popular culture
Mainstream entertainment sphere
Popular culture is the entertainment, media, fashion, and ideas that appeal to the general public rather than specialists or elites.
It encompasses television, pop music, movies, viral trends, memes, celebrity gossip, and mass-market products—the shared references that most people in a society recognize.
The term often carries a faint suggestion of the lowbrow: She's more interested in popular culture than classical music.
Shortened to pop culture.
- mainstreamDominant cultural current
- comic stripsSerialized newspaper cartoons
- social mediaOnline content-sharing platforms
- internet memeWidely spread digital content
- popFizzy drink, regionally
nostalgia · guilty pleasure · binge watching · hip-hop · memes · folklore · zeitgeist · trending topic · influential · fanfiction · graphic novels · fan fiction · music · cosplay · playlist · leisure · chart-topping · tabloid
- cultural historyart history, music history, social history, collective memory, literary history
- culturemusic taste, beliefs, food preferences, custom, festivals
- mass culturemass media, mass communication, entertainment, television, Hollywood
- human geographydemographics, migration, demography, urbanization, regions
- pop artpop art, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, soup cans, screenprint
- cultural geographyethnic groups, borders, territories, nationalism, migration
popular culturehigh culture
Society's esteemed artistic traditions
elite culture · fine art · avant-garde · literary fiction · belles-lettres
popular culturetraditional culture
Established customs of a people
folk culture · ancestral traditions · ancient culture · oral tradition · classical antiquity
popular culturesubculture
Group with alternative norms
counterculture · underground culture · cult following · outsider art · minority culture
culture, popular, cultured, cultivate, population, cultural, agriculture, populism, unpopular