Pop culture has been a term used since the 1950s/60s and entails a set of things that are prevalent in our society that are transmitted to us via the mass media.
Whilst reflecting on popular culture following the prompt, ‘What popular culture do you consume?’ I came to the realisation that almost all of the things ‘in trend’ and popular in society I consume on a daily basis. Such as pop music, fashion trends, the newest tv series and things like tik tok challenges or dances are all a part of the daily pop culture intake of my gen z life.
The pop culture that I consume the most is definitely television shows like netflix series, most of which are American made. I have noticed online that these shows are all just as popular in America of course, Australia and the UK. This popular culture is within our cultural proximity. Cultural proximity refers to media preferences across national boundaries. Whereby for content to best resonate with the cultural dispositions of viewers, the content and the viewer must exist in the same ‘cultural linguistic’ (Ksiazek & Webster, 2008) this refers to how people would prefer to watch a show made in their own language than one that has been dubbed or with subtitles. For example, Money Heist is a great tv series however I struggled to get into it because of the dubbed language compared to a English spoken series like Animal Kingdom.
The cultural proximity theory is directly related to pop culture especially television because of the way people will automatically gravitate towards media that they are culturally affiliated with.
References:
Thomas B. Ksiazek and James G. Webster, 2008, ‘Cultural Proximity and Audience Behaviour: The Role of Language in Patterns of Polarization and Multicultural Fluency’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. Vol. 52:3, pp. 485-503.
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