become a marker of identity and how the representation that people have rightly been clamoring for has become a marker of identity as well.

When it comes to critiquing POC-fronted works, how do you see the conversation playing out differently among white critics and critics of color? Does it ever feel like there are separate conversations happening? Relatedly, do you ever feel like it’s not “your place” to critique a work? And do you think that applies to other critics?

JS: I struggle with thinking it’s my place in a published piece; my Twitter is like the gladiator arena — we can fight to the death in there. I have only recently realized that there should be such a delineation.

AW: Weirdly, I feel better about writing pieces that take on things I’m maybe scared about. Twitter I’ve been fading off of recently just because I feel like everything becomes a fight, and at least in a piece I can make a whole argument before people start yelling at me.

AJB: To get more to the question, it is sometimes startling to see how much of a different conversation is going on between white critics and critics of color. Even with Wesley’s piece, my timeline was starkly divided.

MB: Yes. And, going back to Twitter, the difference between the public conversation and the one in the DMs.

AJB: I think white critics are in a weird crisis right now. I’ve seen some … interesting pushback to critics of color who talk a lot about politics. Which on one hand, I do think some critics of color who are new to the game do not know how to balance talking about aesthetics, the history of the medium, and the political dimension of a work. On the other hand, white critics remain a mess in many ways, too. But that is also on editors who are pushing young critics of color to do these clickbait-y, angry, not all that nuanced criticism of art from a distinctly and sometimes solely political perspective. This is something I have been thinking about a lot.

EAJ: It felt like Wesley was yearning for the days of classical exegesis when we’re ideally in a space where critical discussion is considering a lot of different aspects of production, history, aesthetics, and political content. Part of the problem with the spate of “is this good or bad for the culture” critiques is that you still have a raft of white editors who are the gatekeepers. To use a specific example, I was struck by the L.A. Review of Books review of Morgan Jerkins’s This Will Be My Undoing . The writer said she had submitted it to multiple places and it had been rejected. I thought it was a smart, tough piece of criticism that, regardless of whether you “agreed” with it or not, was worth publishing. Of course I don’t know what the pitching process was, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that there may have been a reluctance on the part of white editors to publish something that was critical of a black female memoir.

JS: White people are absolutely in crisis. It’s so interesting to consider how something is only “racial” once it’s not white. If it’s about whiteness, it’s about race as well. But most Americans have no idea how to begin excising their own racial identity.

One of the implications of Wesley’s piece was that art itself is less interesting now because of the pressure to be politically correct. Do you think there’s any truth to that?

EAJ: I’m a little ambivalent about this. I do think art is slightly less interesting, but I don’t think it’s because of political correctness, but rather commercialism. The ties between capital and art or artistic production are only getting more intertwined, and when something must have monetary value first , as well as artistic value, things start to get less interesting. I was thinking about what Donald Glover said in his New Yorker profile — “The system is set up so only white people can change things” — because it is a system of white capitalism that’s determining whether something has “value,” whether that’s actual or potential.

That said, if we’re comparing television (a populist, inherently commercial medium) then to now, it’s certainly better now. It’s also somewhat about where you direct your gaze: I’ve written about this before, but comedy is way more interesting now than it ever has been thanks to the rise of alt-comedy spaces and queer comics. They’re edgy, gross, boundary-pushing, and fucking weird.

JS: Yes! There’s a critic I adore, Tobi Haslett ( @TobiHaslett ) who created this amazing thread about the relationship between art, the academy, critics, and commerce. Danielle Butler ( @Daniecal ) was another super-insightful, incisive thread. They’re two very even-keeled, funny writers who I always look to, something like a lodestar, when conversations like this happen.

AJB: I totally agree, Jasmine! I always look to @daniecal when something pops off. Her perspective on Twitter is a balm and a clarion call. And for the record, I agree with you, Alex. I am also ambivalent on this. The issue is complicated. I think Hollywood film is at its least interesting point in a long time. But television is so fascinating and rich with a lot of options. It all depends on where you are looking. That feminism and so forth have been co-opted to both market pop culture and give it the veneer of progress is a big problem, and it makes art boring as hell.

AW: Oh, agreed, Alex. It’s been depressing to me the degree to which the conversation about POC creators has focused on getting to make mainstream work and be hired by large media companies but so much less on elevating work made outside the system. I don’t want to discount the latter! Or the importance of getting people paid and shifting who’s in power within those structures. But it’s often the least interesting and least daring source of art.

AJB: Alison, you bring up a really good point about how progress for people of color equals being swept up in the mainstream and — I’ll take it further — having the same markers of success as white people. I say burn it all down. The most interesting work to me is happening outside of the system in many ways. But that has always been true in one way or another.

We are in a time where it’s truly impossible to separate the art from the artist. How much do you think about the author of a story as you’re writing about it?

AJB: This is a really complex question. I want to answer the first part a bit personally. When Kathryn Bigelow’s film Detroit came out, I was still freelance and did a review for RogerEbert.com which exploded because I wrote this: “Watching Detroit I realized that I’m not interested in white perceptions of black pain. White filmmakers, of course, have every right to make stories that highlight the real and imagined histories of racism and police brutality that pointedly affect Black America. There are, of course, a litany of films by white filmmakers about subject matter unique to the black experience that I find moving — The Color Purple comes to mind. But Steven Spielberg’s film was based on a novel by Alice Walker and produced by Quincy Jones. Detroit was directed, written, produced, shot, and edited by white creatives who do not understand the weight of the images they hone in on with an unflinching gaze.”

I have never received more hate mail and criticism from white and black critics accusing me of saying white people can’t write/direct films about black pain, which is not what I said. It angered me because I feel there is a way to discuss how the makers of a piece of art might be myopic due to their background, which prevents them from meeting the goals they set out for with a film. I don’t think you can separate art from the artist. But most of what we are talking about are very collaborative mediums, and for the most part, I am pretty anti-auteur theory. Which is to say, this is a complex issue that changes depending on the work we are talking about, the production process, and so forth.

MB: I was haunted by something Bigelow said to Variety during the promotion for Detroit : “I thought, ‘Am I the perfect person to tell this story?’ No, however, I’m able to tell this story…” I see many “allies” with that logic. It seems that question of who is able to tell stories should be more a primary concern.

AW: I feel like “art from artist” arguments have always been bullshit, or at least deployed selectively.

EAJ: It’s funny how many critics have coded work by women and people of color as personal or “autobiographical,” whereas work by white men is somehow transcendent of that.

AJB: Ain’t that the truth, Alex. That just puts into harsh relief how we (as in critics, generally) talk so differently about the work of people of color and white people.

As much as we can’t separate those the art and the artist, does it ever feel like it simplifies the conversation around art, where a “good person” translates to a “good work” and a bad person therefore creates “bad work.” For example, after the Junot D í az controversy, in which he was accused of sexual misconduct , there was a lot of criticism of his previous work — was some of it valid, and did some of it conflate him with his work?

JS: For the record, I did stan Junot for a period, but I do agree with the summation that a man writing abusive male characters … may or may not himself be an abusive male character. The same with lots of male auteurs and creators. I think we’re smart enough to not conflate character and art, or I hope so. I don’t know if there was a conflation with Díaz or just a retrospective enlightenment? Hindsight is 20/20, etc.

EAJ: There is a conflation happening around personhood and the work itself that’s now part of “branding.” You definitely see some people trying to use that as cover to inoculate themselves from criticism.

AW: Like Dan Fogelman blaming white male critics for Life Itself ’s bad reviews !

EAJ: That was some of the most suspect co-opting of social justice rhetoric in 2018!

Let’s talk about how art and politics intersect in 2018, when it comes to the work itself. Does the way some works focus so intently on the experience of racism/sexism/etc. lead to characters who have no interiority beyond the message they’re supposed to communicate?

MB: I have become very suspect of any recent work that adds in a police shooting of a black person for topicality and gravitas.

AW: I was just hanging out with a friend, who’s an indigenous filmmaker, who was telling me about how a lot of the work she’s been seeing from her community, especially people starting out, is focused on instances of oppression and racism rather than lives in which those things are an element, and it frustrated her. I feel like there are a lot of structures in place, both commercial and in terms of grants, that incentivize that kind of work in a lot of POC communities, because it fits an idea about what is “important.” It frustrates me, too — like, the lens through which we get to see POC characters is often so narrow and so focused on pain.

MB: There’s a current movement called “Afro Bubblegum” that calls for films about Africa to be fun, fierce, and frivolous, for exactly those reasons, Alison. And I feel that impulse! On the other hand, the only film I’ve seen from that movement, Rafiki , was pretty mediocre. (You didn’t hear that from me! Another instance of proving Wesley correct.)

JS: There are definitely those plainly obligatory, utilitarian characters in books and film. They always feel hollow or arbitrary; I’m thinking of Donald Glover’s appearance in season two of Girls . Like, just let the show be white, I’m fine with a white show! (I think that Girls is as much about white East Coast womanhood, though not ladyhood, which I perceive as something different.)

AJB: Sometimes it is okay for a show to not be intersectional — sometimes it is actually dishonest when it is. The girls of Girls not being close to or interacting with people of color much reminded me of white women I have known who lead insular lives. Like, that is a real thing that happens.

EAJ: I did a recent interview with Alan Yang where he talked about how he got some criticism about his new show, Forever , because it wasn’t explicitly about race. And yet, there were a lot of little touches about race that you could pick up on that aren’t as explicit. It’s about race even if it’s not about “oppression.”

AW: I have definitely heard creators of color talk about feeling pressure to make stories about their communities, and some of that is self-created pressure — when there’s a dearth of people who look like you onscreen, and you’re in a position to do a little bit to change that, you tend to feel like you should. But, to Alex’s point about Alan Yang, I think a lot about Justin Lin taking over The Fast and the Furious series and slowly pushing it from being this dumb Point Break -but-with-cars (as if anything else could ever live up to Point Break !) to being this gloriously dumb multiethnic ensemble series that snuck in a stealth Asian male lead, and the power that comes with working with material that isn’t inherently, in this case, Asian-American, and inserting that POV anyway.

EAJ: Tokyo Drift is the best of the franchise and Sung Kang should have been a fucking movie star and I will take that with me to my grave.

I feel like there’s a deep parallel between this and the Memoir Industrial Complex that often asks for women and people of color to cut themselves open and share their pain and trauma. It still seems like it’s ultimately for a white gaze, and that’s why I feel ambivalent towards those works, because often I think they’re not doing something formally inventive or challenging, but merely playing into a genre that renders their subjectivity as abject and easily digestible for a white readership.

This is a great way to get into the final question. What are examples of works that strike the right balance between having a strong political intent and being artistically dynamic?

MB: I think the goal is not a balance between political and artistic goals, because all art is political. Superior work is going to be so political that it transcends partisan views, and is no longer about right and wrong sides but instead criticizes every view, including your own. Good artwork should make everyone uncomfortable. I’m trying to think of an example! (The only thing that comes to mind is Eastwood, but I don’t really want to get into that.)

EAJ: Right. Work by women and people of color often gets marked as “political” in part because their effects are counter to the current regime, whereas something like Home Improvement would have been seen as apolitical because it followed the smooth grain of patriarchy.

AW: The term “political” has gotten weirdly and unfortunately claimed by a certain type of reactive Twitter troll as a slight. What I’m really interested in is our having more conversations about aesthetic choices in addition to social/political/content-focused ones, because I feel like criticism (and I don’t excuse my own writing from this) leans really heavily toward the latter at the moment.

AJB: You also can’t adequately even critique the political dimension of a work — especially mediums as visual/aural as film and television — without bringing in the aesthetics of a piece.

EAJ: Totally. Aesthetics and politics are separated far too often, when in fact, one informs the other. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (which, it should be said, has a troubled relationship with race), many episodes of Atlanta (“Teddy Perkins” most recently), Moonlight , BPM , Jane the Virgin , and a boatload of queer comedy feel aesthetically vital because they upend conventions, challenge form, and are also really fucking well-crafted.

AW: Maybe because we’ve been talking about it offline, Alex, but the first thing that came to mind for me is Lee Chang-dong’s Burning , which is at once a mesmerizingly good, beautifully crafted thriller and a bitterly incisive exploration of class. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, or Steven Yeun’s dead-eyed yawns. And I thought The Rider , my favorite film of the year so far, was an amazing look at masculinity and economic precariousness and life on a reservation, while feeling the need to give none of these elements the double underscore.

MB: I agree Atlanta is a great example. I also like when white artists address whiteness, like Lena Dunham at her best in Girls , but not necessarily when she thinks she’s doing it, when she makes it opposed to blackness. The politics and style of Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro Felice serve each other well. It’s hard to think of many American examples.

AJB: When I think of works that are actively thinking about power, politics, and are also formally inventive, my mind doesn’t immediately think of the present but the past — I feel noir during Hollywood’s classic period did this beautifully. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend , Jane the Virgin, Killing Eve, Annihilation , Jennifer Phang’s amazing film Advantageous (if she doesn’t have a long, great career as a director I will be livid) are all good examples. These days, I feel a lot of heavy genre works are the most interesting. Horror, noir, and science fiction offer a fascinating set of tools, values, and aesthetic experimentation that allows filmmakers to hit on these notes very well.

Hearing your responses urges me to be more exact when it comes to discussing these matters, personally and critically. Like Alison, I deeply want more nuanced criticism that takes into consideration the aesthetics, production, and medium’s history when it comes to pop culture, while keeping in mind the social and political.

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75 Pop Culture Topics for Essays and Research Papers

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Are you searching for excellent pop culture topics for your academic work? If yes, then this blog will be helpful to you. Especially, for the convenience of students like you, here, we have presented an amazing list of 75 unique pop culture essay topics and research ideas. With subjects ranging from fashion and music to movies and social media, the topics we have recommended here will guarantee you to engage your readers. In addition to the list of pop culture ideas for discussion, we have also explained how to write an effective pop culture paper.

Continue reading this blog and get exclusive topic ideas on pop culture for academic writing.

What is Pop Culture?

Popular Culture or ‘Pop Culture’ refers to the material culture and tradition followed by a particular society. It is mainly transmitted to the younger generation via mass media. Mostly, pop culture focuses on cultural products like film, art, music, dance, literature, cyberculture, radio, and television that are consumed by a lot of society’s population. Essentially, popular culture is a set of values, beliefs, actions, objects, and practices that are popular during a specific time and space in society.

An Overview of Pop Culture Writing

If you are a student, then in your school or college, you may get a chance to deal with pop culture writing. In general, pop culture writing refers to the practice of studying, criticizing, and discussing many aspects of popular culture in written form. It covers a wide spectrum of current popular trends, such as movies, music, television shows, fashion, celebrities, internet phenomena, and more.

Steps for Writing a Pop Culture Paper

Are you unsure how to write an essay or a research paper on pop culture topics? If yes, then follow these pop culture paper writing steps.

Choose a relevant and intriguing pop culture topic that is interesting to you. It could be a certain film, television show, music genre, celebrity, or social media trend.
Develop a precise and short thesis statement that summarizes your major argument or point for your article. Your thesis should be targeted and present a specific viewpoint on the chosen topic.
Organize your ideas and create a neat outline for your essay.
Next, begin writing your academic paper with an engaging introduction that provides background information on your topic and states your thesis statement.
After the introduction, compose the body section. In the body paragraphs, present your analysis and back it up with evidence from your research. Furthermore, consider alternative perspectives and interpretations of your pop culture topic. Address the counterarguments as well. Make sure the ideas in your essay flow naturally from one paragraph to another. Add easy transitions between concepts and open each body paragraph with a clear topic sentence.
At the end of the paper, include a conclusion paragraph. The conclusion should summarize your important points and restate your thesis.
According to the given essay writing guidelines, format the citations, references, and overall structure of the paper.
Lastly, after you complete writing your academic paper, check your paper for grammar, spelling, and punctuation issues. Also, validate the clarity, coherence, and consistency of your ideas. If everything looks perfect, then you may go ahead and submit the paper.

List of Top Pop Culture Topics for Academic Writing

For writing an academic paper, a good topic is essential. If you have no idea what topic to choose for your pop culture paper, then without any hesitation, explore the list presented below. In the list, we have shared exciting popular culture topics for essays and research papers.

Also Read: 200+ Excellent Research Paper Topics of 2023

Simple Pop Culture Topics for Essays

Explain how technology affects pop culture.
Examine the impact of popular culture on consumer behavior.
Describe the role of fandom in pop culture.
Discuss the impact of K-pop culture on fashion.
Examine the correlation between mass media and pop culture in the U.S.
Discuss how globalization affects pop culture.
Compare folk culture and pop culture.
Is TikTok a part of modern pop culture?
Focus on the radio stations that contribute to pop culture in the past.
Discuss the types of pop culture topics that mass media ignore to broadcast.

Interesting Pop Culture Essay Ideas

Investigate how fandom culture varies around the world.
Discover the roots of the US pop culture.
Explain how politics influence pop culture.
Prepare an essay on a specific period of American pop culture.
Write about American fast food as a part of pop culture.
Explain how pop culture categorized social groups.
Examine how popular culture affects public health.
Analyze a pop culture artifact that you are interested in.
Examine the contribution of YouTube to the pop culture.
Explain how the 2020 pandemic influenced pop culture.
Talk about the lessons that pop culture teaches about gender.
Explain how pop culture portrays religion.
Explore the different popular culture issues.
Explain how memes influence public opinion.
Examine the impact of TV shows on self-realization among teenagers.

Also Read: 130 Excellent Agriculture Research Topics

Engaging Pop Culture Topics for Research

Analyze how pop culture unites American citizens.
Examine how cultural appropriation affects media.
Explain the impact of pop culture on gender imbalance.
Write about influential online news resources.
Examine the effect of pop culture on the morality of teenagers.
Investigate the influence of pop culture in eradicating terrorism.
Focus on the contribution of pop culture in promoting women’s rights.
Examine the ethical issues related to pop culture.
Prepare a research paper on the representation of pop culture superheroes in society.
Discuss the impact of pop culture on technology adoption.
Examine the challenges related to the trends in pop culture.
Discuss the effects of pop culture in promoting the fashion industry.
Analyze how pop culture changes with social events.
Examine the differences between men and women in pop culture.
Explain how music shapes a generation.

Captivating Pop Culture Essay Questions

Discuss the significance of pop culture in eradicating stereotypes.
Analyze the impact of pop culture on community practices.
Write about the importance of radio in modern popular culture.
Explain how pop culture trends affect intercultural relations around the US.
Examine the influence of nostalgia in pop culture.
Discuss the impact of travel on pop culture.
Explore the cultural appropriation debate in the fashion and music industries.
Analyze the rise of hip-hop music in popular culture.
Discuss the cultural significance of reality TV shows in modern society.
Explore the rise of streaming platforms and the decline of cable TV.
Examine the role of social media challenges in teenage peer pressure.
Discuss the impact of video game violence on aggressive behavior.
Explore the influence of social media on beauty standards.
Analyze how mental health is portrayed in popular media.
Examine the impact of streaming platforms on the music industry.

Latest Pop Culture Topics for Academic Papers

Examine the influence of pop culture on modern advertising strategies.
Explain the influence of digital media on fashion trends in pop culture.
Analyze the influence of pop culture on language evolution.
Write about the sneaker culture within the music industry.
Examine the role of pop culture iconography in classrooms.
Analyze the influence of science fiction on popular culture.
Discuss the influence of Greek Mythology in contemporary pop culture.
Examine the correlation between sports and popular culture.
Analyze the portrayal of LGBTQ+ representation in films and TV shows.
Examine the influence of pop culture on modern education systems.

Wrapping Up

From the list suggested above, choose any topic of your choice and compose a brilliant pop culture paper. In case, you require any other pop culture ideas for your academic work or if you need help with writing your essay or research paper on popular culture topics, call us right away.

On our platform, we have plenty of talented academic writers from diverse fields to offer help with paper topic selection, writing, and editing. Particularly, by using their expertise, they will assist you in completing your pop culture assignments on time in the way you want. Moreover, getting our assignment help online will aid you in submitting plagiarism-free pop culture papers on time and scoring top grades.

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Essay on Pop Culture
Pop culture is the collection of ideas, images, and attitudes that are known by the mainstream of a society at a given time. It includes music, movies, fashion, technology, and slang. Pop culture is often seen as fun, easy to understand, and enjoyed by many people. Music and Movies. In pop culture, music and movies are very important.
Impacts Of Popular Culture On The Society: [Essay Example], 1737 words
Nevertheless, pop culture impacts the society in both positive and negative manner. Positively, the culture has helped women and teenage girls to self-define themselves, create bonds with people of different backgrounds, increase knowledge in various subjects and realize their worth in the society. Negatively, the culture has made both women ...
Why Pop Culture Is Important: Understanding Its Impact on Society and
Yes, pop culture is highly relevant in today's society, reflecting people's values, beliefs, and attitudes and shaping how we think, act, and communicate with one another. It plays a significant role in our daily lives and profoundly impacts communication, connection, and identity formation. By Valerie Forgeard.
How Pop Culture Can Benefit Our Lives
A: Pop culture adds more to our lives than an escape from boredom. Authentic portrayals of events and people make us more empathetic, exposing us to new perspectives and building bridges. It can be cathartic, helping us purge strong emotions and work through past experiences. It also helps us connect: you see someone wearing a T-shirt with your ...
Society's values: Decoding the impact of pop culture on Hospitality
The intersection of hospitality and popular culture is a dynamic space where societal values, norms, and human interactions are vividly depicted and often critiqued. From television series to classic films, pop culture has consistently provided a mirror through which we can examine our own behaviors and beliefs.
Breaking the Academic Stigma Surrounding Pop Culture Studies
Pop culture includes any mass-produced and mass-consumed entertainment. Darowski explains that academics who study pop culture apply the same critical and analytical skills and theories to pop culture objects such as graphic texts, film, and merchandise as they would apply to a traditional text. Many cultural aspects of society disappear over ...
How Does Pop Culture Influence Society: A Comprehensive Analysis
Pop culture, short for popular culture, refers to a wide range of ideas, images, trends, and expressions recognized and shared by a large group. It encompasses various aspects of society, including music, movies, television, fashion, slang, and technology. Pop culture often reflects the current values and interests of the masses.
Pop Culture: An Overview
Popular culture is, in the historic use of term, the culture of the people .". Popular culture allows large heterogeneous masses of people to identify collectively. It serves an inclusionary role in society as it unites the masses on ideals of acceptable forms of behavior. Along with forging a sense of identity which binds individuals to the ...
Essay Example: How Does Pop Culture Effect The Youth
Title: The Impact of Pop Culture on Youth: Navigating Influences in the 21st Century Introduction Pop culture, a dynamic and ever-evolving landscape, plays a pivotal role in shaping the perspectives, behaviors, and identities of the youth in contemporary society. As the nexus of entertainment, fashion, music, and technology, pop culture serves as a mirror reflecting […]
Popular Culture
Introduction. Popular culture is the set of practices, beliefs, and objects that embody the most broadly shared meanings of a social system. It includes media objects, entertainment and leisure, fashion and trends, and linguistic conventions, among other things. Popular culture is usually associated with either mass culture or folk culture, and ...
Popular Culture: We Are What We Consume
Collectively, a popular culture that is an expression of a society's shared experiences has essential value and a beneficial function to that society. It is an important contributor to the ...
How 'pop culture' defined the 20th century
Pop culture is the heartbeat of modern society, from the catchy tunes that get stuck in our heads to the blockbuster movies that captivate millions. It is an ever-evolving phenomenon that has reflected and influenced the zeitgeist of the last few generations. It's a mirror held up to society, capturing the trends, attitudes, and values that define each decade's hopes and fears.
Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture
Whatever one's liking is for relating the substantive, serious, classic philosophical issues to the fluff of popular culture, these books have made some serious inroads to connecting philosophers and philosophy to the "real world." ... Shusterman does a nice job problematizing the concept of "entertainment value." In his essay on television ...
The Importance Of Popular Culture
The Importance Of Popular Culture. Popular culture is an essential element of everyone's daily life. Whether it is through direct or indirect means. Popular culture can often be interpreted in different means simply because it is a rather big umbrella where many areas of lifestyle/society seek shelter. Lifestyles such as music, films, toys etc.
Examining the power of pop culture to shape perception, issues and
As a pop culture educator and scholar, Brooks sees urgency in the study and analysis of marginalized groups and false hierarchies. Her hope is to give rise to different voices, to break down and question barriers and to address the countless issues that have been handed down or ignored for generations. Pop culture, she said, can play a role, by ...
Should pop culture be studied academically?
In a world so diverse, popular culture can provide a sense of commonality. Story continues below advertisement. The study of pop culture academically should not be dismissed but some examples why include: the incredibly high interest in movie and book franchises that rake in millions a year, the sold-out shows and tickets that sell out in ...
American Pop culture: Its Influence and Impact on the Global Stage
American pop culture has shaped and continues to shape our global society. Pop culture icons like Elvis Presley, Madonna, and Michael Jackson have transcended borders and become global symbols of American pop culture. American pop culture trends have influenced and been influenced by cultures worldwide, creating a vibrant global exchange.
Pop culture's influence on people's morality/moral code
Pop culture refers to the prominent and easily recognized set of practices, beliefs and objects by the mass majority in the modern world. This mass appeal is what helps pop culture thrive. Morals are individualistic ideologies pertaining to acceptable or unacceptable standards of behavior. Although morals vary from person to person, pop culture ...
Pop Culture, Subculture, and Cultural Change
The term popular culture refers to the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in mainstream society. Popular culture events might include a parade, a baseball game, or the season finale of a television show. Rock and pop music—"pop" is short for "popular"—are part of popular culture. Popular culture is often ...
How Pop Culture Reflect Our Society's Values
Popular culture is the entirety of ideas, views, attitudes, images, and other events that are in the mainstream of culture. It is intended to all people of all age groups and influences our thoughts, behaviors, trends, etc., and can include songs, movies, celebrities, food, and literature. It is a defining aspect of most people's lives.
The Interplay of Religion and Popular Culture in Contemporary America
In exploring the interstices running along the contours of religion and popular culture researchers must not neglect the embodiment and praxis of religious expression in popular culture and vice-versa. There was a time when the realms of popular culture and religion did not meet — at least in an academic or analytic sense. The space betwixt, between, around, and interpenetrating each was ...
11 Pop Culture Research Topics That Pop
Pop culture research topic #9: Pop culture's promotion of social change. While it's certainly true that pop culture can be filled with crazy trends in clothing, hairstyles, and catch phrases, pop culture can also be an instrument of social change. Consider how the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter increased awareness.
Race and Pop Culture: A Roundtable Conversation
Pop culture has been in a state of upheaval and growth in recent years, leading to fascinating art and even more complex conversations. When Wesley Morris's essay " The Morality Wars " was ...
75 Pop Culture Topics for Essays and Research Papers
Simple Pop Culture Topics for Essays. Explain how technology affects pop culture. Examine the impact of popular culture on consumer behavior. Describe the role of fandom in pop culture. Discuss the impact of K-pop culture on fashion. Examine the correlation between mass media and pop culture in the U.S.

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Popular Culture by Dustin Kidd LAST REVIEWED: 08 February 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 28 February 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0193

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