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Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of the practices, beliefs, and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving force behind popular culture is mass appeal, and it is produced by what cultural analyst Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry".[1] Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of people in a given society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain topics.[2] However, there are various ways to define pop culture.[3] Because of this, popular culture is something that can be defined in a variety of conflicting ways by different people across different contexts.[4] It is generally viewed in contrast to other forms of culture such as folk cults, working-class culture, or high culture, and also through different high praised perspectives such as psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, and more. The common pop-culture categories are: entertainment (such as film, music, television and video games), sports, news (as in people/places in the news), politics, fashion, technology, and slang.[5]
The countries commonly thought to have the most pop culture influence are the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Other countries, such as South Korea, China, Italy, and France, are also highly influential.[6][7]
Popular culture in the West has been critiqued for its being a system of commercialism that privileges products selected and mass-marketed by the upper-class capitalist elite; such criticisms are most notable in many Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, as well as certain postmodern philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, who has written about the commercialisation of information under capitalism,[8] and Jean Baudrillard, as well as others.[9]
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