What is popular culture?

What is Popular Culture?

There are many different ways to look at popular culture or “pop culture” as it’s sometimes referred to. I shall use my own definition before moving into the “popular” definition provided by our textbook. Culture is the shared values, attitudes and characteristics of a particular group or institution. There are many subcultures in the world that are fairly easy to identify. Any minority group would fall into the subculture category. An institution can have a culture, most business have some kind of culture that they try to encourage. Colleges are another type of institution that is well known for their cultures. Based on the previously mentioned examples you can probably figure out what popular culture must be. I believe that popular culture is culture for the masses; it crosses all boundaries of color, wealth, and religious beliefs. It is generally passed along through the media, friends, and family.

If I mention iPods, gangster rap, and lol cats, the majority of society would know what I am talking about. These items are part of popular culture. If I mention something like Jack and Jill of America then that narrows it down to African-American culture. Pop Culture as defined by our textbook “Common Culture” is “The shared knowledge and practices of a specific group at a specific time” (Petracca & Sorapure, 2007). This definition is similar to my own personal definition but put much more succinctly.

An understanding of popular culture is very relevant to you and your business because the world is shrinking and growing smaller. As technology gets faster and the world more connected, understanding other cultures becomes more and more important. Understanding and knowing how another country’s culture works is critical in today’s business world; it can help your company succeed where another fails because of their lack of understanding. India and China are two countries that are important to a large number of American companies. The American companies must understand those countries culture in order to do business there.

The internet is a big part of popular culture and I feel a very important part. However the one thing about it that annoys me to no end is the anonymity that it grants people. By that I mean a specific group of people referred to as “trolls”. These are people whose whole point of being on the net is to go into chat rooms or post on comment boards nasty and inflammatory comments. I was reading an article about Haiti and the tragedies that occurred there. I read through some of the comments and came across one that said something along the lines of Haiti being a wasteland and the people were less than human. That is was God correcting a mistake that he made. The comment was offensive in a number of ways plus it was totally unnecessary and unwarranted. I read another article about a basketball player who was having a rough time in their personal life. A comment about the article was that black people were all idiots and did not deserve to live. These types of comments are asinine and yet these types of comments are prolific all over the web. People hide behind the fact that no one knows who they are and there are no repercussions for what they say.

References
Petracca, M., & Sorapure, M. (2007). Common Culture: Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.