Popular culture

Popular culture, or pop culture, is the vernacular (people's) culture that prevails in any given society. The content of popular culture is determined by everyday interactions, needs and desires, the cultural 'moments' that make up our everyday lives. It can include any number of practices such as knitting, cooking, chopping wood, storytelling, playing cards and throwing or kicking a ball.

18th and 19th century popular culture

The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization in many Western countries and the rise of new great cities in Europe, America, Australia and other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas and from poor to rich nations. Increased literacy, improvements in education and public health, new industrial and scientific technology and rapidly increasing urbanisation provided the socio-economic bases of popular culture as we know it today.

Related Topics:
Modern industry - 18th century - Urbanization - Cities - Literacy - Urbanisation

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Developments in transport also played a vital role in this process, with the advent of the steam locomotive and the steamship enabling both cultural products and their performers, producers and consumers to be distributed further, faster and more widely than ever before. Related advances in building technology saw the construction of the first large-scale public exhibition spaces (e.g. the Crystal Palace) and ground-breaking public events such as the famous Great Exhibition of 1851.

Related Topics:
Steam locomotive - Steamship - Crystal Palace - Great Exhibition

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During the late 18th and 19th centuries, entirely new genres of popular culture arose from the many new forms of communication that appeared and proliferated. These include the illustrated newspaper and magazine, the novel, printed sheet music, political pamphlets, the postcard, the greeting card, children's books, commercial catalogues, photography and the phonograph.

Related Topics:
Newspaper - Magazine - Novel - Sheet music - Pamphlet - Postcard - Greeting card

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Developments in the print industry during the 19th century -- notably the advent of the illustrated newspapers and the periodical magazine -- led to the appearance of many new genres of text-based popular culture, including the detective story, the serialised novel (e.g. Charles Dickens and the pioneering science fiction of authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as the mass-market populist book genre nicknamed the "Penny Dreadful", which later evolved into the pulp fiction genre. These innovations also created new categories of work and employment, such as the commercial artist, the journalist and the photographer.

Related Topics:
Detective story - Charles Dickens - Science fiction - Jules Verne - H.G. Wells - Penny Dreadful - Pulp fiction - Commercial artist - Journalist - Photographer

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Facilitated by law reform and changes in social attitudes, newspapers and periodicals began to feature new forms of social reportage and commentary, such as the editorial, the gossip column and the first works of investigative journalism. The invention of the telegraph allowed newspapers to gather news and other information more rapidly and widely than ever before, enabling the rise of the daily newspaper and the news agency.

Related Topics:
Editorial - Gossip column - Investigative journalism - Telegraph - News agency

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The performing arts likewise underwent radical changes in this period, with the emergence of many new genres including modern grand opera, comic opera and operetta, vaudeville and music hall entertainment. The invention of gaslighting revolutionised the theatre and made regular night-time mass entertainment a practical reality.

Related Topics:
Grand opera - Comic opera - Operetta - Vaudeville - Music hall - Gaslighting

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Music, at all levels of culture, was also drastically reshaped by new technology and techniques -- the mass-production of musical instruments such as the guitar, the banjo, the ukelele, the harmonica and the pianoforte (soon followed by the player piano and reproducing piano, the invention of the saxophone, the evolution of the symphony orchestra, the standardisation of concert pitch and the advent of cheap printed sheet music.

Related Topics:
Guitar - Banjo - Ukelele - Harmonica - Pianoforte - Player piano - Reproducing piano - Saxophone - Symphony orchestra - Concert pitch

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The two most profoundly influential developments in this entire period were without doubt the invention of the collodion 'wet-plate' process of photography in 1851 and the invention of the phonograph ca. 1878. Printing, photography and recorded sound provided the practical basis for a significant part of popular culture in the 20th century.

Related Topics:
Collodion - Photography - 1851 - Phonograph - 1878

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