What is considered pop culture?

Popular culture is the set of practices, beliefs and objects that embody the most widely shared meanings of a social system. It includes multimedia objects, entertainment and leisure, fashion and trends, and language conventions, among other things. Sex, love and rock-26 roll were the way of life during the 1960s. People used pop culture as a way to escape government atrocities, protests, war and violence.

Bands and musicians such as The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, The Beach Boys and Elvis Presley gained great popularity. The cinema of the 1960s reflected the decade of fun, fashion and rock (26%) and social changes. It could be said that sports and television are two of the most consumed examples of popular culture, and they also represent two examples of popular culture with great staying power. While the folkloric element of popular culture is strongly related to the commercial element, public communities have their own tastes and may not always accept all cultural or subcultural items sold.

An individual can choose to participate in everything that is “popular” for the sake of popularity; or they can choose a course of action off the beaten path. Most people were scattered around small towns and rural areas, conditions that were not conducive to a “popular” culture. Taking into account these fundamental aspects, popular culture can be defined as the products and forms of expression and identity that are frequently found or are widely accepted, that are usually liked or approved of and are characteristic of a particular society at any given time. It creates currents and whirls, in the sense that a small group of people will have a strong interest in an area of which mainstream popular culture has only partial knowledge; thus, for example, the electro-pop group Kraftwerk has had an impact on mainstream popular culture to the extent that they have been referred to in The Simpsons and Father Ted.

With the Internet and all cultural products easily accessible, you could say that everything can be considered pop culture. Some argue that highly attractive items dominate popular culture because for-profit companies that produce and sell popular culture items try to maximize their profits by focusing on items that are broadly attractive (see culture industry). According to Baudrillard, the products of popular capitalist culture can only give the illusion of rebellion, since they continue to be complicit in a system controlled by the powerful. As mentioned above, a primary source is the media, especially popular music, movies, television, radio, video games, books and the Internet.

Some Marxists complain that popular culture and its implicit insistence on a necessary causal relationship between consumption and self-realization perpetuate pernicious and deep-seated social and economic divisions that alienate the working class from the professional and idle ruling classes and cause general discontent and a decline in the quality and enjoyment of life for all (compare with Situationism). There are times when certain elements of popular culture (for example, Turkish carpets, Mexican blankets, and Irish fairytales) reach the world of pop culture. The most influential criticisms of popular culture came from Marxist theorists at the Frankfurt School during the 20th century. This has led to the greater popularity of certain media that would never have reached their audience before the Internet.