Short answers, pulled from the story.
Popular culture, also called pop culture or mass culture, is the set of practices, beliefs, artistic output, and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Its common categories include entertainment such as film, music, television, literature and video games, along with sports, news, politics, fashion, technology, and slang.
The phrase "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or earlier and was traditionally associated with poor education and the lower classes, in contrast to the "official culture" of the upper classes. According to author John Storey, popular culture emerged from the urbanization of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The term "pop", as in "pop music", dates from the late 1950s and is narrower than "popular". Pop refers specifically to something containing qualities of mass appeal, while "popular" refers to whatever has gained popularity regardless of its style.
The culture industry critique came from the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their work Dialectic of Enlightenment. They argued that capitalist popular culture churns out homogenous, standardized products manufactured to serve elite domination rather than expressing the people authentically.
In the 1970s, Japan's techno-nationalism produced global phenomena such as Sony and Matsushita's software in Hollywood Studios, the Walkman, and Kawaii culture. The word kawaii entered popular vernacular in 1914 through Tamaki Kishi and now describes cute things from manga icons and Pokemon to Hello Kitty, fronted by companies such as SanRio and Nintendo.
Popular culture spread through a series of inventions: the printing press in the sixteenth century, the radiotelegraph created by Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi in the 1890s, moving pictures first captured by Eadweard Muybridge in 1877, and recorded music from Edison's phonograph and Berliner's gramophone. Films like Casablanca in 1942 showed how cinema could shape public sentiment.
bell hooks argues that commercial celebrities cannot authentically symbolize liberation while structurally depending on imperialist capitalism and oppressive beauty standards. She dissects Beyonce as a node within a profit machinery that enriches corporations like Pepsi and Adidas and platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, contending that her billionaire status fuels the systems it appears to challenge.