Pop Culture: The Definition Of Popular Culture

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good way to communicate and if this form could be a kind of gateway to other, more traditional forms of education about science. (Pinto et al., 2015) The results can be adopted for my own research. It is a different way of science communication, but also similar to YouTube videos; both have the aim to educate and entertain (edutain) at the same time. The formats have similar limitations and possibilities (be simple and short, but not boring and misleading) In the end, the authors concluded that this form of science communication could be seen as communication in the tradition of the deficit-model. (Pinto et al., 2015) The basic assumption with this format is that the audience does not know about science and has to learn more. This assumption…show more content…
In the field of culture studies are hundreds of articles and books on the topic of pop culture, it has different concepts and definitions. This is why it is important to show how pop culture is seen by different authors. In this way we get a better idea of what pop culture is and what it means for other scholars. After that I will show which definition of pop culture I chose as most useful for my study. John Storey (2006) gives in his book six definitions of popular culture. All of them have opportunities and difficulties to explain social phenomenon. All of them have in common, that popular culture developed as a result out of industrialization and urbanization; popular culture can only exist in and depends on a society with a capitalist economy. 1) In a wide definition is popular culture extensively liked and favored by many people. This is too vague and includes millions of items and phenomenon to be a meaningful definition, but it is a good starting point to understand popular…show more content…
In this way popular culture is only produced for its commercial sale. “It is mass produced for mass consumption.” (Storey, 2006, p. 6) It sees consumption as a passive activity, the audience is a consumer. Mass culture is in this way often equalized with American culture. 4) In this definition pop culture is seen as culture from the people for the people. Can also be seen as ‘authentic’ folk culture. One problem with this approach is who is included in ‘the people’ and it cannot explain properly the commercial side of popular culture, which is an important factor of popular culture. 5) This definition builds upon the concept of hegemony by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. It is about power relations between dominant groups and subordinate groups in society, which leads to a dominant culture and a subordinate culture. Popular culture is negotiated and exchanged between the dominant, imposed culture from the powerful groups in society and the culture coming from below from the

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