Source Image: Terry Kearney, 'John Paul George and Ringo', 2017, Via www.flickr.com/photos/oneterry/32256424340
Culture comes in many different forms. When we talk about culture most people think about traditional culture which includes clothing, ceremonies, and even belief systems. However, culture can also be what we see in our regular lives such as sports, film, anime, etc. Most of this we call pop culture which is short for popular culture. Pop culture is spread through mass media.
The phrase “popular culture” was coined in or around the 19th century. It all started with a serialized novel that became popular. They were published in magazines or newspapers in order to reach a wide range of people.
With the development of film in the late 19th century, people were able to watch recorded video which revolutionized pop culture. In the 1920’s you had the popularity of jazz music, flapper fashion and film.
Even with the introduction of television in the 1940s and 1950s, it brought pop culture into people’s homes. It was much easier to get your fill of pop culture considering it helped raise the rock’n’roll music scene and youth culture. Most notably, you had Elvis Presley and The Beatles. The Beatles became a global sensation during this time.
In the 1960s you had the counterculture movement when teenagers started to challenge mainstream values and norms.
The 1970s went for more hip-hop influences and saw the video game industry begin to flourish with games like ‘Space Invaders’.
In the 1980s you have music and TV combined into MTV (Music Television Channel) and one of the biggest pop stars of the time Michael Jackson revolutionized it with his hit ‘Thriller’ in 1983.
More recently the biggest change in pop culture was the creation of social media in the early 2000s. Social media has become a big part of all of our lives and it’s one of the best ways for us to consume pop culture.
Things have changed so much in the span of just a hundred years. Now we have so many ways to get our fill of pop culture because of the internet. With the advent of the mobile phone, we can now get that content anywhere we go.
There will always be concerns about how we mainly consume pop culture now because we are constantly on our phones. Some people reading this might even be reading it on their phones. You don’t know. But pop culture is so much more than just social media, it’s part of history and we can’t change that.