What exactly is popular culture according to you?

Introduction

There are numerous ways to define popular culture. Popular culture influences people's beliefs and values. Popular culture plays a vital role in defining the term Culture. It consists of various cultural elements in a society mainly using the media such as TV, radio, and even though modern days social media. According to some scholars, popular culture is just the leftover of high culture in society. Popular culture in this context is defined as a great category which tries to accommodate mass people's culture, texts and practices and the culture which fails to prove as a high culture according to the aristocrats and the leaders within the society. Pierre Bourdieu, a French socialist argues that cultural distinctions, that is the distinction between the high culture and low culture, are often used to define class distinctions. For him, culture is Predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not. Popular culture claims that the destination is mass commercial culture, whereas high culture claims that a destination is an individual act of creation.

Another way to define popular culture is ‘mass culture'. This definition is substantially based on the previous one. Many believe that popular culture is a hopelessly commercial culture.Popular culture is believed to be produced for mass consumption. Those who are a part ofpopular culture usually keep in mind the golden age that is the previous generation. This usually takes place in 2 different ways

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● A lost organic community

● A lost folk culture

For example, It has been found that American culture has turned out to be a more efficientpopular culture than other cultures. Foods like Mcdonald's and KFC are found in almost allcountries and are easily available.

History of Popular Culture

During the early period, most people were spread in small cities and states, at that time they were not known to any form of popular culture as people at that time were divided into small groups. With the beginning of the Industrial Era, the rural masses began to migrate to cities, leading to the formation of urbanisation.

Urbanisation is the only step in the formation of popular culture. People used to live in small rural villages in small groups but as the urbanisation grew and as they started growing into larger groups and crowds the adaption of popular culture also started increasing. Thus, many scholars have found that the beginning of popular culture led to the rise of the middle class during the industrial revolution. Industrialisation brought up many developments and advancements such as various types of transportation such as steam, locomotive advancement in building infrastructure, improvements in education and health and the evolution of writing in leaves to writing in printed pages all this led to the creation of popular culture. Popular culture is largely influenced by the mass media in this modern ERA. Television all has a certain form of influence on creating popular culture. As a result, urbanisation, industrialisation, the mass media and the advancement of technology led to the total creation of popular culture. This totalled to the shaping of pop culture.

Reflection on the study of Popular Culture

However, During my study about high culture and popular culture. I found out that this division between the two types is not so clear to me. William Shakespeare is now considered high culture, even though his work was once considered popular theatre in thenineteenth century. The same argument can also be done with the famous writing work done by Charles Dickens. Similarly, Film Noir has crossed the borders separating popular and high culture. However, Luciano Pavarotti's performance of Puccini's Nessun Dorma is a recent example of cultural flow travelling in one direction. Even the staunchest defenders of high culture would not want tenor or Puccini to be barred from their chosen domain.

Pavorti, on the other hand, was able to get 'nessun Dorma' to number one in the British Charts in the 1990s. Such a commercial triumph. He added that it was now humiliating for him to play the song because he didn't want people to think his musical taste was influenced solely by the fact that it was "the official BBC Grandstand World Cup Theme." Other students teased and laughed. Pavarotti performed a free concert at London's Hyde Park on July 30, 1991. The concert was expected to draw 250000 people, however, due to heavy weather, the attendance was onlyapproximately 100000. This concert puts an interest in the people regarding the concept of popular culture.

This popularity of the event put a question on the excitation of the differences between popular culture and high culture. In the early days, concerts were mainly attended by the ethnic class people. This concert, really put a question mark on the differences between the extensions of high culture and popular culture.

This example clearly demonstrates that the cultural divide between high and low cultures is no longer as visible as it once was.

It has been seen that the popular culture is generally different for different countries, according to the research most of the country's popular culture is nowadays changing. For example, Western countries have found out that eating unhealthy food has created a bigger issue, diseases like obesity, diabetes etc are rapidly increasing and dealing with mental illness is a huge issue.

It has been found that slowly the western countries are now getting influenced by India and slowly have started to do yoga to deal with these issues. Doing yoga keeps your body, and mind in peace. While yoga was first discovered in India. On the opposite side, Indian scholars and people are now getting influenced by western culture and slowly and steadily the younger generation prefers to go to the gym in India rather than do yoga.

As a result, from both countries' perspectives, I found out that popular culture is really acontroversial term. It has a negative as well as a positive side

● Positive in the sense, that due to the growth of social media and technology we are gettingto know each country's popular culture.

● And, Negative in the sense that due to the growth and the advancement of technologyslowly and steadily each country is reading their traditional culture and adopting other countries' culture. For example, as this yoga was first discovered in India according to Vedas, and Upanishad while it has been seen nowadays yoga is slowly been adopted by western countries. While on the other hands GYM is a part of western countries the first GYM was introduced in 2000 BC was first found by Egyptians and Greek , but now during this modern times due the growing and evolution of GYM it also now been adopted by the Indian people .

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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