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Fanatique Because everything in pop culture is connected...
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Popular or pop culture has been defined as being everything from 'common culture,' to 'folk culture,' to 'mass culture.' While it has been each of these things at various points in history, in postwar America, pop culture is undeniably associated with commercial culture and all its trappings: movies, television, radio, cyberspace, advertising, toys, nearly any commodity available for purchase, many forms of art, photography, games, and even group 'experiences' like collective comet watching or rave dancing on the drug ecstasy.
While humanities and social science departments before the 1950's would rarely have imagined including anything from the previous list in their curricula, it is now widely acknowledged that popular culture can and must be analyzed as an important part of US material, economic and political culture. Pop culture is also one of America's most lucrative export commodities, making everything from Levi's jeans to Sylvester Stallone movies popular on the international market.
It would be impossible to do an exhaustive - or even not-so-exhaustive - survey of all the work being done in and on the subject of pop culture, so we have included only representative examples of both. Our bibliographies and links focus on major figures in popular writing and basic categories of popular media after the war.
Copyright 2007 Fanatique
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