Popular culture or pop culture is generally recognized as a set of practices, beliefs, and objects that are dominant or ubiquitous in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain topics.[1] However, there are various ways to define pop culture.[2] Because of this, popular culture is considered to be an empty conceptual category, or something that can be defined in a variety of conflicting ways by different people across different contexts.[3] It is generally defined in contrast to other forms of culture such as mass culture, folk culture, working-class culture, or high culture and also through different theoretical perspectives such as psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, and more. The most common pop culture categories are: entertainment (such as movies, music, television, and video games), sports, news (as in people/places in news), politics, fashion/clothes, technology, and slang.[4]
Popular culture is sometimes viewed as being trivial and "dumbed down" in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result, it comes under heavy criticism from various non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, or corrupt.