Popular Culture

What is popular (low) culture? "Popular culture is a symbolic expression allegedly aligned with the questionable tastes of the "masses," who enjoy commercial "junk" circulated by the mass media, such as soap operas, rock music, talk radio, comic books, and monster truck pulls" (Campbell, 18). When looking at the high-low hierarchy it often determines the way people view culture as a whole today, saying high culture is good taste and low culture is questionable taste. Many audiences take for granted the world of high culture and fine art causing many young people to not know where a library or museum is located, which promotes people to overlook important information for a paper or research project on a certain topics. Now many tend to look to the Internet for their sources of academic information. In the world of postmodernism, or as scholars define, mixing generations by recycling old media in new ways, the internet and emerging technology enables accessing information much easier, but it takes away from face to face communication. This newly defined technology or postmodernism is cheapening forms of public life such as email, libraries, and public communication. But, when looking at pop culture, countless people encounter it with a short life span, distracting them from what true meanings are, and exploiting aspects and understandings of what is meant to be. There are many differing distractions that a human may face in living their everyday lives. Pop culture does nothing more than add to it. When looking at the internet again for examples, we see websites such as "You Tube" or "My Space" causing communities of people to find pleasure in mindless web surfing. These web sites restrict a person 's ability or strive to search for history or anything significant to an individual 's culture. Instead they focus on an image of themselves and what they portray to society via the internet. Other forms of contemporary distraction include movies, television, and