pop: definition

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Pop culture is hard to define or classify. For example in music, popular music can be anything from music that is not classical to only the current top ten songs or music that sounds like these. One definiton is, "The segment of culture that incorperates the activities of everyday life, including the consumption of consumer goods and the production and enjoyment of mass-produced entertainments."
But everyday life for whom? A classical musician plays classical music everyday, but that is not pop culture. A experimental painter paints paintings that are not pop culture. These are activities of everyday life for some people. Where do you draw the line and call something not popular culture? Is it the average of what everybody in one area is doing, and the top of the list is pop culture? Or is it just what makes the most sales?

Also does anyone have any major interests in things they would not consider pop culture? (e.g. classical/jazz music, silent film, foreign film, modern art, etc) Or what are your reasons for prefering somethings that are more popular?

― A Nairn (moretap), Saturday, 25 January 2003 17:25 (twenty-three years ago)

(this a question I asked to my English class on popular culture via our e-mail list with mandatory participation)

― A Nairn (moretap), Saturday, 25 January 2003 17:26 (twenty-three years ago)

I hope you spelled "incorporates" correctly.

― gabbneb (gabbneb), Saturday, 25 January 2003 17:29 (twenty-three years ago)

The teacher doesn't care, it's informal. She just incorporates it with part of the participation grade.

― A Nairn (moretap), Saturday, 25 January 2003 17:30 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't think there is a clear division, but you could mark things on a scale, with points for dissimilarity from traditional high culture, prevalence in current culture, mass popularity and the like, to get some sort of pop culture index score. Maybe a traditional critical lack of respect or interest might score well too.

I'm certainly interested in some things that are not really pop culture. I'm reading a book on Japanese art at present (this is a major interest of mine), at least three quarters of the films I saw last year were subtitled, I've read all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, and so on. I don't make so much distinction between those and comic books, Hollywood films or reading crime novels, and it is surely undeniable that the distance and barriers between the allegedly opposite ends of the cultural scale have been greatly eroded over the last century.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 25 January 2003 17:41 (twenty-three years ago)

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