Influence of Popular Culture in Society

Popular Culture
Your Name
Department of ABC, University – Whitewater
ABC 101: Course Name
Professor (or Dr.) Firstname Lastname
Date
Popular Culture
Question 1
Often, cultures in societies are shaped by elite and influential individuals within a society. For instance, when functioning correctly, the British monarch embodies the best of English society and, therefore, the English culture. For example, the white wedding gown became popular after 1840 when Queen Victoria of England married Prince Albert, setting the motion for a phenomenon that is still popular in modern societies (Carter, 2021). However, popular culture defies this aspect of cultural understanding because it is a culture based on the tastes of ordinary people rather than the educated elite. According to Kidd (2021), popular culture is a set of beliefs, practices, and objects that embody a social system's most broadly shared meaning. It is often associated with folk/mass culture and differentiated from various institutional, organizational, and high cultures.
In essence, popular culture involves the aspects of society's social life in which most public members are actively involved. Therefore, it is also called 'the culture of the people. It is determined by the interaction among people in day-to-day activities, including greeting rituals, slang, dressing, and food choices, among others. These are the most immediate and contemporary aspects of life in modern societies. These aspects, however, are rapidly changing, due to advances in technology and mass media, making popular culture a temporal phenomenon. Based on these attributes, popular culture can best be described as products and forms of identity and expression most frequently encountered, commonly approved, liked, and embraced, and characteristic of a particular society at a given time. Popular culture comes from various genres, including popular music, advertising, leisure, sports, entertainment, fads, and television, among others.
The association of popular culture with mass culture leads to the determination of the position of popular culture in the modern capitalist economic system. Thus, from an economic point of view, popular culture is a set of commodities driven solely by the profit motive and marketed based on how they are widely accepted. On the other hand, the association of popular culture with folk culture to the conceptualization of subcultures like ethnic and youth cultures. From this point of view, popular culture becomes a set of practices by culture makers like artists that result in objects and performances embraced within and without the culture they originated. An example to this end is the global embrace of Jamaican reggae, American hip-hop, and Kpop.
Sociologists, unlike economists, are best placed to study and explaining the nature and characteristics of culture, including popular culture. According to Kidd (2021), classical sociologists generally spoke to the concept of culture and its role in shaping social life. However, they did not distinguish the concept of popular culture. However, as added by Aistrope (2019), numerous sociological studies have highlighted how imagery and language from television, drama, music, literature, and film contribut...