Abstract

Popular culture is malleable concept. It can be thought of as folk culture produced by people as an expression of their values and modes of existence, and it can be opposite, an ideologically laden product imposed by an elite class in display of power and social control. Popular culture can be an ordinary part of everyday life as well as site of intellectual and political struggle. It can be participatory form within community (actual or virtual) that engages most populous mainstream in society, and it can be mode of entertainment—an almost universal feature of most known societies. The paper will be discussing popular culture and its effect on different classes.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION3

DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS4

The Future is Past4

Mass Society becomes Popular Culture7

Contemporary Popular Culture10

The Heart of Matter16

End Thoughts21

CONCLUSION22

MLA Research Paper

Introduction

Popular culture is malleable concept. It can be thought of as folk culture produced by people as an expression of their values and modes of existence, and it can be opposite, an ideologically laden product imposed by an elite class in display of power and social control. Popular culture can be an ordinary part of everyday life as well as site of intellectual and political struggle.

It can be participatory form within community (actual or virtual) that engages most populous mainstream in society, and it can be mode of entertainment—an almost universal feature of most known societies. Wall painting, body decorating, singing, and gladiatorial sports from ancient world can all be regarded as forms of popular culture, as can Rembrandt's cottage industry products and Shakespeare's seventeenth-century theater. Items for inclusion in category of popular culture are now so diverse that no single definition contains them. Thus, popular culture refers to any demotic form that appeals to populace at large, and as such, it can function as social bond and folk culture that is expressive of people. In its early form, from sixteenth century, popular also implied lowly, vulgar, and common (Storey 2005:262). Popular culture can simultaneously refer as well to mass media dedicated to spreading propaganda and political repression.

Discussion and Analysis

At beginning of twenty-first century, range of phenomena potentially covered by term popular culture is such that its study is necessarily interdisciplinary and of interest not just to sociologists but also to variety of area specialists in fields such as American studies (from which Journal of Popular Culture has its origins), anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars. It has also generated new academic disciplines, including cultural studies, leisure studies, media and communication studies, and youth studies. It has been focus of research and teaching in gender studies, where question of how femininity and masculinity are socially and culturally constituted gives priority to issues of representation and everyday cultural practice. The coexistence of these new research and teaching disciplines with older subfields in sociology from which some of them, at least in part, emerged (e.g., sociology of popular culture, sociology of cultural production, sociology of everyday life, sociology of education, sociology of gender, sociology of sport, and sociology of consumption) and with more ...