by Lucy Adams
Popular culture has made significant icons and symbols to be used for the modern generation to indicate how they characterize with the various social elements. Popular culture is defined as a mainstream approach to consuming these social elements. It is often cited as temporary and evidently, only existent when there is a high demand for its popularity. Every person in the world contributes to this development of pop culture.
Clearly, the media is responsible for its distribution and influence of the attention that the society provides for it and its conventionalities. Modern slang defined popular culture as the normal and urges people to accept it as a fixture in the society. There are advantages of popular culture that binds the community of diverse people, which are the following:
1) The advantage of popular culture is that it is orthodox, and is accessible to almost anyone who has the ability to gain access to media. As a result of commerce, popular culture is used as a way to incorporate current ideas and concepts to present situations in the society, making it a very influential element not only for business but also for social development.
2) Another advantage is that it uses products of high culture as a basis. It increases the prestige of an individual product and captures the interest of the audience because of the desire for belongingness. Mass culture has devised a significance of classic art and used it to promote modern ideas and objects which can be related to the pop culture icon. Read more here: https://trans4mind.com/counterpoint/index-creativity-career/adams1.shtml.
3) Popular culture also enables people to understand the varying degrees of activities and human emotions and makes a strong relationship with the masses to make it influential. For example, television series often include and introduce popular culture symbols to make the audience relate to its episodes.
4) Inclusion of a product or idea in established television serves the purpose of enabling the masses to understand certain facets of society and makes them associate with the characters. This process introduces new pop culture icons in the long run.
However, there are disadvantages which promote popular culture as the representation of the vanity of modern society. Below are the minuses of popular culture:
1) Pop culture distorts cultural values and often pushes temporariness as the bait for people to consume it as pleasure and passing ideals. It disorients the society and introduces stereotypes. It is significant that the pulls of society make pop culture icons, and without the endorsement of products or a concept, a pop culture icon will never experience popularity with the masses.
2) Another disadvantage is that popular culture only resonates the creation of a ‘cult following,’ wherein people only join the bandwagon of wanting an object because it is popular. The rise of the particular object as a pop culture icon makes it desired but nevertheless, makes it only wanted because people want to belong to the group which has it. Read more here: https://www.michigandaily.com/arts/10uses-and-disadvantages-popular-culture03.
3) And lastly, popular culture makes a weak way of self-expression because it lessens the individuality of a person, and makes culture stagnate on the limited definitions of pop culture. The masses, being the main consumers of pop culture, weaken its culture by having a dependence on an icon’s image, and this loses individuality and development of culture as a whole.
In a world where everything changes as fast as concepts are produced, popular culture is here to stay with the modern society. Mainstream is here to stay, together with its pros and cons in the creation of conventional society, the depiction of individuality, and the ideas of popularity.
Lucy Adams is a blogger and an outsourcer from bestessay4u, an essay writing service. She’s a generalist able to cover a wide range of topics, from business and marketing to psychology and self-education. She can customize your writing requests.
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