Popular culture or pop culture is the entirety of ideas, perspectives, attitudes,

images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture,
especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global
mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass
media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society. The most
common pop culture categories are: entertainment (movies, music, television,
games), sports, news (as in people/places in news), politics, fashion/clothes,
technology, and slang. Popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's
attitudes towards certain topics.

Popular culture is often 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,
and/or corrupt.

Mass culture refers to how culture gets produced, whereas popular culture refers to how
culture gets consumed. Mass culture is culture which is mass produced, distributed, and
marketed. Mass culture tends to reproduce the liberal values of individualism and to foster a
view of the citizen as consumer. Theodor Adorno was among the radical critics of mass
culture.

"Mass Culture" is a set of cultural values and ideas that arise from common exposure of a
population to the same cultural activities, communications media, music and art, etc. Mass
culture becomes possible only with modern communications and electronic media. A mass
culture is transmitted to individuals, rather than arising from people's daily interactions, and
therefore lacks the distinctive content of cultures rooted in community and region.

Mass culture is the set of ideas and values that develop from a common exposure to
the same media, news sources, music, and art. Mass culture is broadcast or
otherwise distributed to individuals instead of arising from their day-to-day
interactions with each other. Thus, mass culture generally lacks the unique content
of local communities and regional cultures. Frequently, it promotes the role of
individuals as consumers. With the rise of publishing and broadcasting in the 19th
and 20th centuries, the scope of mass culture expanded dramatically. It replaced
folklore, which was the cultural mainstream of traditional local societies. With the
growth of the Internet since the 1990s, many distinctions between mass media and
folklore have become blurred.