Popular culture

• 1. Introduction

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  Popular culture goes by other names too: pop culture, or mass culture. The philosopher Theodor Adorno gave it a harsher label, calling it the 'culture industry'. Both names point at the same thing. They name the practices, beliefs, and objects that dominate a society at a given point in time, plus the feelings those objects stir in the people who interact with them. After World War Two, mass media took hold of this collection of ideas and pushed it into everyday life. The result shapes how people feel about almost any topic. Yet for something so familiar, popular culture resists a single definition. Different people, in different contexts, define it in ways that openly conflict. Who decided that penny dreadfuls were Britain's first taste of mass-produced culture for the young? Why did a word for cute, coined in 1914, end up describing Hello Kitty? And why have so many thinkers, from Adorno to bell hooks, accused this culture of being a machine for selling? Those questions sit at the heart of what follows.

• 2. Born From The Factories

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  The phrase "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or earlier, and for a long time it carried a sting. It was associated with poor education and the lower classes, set against the "official culture" and higher education of the upper classes. The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries changed the ground beneath that distinction. Britain saw literacy rates climb, and as capitalism and industrialization spread, people began spending more money on entertainment. Commercialised public houses and sports drew that money, and reading gained traction alongside them. The first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened in north-east England in 1825. That new capacity for travel created both a market for cheap popular literature and the means to distribute it widely. To meet the growing demand, the first penny serials appeared in the 1830s. The Guardian in 2016 described penny fiction as "Britain's first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young", calling penny dreadfuls the Victorian equivalent of video games. By the end of the 19th century the split from "official culture" grew sharper, a usage that became established by the interbellum period. The author John Storey traces popular culture itself to the urbanization that the Industrial Revolution unleashed.

• 3. Pop Versus Popular

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  The abbreviated form "pop", as in "pop music", dates from the late 1950s, and the small word carries a precise meaning. "Pop" and "popular" are sometimes used interchangeably, and their meanings partly overlap, but "pop" is the narrower of the two. Pop describes something containing qualities of mass appeal. "Popular", by contrast, refers to whatever has gained popularity, regardless of its style. John Storey lays out several definitions, and each one runs into trouble. The quantitative definition, counting what most people consume, stumbles because too much "high culture" qualifies as popular too. Television dramatizations of Jane Austen reach wide audiences. Another definition treats pop culture as whatever is "leftover" once high culture has been named. A third equates it with mass culture, commercial and mass-produced for mass consumption. Many works refuse to sit on either side of the line. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Orwell all straddle the boundary. Storey adds a political dimension, drawing on neo-Gramscian hegemony theory. That view sees popular culture as a site of struggle between the resistance of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation working for dominant ones. A postmodernist approach goes further and refuses to recognize any distinction between high and popular culture at all.

• 4. The Cult Of Cute

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  In the 1970s, Japan's post-World War Two "liberated" nationalism produced a cultural shift toward technological and financial innovation. This techno-nationalism yielded global phenomena: the software of Sony and Matsushita, now Panasonic, in Hollywood Studios, the Walkman, and large-scale advertisements. The same movement gave rise to Kawaii culture. The word kawaii entered popular vernacular in 1914, introduced by Tamaki Kishi in an advertisement for her feminine, chic boutique. Over time it took on a life of its own, becoming the word for all things cute, adorable, or lovable. It wove itself into Japanese culture through manga icons, Pokemon, and most notably Hello Kitty. Companies such as SanRio and Nintendo fronted this "cult of cute", and its appeal spread across East Asia and into the West. Important contemporary understanding of what popular culture means has come from the German researcher Ronald Daus, who studies the impact of extra-European cultures in North America, Asia, and especially Latin America.

• 5. The Culture Industry

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  Adorno once wrote that "The industry bows to the vote it has itself rigged". That line sits at the center of the Frankfurt School's critique, developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Drawing from Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and others, they argued that capitalist popular culture is no authentic expression of the people. Instead it churns out homogenous, standardized products built to serve elite domination. The desire for Hollywood films, pop melodies, and disposable bestsellers, they held, is not organic. It is shaped by capitalist behemoths and the gatekeepers who decide which commodities saturate the media. Adorno's work influenced cultural studies, philosophy, and the New Left. Western popular culture has long stood accused of being a vast engine of commercialism, a charge voiced by Marxist theorists including Herbert Marcuse, bell hooks, Antonio Gramsci, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton, and by postmodern philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard. The music critic Alex Ross observed in the New Yorker in 2014 that the digital age has only magnified Adorno's relevance. Jack Zipes points to the Harry Potter franchise, arguing that culture industry commodities achieve "popularity" through their very homogeneity and adherence to formula. Jean Baudrillard pressed the point further, holding that products marketed as rebellious can offer only an illusion of defiance, because the system producing them stays firmly controlled by the powerful.

• 6. Stars And Supply Chains

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  Cobalt and tantalum, critical for electronics, are frequently sourced from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo using child labour and artisanal miners facing lethal hazards. The very devices essential for engaging with this culture often rest on minerals mined under appalling conditions, generating vast profits for multinational conglomerates further up the supply chain. These conglomerates control music labels, film studios, streaming platforms, and news outlets, and they answer primarily to shareholders demanding ever-increasing returns. While mega-stars achieve immense wealth, the system is structured so that most revenue flows upward, to platform owners, shareholders, and executives. The advertising revenue underpinning "free" platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify is generated through surveillance and data extraction, commodifying user attention and privacy. The feminist scholar bell hooks delivers a searing intersectional critique of this machinery. She argues that commercial celebrities cannot authentically symbolize liberation while structurally depending on imperialist capitalism and oppressive beauty standards. Hooks dissects Beyonce not merely as an artist, but as a node within a vast profit machinery whose stardom enriches Pepsi, Adidas, her own Ivy Park brand, and the ad-revenue engines of Spotify and Apple Music. Beyonce's ascent to billionaire status, hooks contends, is built upon and fuels the very systems of patriarchal capitalism it might appear to challenge. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky made a parallel argument about information itself in their 1988 work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, positing that a powerful elite controls and manipulates mainstream information flow. John M. MacKenzie shows how many such products were crafted to glorify the British upper classes and promote imperialist worldviews.

• 7. Machines Of Transmission

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  With the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century, cheap mass-produced books, pamphlets, and periodicals became widely available, and common knowledge could finally travel. In the 1890s, Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi created the radiotelegraph, and from it the modern radio was born. Radio nurtured a more "listened-to" culture and proved imperative to advertising, since it introduced the commercial. Moving pictures were first captured by Eadweard Muybridge in 1877, and films have since evolved into elements cast into many digital formats. Their influence shows most clearly in what they aim to portray. Casablanca, released in 1942, introduced war subjects to the public after the United States entered World War II, meant to increase pro-war sentiment for the allies. Not every film starts a movement; the content must resonate with most of the public for its knowledge to connect with the majority. Today the culture of film is most evident through social media, an instant source of feedback that creates discussion and even spawns movements to defend a featured subject. Popular music, meanwhile, began in the late 1800s with Edison's phonograph and Berliner's gramophone, which let music be purchased by the public rather than reserved for elites. With copyright laws almost nonexistent, the early 1900s flowed with composers and publishers in a small area of New York known as Tin Pan Alley. The reel-to-tape recorder of the 1940s furthered the genre's success, and from the foundation of jazz and blues came Rock and Roll, Punk, and Hip Hop. Its major figures include Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Beyonce, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.

• 8. Folklore And Feedback

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  Adaptations based on traditional folklore provide a source of popular culture, an early layer of the cultural mainstream that still persists today. It propagates by word of mouth rather than mass media, surviving in the form of jokes or urban legends. With the widespread use of the Internet from the 1990s, the line between mass media and word of mouth has blurred. Communities have their own tastes, and they do not always embrace every cultural or subcultural item put up for sale. Beliefs about commercial products can spread by word of mouth and become modified in the process, evolving the way folklore does. Social media now carries much of this exchange across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and Snapchat. Slang appears online that never surfaces in face-to-face talk, and some people answer a situation with a hashtag or emojis. Influencers have become trendsetters through direct engagement with large audiences, upending conventional marketing. The influencer-driven fashion industry has also drawn fire for encouraging excessive consumerism, inflated beauty ideals, and labour exploitation. Personal branding follows the same logic. Ellen DeGeneres built her brand through The Ellen DeGeneres Show, then extended it into Ellen clothing, socks, pet beds, and more. The academic study of all this has its own pioneer in Ray B. Browne, one of the first academicians to teach courses on pop culture.