Popular culture

Popular culture comprises widely shared cultural forms, practices, and ideas, including entertainment and media created or adopted by broad audiences.

Mass media: Communication technologies and institutions that distribute content to large audiences. Broadcasting and publishing carry popular forms across social and geographic boundaries.
Folk culture: Cultural practices and forms rooted in shared traditions of a community. It offers a tradition-based contrast to culture shaped for mass circulation.
Subculture: A group culture with practices and meanings that distinguish it from the wider society. Subcultures adapt popular forms to express group identity and sometimes resist mainstream norms.
High culture: Cultural forms traditionally associated with elite institutions, education, and prestige. The distinction from popular culture has shaped judgments about taste and cultural value.
Cultural industries: Businesses that produce and distribute cultural goods and services. Commercial production turns music, film, and other cultural forms into widely circulated goods.
Mass culture: Cultural products made for large audiences through industrial production and distribution. The rise of mass production made popular culture a central subject of cultural criticism.
Celebrity culture: Social practices and media attention organized around famous public figures. Fame turns performers and public figures into recurring objects of popular attention.
Avant-garde: Experimental art and ideas that challenge established conventions. Avant-garde work often begins outside broad audiences, though it can later enter popular circulation.
Cultural diffusion: The spread of cultural traits between people, groups, and societies. It explains how popular forms travel beyond the communities where they begin.
Frankfurt School: A group of critical theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Its critique of the culture industry shaped influential accounts of mass entertainment.

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