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Popular culture is constantly changing and is specific to place and time. It forms currents and eddies, in the sense that a small group of people will have a strong interest in an area of which the mainstream popular culture is only partially aware; thus from the Wikipedia article on the electro-pop group Kraftwerk: "Kraftwerk have impinged on mainstream popular culture to the extent that they have been referenced in The Simpsons and Father Ted."
Items of popular culture most typically appeal to a broad spectrum of the public; it is only occasionally that they are esoteric, as for instance in freemasonry. There are two reasons why broad-appeal items dominate popular culture. First, profit-making companies that produce and sell items of popular culture attempt to maximize their profits by emphasizing broadly appealing items. Second, popular culture apparently is governed by the " meme" effect, promulgated by Richard Dawkins. This is a form of natural selection: the items of popular culture which are most likely to survive are those which have the broadest appeal and thus propagate themselves most effectively.
A widely held opinion about popular culture is that it tends to be superficial. Cultural items that require extensive experience, training, or reflection to be appreciated seldom become items of popular culture.
Popular culture has multiple origins. A principal source is the set of industries that make a profit by inventing and promulgating cultural material. These include the popular musicPopular music sometimes abbreviated the genre pop music, is music belonging to any of a number of musical styles that are (at least in their heyday) broadly popular. Broadly, any music that is a part of popular culture, including classical, folk, or other industry, film, television, radioFor other uses see: radio (disambiguation Radio is a technology that allows the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of light. Radio waves Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, and are, video gamescreenshot of Tetris for the Nintendo Game BoyA video game is a game played using an electronic device with a visual display. Overview Often "video game" is taken in a narrow sense to mean those games played on consoles for television and similar handheld publishers, and bookA book is a collection of leaves of paper, parchment or other material, bound together along one edge within covers. A book is also a literary work or a main division of such a work. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book. In library a publishing.
A second and very different source of popular culture is the folkloricFolklore is the ethnographic concept of the tales, legends, or superstitions current among a particular ethnic population, a part of the oral history of a particular culture. The academic study of folklore is known as folkloristics. The concept of folklor element. In preindustrial times, the only culture was folk culture, and popular culture did not exist. This earlier layer of culture still persists today, for example in the form of jokeA joke is a short story or short series of words spoken or communicated with the intent of being laughed at or found humorous by the listener or reader. This sort of "joke" is not the same as a practical joke. Laughter, the intended human reaction to jokes or slangSlang is the non-standard use of words in a language of a particular social group, and sometimes the creation of new words or importation of words from another language. Slang is a type of sociolect aimed at excluding certain people from the conversation., which spread through the population by word of mouth much as they always have. The rise of the InternetThis article is about the Internet the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term for a set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking''. WWW information network structu has provided a new channel of folkloric transmission, and thus has given renewed strength to this element of popular culture.
The folkloric element of popular culture is heavily engaged with the commercial element; indeed popular culture might be defined as the kind of folkloric culture that arises under heavy commercial influence. To the repeated chagrin of the purveyors of commercial culture, the public has its own tastes, and it cannot always be predicted which cultural items sold to it will be successful and thus form the next ingredient of popular culture. Moreover, beliefs and opinions about the products of commercial culture (e.g. "My favorite character is Homer Simpson") are spread by word of mouth, and are modified in the process just as all folklore is.
A different source of popular culture is the set of professional communities that provide the public with facts about the world, frequently accompanied by interpretation. This includes the news media, as well as the scientific and scholarly communities. The work of scientists and scholars is mined by the news media and promulgated to the general public, often emphasizing "factoids" that have the power to amaze, or other items with an inherent appeal. To give an example, giant pandas are prominent items of popular culture; parasitic worms, though of greater practical importance, are not.
Both scholarly facts and news stories are modified through folkloric transmission, sometimes to the point of being transformed to outright falsehoods, known as urban myths (example: "the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow"). Doubtless many urban myths have no factual origin at all, and were simply made up for fun.