Pop Culture Research Paper

POP CULTURE: A threat or a useful tool in tomorrow’s education?

Pop Culture is more than just entertainment, it is also a tool for learning.

Pop culture is power. If you want to influence people’s minds, the best way to do that is to engage them to the different forms of media.

We are living in this generation called “The Age of Technology”, and it is not surprising that people nowadays spent much of their time using media for their everyday needs as well as to entertain themselves. We cannot also deny the fact that because of the developments in technology as well as the occurrence of globalization, a new phenomenon emerged. We called this as the popular culture. Popular culture emerged as an answer to the unlimited wants and needs of the

The emergence of mass media and commercialization of culture open a way to the rise of pop culture. It is said to be a very powerful tool to influence and control people’s minds, a mouth-watering and very appealing to the taste of the masses. That is how pop culture runs in our societies nowadays. But before going to the main point of this essay, we must first identify and understand the origin of popular culture to deeply understand it. We must know the meaning of the two words where it came from: the “popular” and the “culture”. According to Williams (1983), ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. He suggests that there are three broad definitions of culture. First, it can refer to ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’. Like as if we are talking about the development for example in the West—great philosophers, artists and poets. Second, a culture may be ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people or a group’ (so it can refer to holidays, traditions, religious beliefs and festivals and the like). Lastly, he suggests that culture can be used to refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’. Here, the culture signifies the texts (written symbols) and practices to show culture in an artistic manner. For example, literary pieces and others like poems/poetry, novels, plays, dances, songs, novels, operas. (Storey,