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Is all popular culture 'success' formulaic? Provide three examples to back your response. Check out the example in the link to get started.

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Is all popular culture 'success' formulaic? Provide three examples to back your response. Check out the example in the link to get started.

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There was a time a few years back when it seemed to me that about every third book I encountered was called "The X's Daughter," with X standing in for just about any occupation, title, rank and pejorative imaginable. Bookshelf upon bookshelf was filled with the daughters of generals, cartographers, lacemakers, lighthouse keepers, veterinarians, preachers and miscreants.

More recently, we seem to have entered the age of the girls. Paula Hawkins's debut, "The Girl on the Train," was published last year and is still everywhere: Nielsen BookScan reports 2.7 million copies have been sold in the U.S. - the actual number is undoubtedly much higher, because that number doesn't capture eBook sales - and box-office receipts for the film adaptation reached nearly $25 million in its opening weekend. Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" was equally ubiquitous a couple of years back. This summer belonged to "The Girls," Emma Cline's acclaimed debut novel, still prominently displayed in every bookstore I enter. Carl Hiaasen's "Razor Girl" recently hit The New York Times bestseller list.

Who are these girls? Why are there so many of them? Books with "girl" in the titles make up a tiny fraction of all the books published in a given year, but they appear again and again on the bestseller lists. Other people have written about this trend, often with great eloquence, but none of them were backed by a data set. Using the database at Goodreads, the popular social networking website for readers, we set out to change that. A number of patterns emerged in our analysis: The "girl" in the title is much more likely to be a woman than an actual girl, and the author of the book is more likely to be a woman. But if a book with "girl" in the title was written by a man, the girl is significantly more likely to end up dead.

Why are there so many of these books? Well, because publishing is an industry ruled by mystery and chance. If anyone knew the magic formula by which a book sells a million copies, they'd all sell a million copies.

It's not that there's no data - of course there is. As a Penguin Random House author, I can log into a portal that delivers real-time sales data on all of my titles, complete with an addictive selection of interactive charts. But what I don't really know is why any given novel of mine sold the number of copies it did. I can point to moments of good fortune in the life of the book, but then, so can other authors whose books sold either far more or far fewer copies than mine did. Books take off, or they don't; they explode, or there's a slow burn, or there's a failure to ignite.

Because there is a certain element of mystery to the whole thing, when a book does explode, there's a natural tendency to try to copy elements of its success. "It always seems that when there is a mega-sales hit in publishing," said a New York City literary agent who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, "everyone scrambles to ride the coattails of that success. Even after all these years in the business, I continue to be surprised at just how long and how widely publishers will persist in those attempts. I guess it's hard to blame them."

People I spoke with in the publishing industry theorized that the Girl phenomenon started with Stieg Larsson's Millennium series - "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played With Fire," "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," "The Girl in the Spider's Web." That had been my assumption, too, but it appears the share of books that had "girl" in the title had already been rising before the first Millennium novel was published in the U.S. in 2008. (It was published in Sweden under a different title in 2005.) This year is shaping up to be the biggest year for 'girls' in fiction in decades, with nearly 1 percent of fiction titles featuring the word 'girl' in the title, according to Goodreads' analysis.

These books seem to build on each other, but it's worth noting that of course not all books are titled in an effort to replicate past books' success. The author Heidi Durrow told me that in the case of her 2010 debut novel, "The Girl Who Fell From the Sky," her title was a line in the book. "I like that it immediately suggests a mystery and puts the young adult narrator at the center of the story," she said, "even though the book is told from many character's perspectives." Another author, Sarah McCarry, told me that her novel "About a Girl" was titled as such because "it is literally about a girl, but more pertinently it's the title of a Nirvana song."

Durrow and McCarry are two fortunate novelists who got the titles they wanted for their books; not everyone's so lucky. Generally speaking, titles are like book covers; the author is invited to be a part of the selection process, but neither is ultimately the writer's decision. (The photographer and writer Deborah Copaken wrote a fairly chilling essay about this for The Nation a few years back. Her memoir of her career as a war photographer was titled "Shutterbabe" against her wishes.) Writers and publishers usually don't go on the record when there's been a disagreement, for the same reason that that New York City agent requested anonymity: Publishing's a small world, and it takes a certain recklessness to alienate a business partner.

But people in publishing will sometimes talk candidly when you agree to keep them anonymous, so here's that New York City agent again: "I recently surveyed the Barnes & Noble bestseller shelves," the agent wrote in an email, "and saw 'The Woman in Cabin 10' and thought 'We've finally graduated. They are allowed to be women again. Hallelujah.'"

I was curious about more than just how often "girl" books appeared; I wanted to understand who was writing these books, and the fate of the "girl" in the title. With the help of research assistants, I looked at the 2,000 or so most popular books with "girl" or "girls" in the title on Goodreads. I filtered out books with 250 or fewer ratings, as a means of getting the dataset down to a manageable size, and then filtered out books for children and young adults. I was left with 810 books, including all the heavy hitters we'd expect. It made for a nice representative sample of "girl" titles.

As one might suspect, the authors of these books were, most of them, formerly girls themselves.

The identity of the authors is relatively straightforward, but, well, who are all these girls? The agent I spoke with told me that he'd wondered if "girl" was even an accurate descriptor: "Were all of those 'girls' in the titles actually girls - or were the characters really women?"

I actually have this data, so please, allow me:

"And I thought women hated being called girls," the agent continued. "Are we regressing?"

I don't think we're regressing. I think it's just that publishers understandably want to sell as many books as possible, and given the wild success of books like "Gone Girl" and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," they think putting "girl" in the title might help. But the agent's comment about "The Woman in Cabin 10" made me think of a colleague of mine at The Millions, Edan Lepucki, who has a novel coming out next year titled "Woman No. 17." She's another fortunate author who got the title she wanted. "I have thought about the girl/woman dichotomy," she told me in an email, "and it does mean something that the book isn't called 'Girl No. 17.' It just could not be named that! It sounds so wrong, inaccurate and silly."

Lepucki's title character is 41 at the beginning of the book, but the data - and, well, personal experience - suggest that age is no impediment to calling someone a girl. I asked my editor at Knopf, Jennifer Jackson, if she had any thoughts on the trend. "Maybe 'girl' hints at a vulnerability that raises the stakes," Jackson suggested, "or an inevitable growing up in a way that promises story?"

It's an interesting idea. What does happen to the girls in these stories? With the help of a research assistant, I sorted the titles based on the status of the girl in the title, or insofar as we could figure out the status of the girl based on the book's Goodreads description. The good news is, the girl's usually all right:

However, something interesting and faintly troubling happens when you separate the titles by author gender and run the same analysis:

It's important to note what the data does and does not show. It wouldn't be fair to extrapolate from this that women and girls are more likely to be dead or missing across all books written by men; only that they're more likely to be dead or missing in books by men with "girl" in the title.

I can't think of any mitigating factor that fully explains this. Sure, women may be more likely to write memoirs with the word "girl" in the title, and we can safely assume a near-100 percent chance that the girl in the title survived to tell the story, but there are too few memoirs in this list - about a dozen, out of hundreds of titles by women - to skew the data in any significant way. The same goes for guidebooks (e.g., "Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide To Finding Her Inner French Girl," which is presumably for women who don't share my distaste for being called girls.) Perhaps, when you looked at the above charts, the thought crossed your mind that it's just that women are writing books that are generally less dark, to which I can only reply that you might consider reading more Denise Mina and Gillian Flynn. The explanation for the divergence between the fates of the titular girls could be as simple as women perhaps being more likely to write books with female protagonists. Book protagonists often appear in the book's title - think of John Le Carré's The Night Manager, for instance - and killing off the protagonist is a relatively unusual authorial choice.

All trends pass, in publishing and elsewhere. The "girl" books, though, will be with us for at least a little while longer. I had dinner recently with Michael Link, a bookseller at Joseph-Beth in Cincinnati. When I told him about this project, he laughed and said that he and his colleagues had joked about imposing a moratorium on books with "girl" in the title. A week later, he sent me an email: "There are five different galleys on the shelf with 'girl' in the title pubbing this fall."
Becca Schuh and Kshitij Aranke provided research assistance.

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The Gone Girl With The Dragon Tattoo On The Train

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There was a time a few years back when it seemed to me that about every third book I encountered was called "The X's Daughter," with X standing in for just about any occupation, title, rank and pejorative imaginable. Bookshelf upon bookshelf was filled with the daughters of generals, cartographers, lacemakers, lighthouse keepers, veterinarians, preachers and miscreants.

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Which one 'pop culture reinvention' was MOST worthy of being reinvented and why

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Which one 'pop culture reinvention' was MOST worthy of being reinvented and why

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The 25 Most Incredible Reinventions in Pop Culture History

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From Kim Kardashian to HBO to Monica Lewinsky, a rundown of spectacular second acts

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Watch and recommend any TED from this playlist to your peers. Be sure to clarify what makes it worth watching, and how it might allow us to rethink pop culture.

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Watch and recommend any TED from this playlist to your peers. Be sure to clarify what makes it worth watching, and how it might allow us to rethink pop culture.

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Explore some cultural phenomenons from across the globe. Some touching, some silly - and all very intriguing.

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Which of these 'internet icons' influence your generation the most? What gives them the power of influence?

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Which of these 'internet icons' influence your generation the most? What gives them the power of influence?

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Meet the 30 Most Influential People on the Internet

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From Drake to "Damn, Daniel," we sized up contenders by looking at their global impact on social media and their ability to drive news

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"We call our liking for all kinds of things—music, fashion, art—our taste."  Do you think anyone is capable of having 'unbiased taste'? Why or why not

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"We call our liking for all kinds of things—music, fashion, art—our taste."  Do you think anyone is capable of having 'unbiased taste'? Why or why not

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Researchers are cooking up experiments to learn what might explain which foods we love and which foods we hate

For most of us, a pickle is a pickle. It is something that rests snugly beside a sandwich, or floats in a jar on a deli counter. It is rarely something that occasions cryptographic analysis. A number of years ago, though, Howard Moskowitz, a Harvard-trained psychophysicist and food industry consultant, was asked by Vlasic Pickles to crack "the pickle code." Losing market share to Claussen, the Vlasic executives wanted to take a hard look at a question that was, surprisingly, rarely asked: What kind of pickles did people really want?

Sitting in the wood-paneled Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan, where he can often be found, Moskowitz tells me how, at Vlasic's behest, he stopped in Detroit to take part in a brine-tasting experiment in the airport's Admirals Club. "We came out with an experimental design of 45 different combinations of garlic, salt, spices and oils," he says. The test prompted the executives to come up with pickles that were far different from the current offerings. It forced them to think outside the jar.

What was most surprising, says Moskowitz, is that many people in later taste tests seemed to gravitate to pickles that were spicier than what Vlasic sold. "You could relate the ingredients and their interactions by a mathematical model to the amount of liking," he says. "So you had an optimum pickle."

And when Vlasic subsequently released its line of "zesty" pickles, he says, "you had the best-selling thing in history. We didn't expect that."

That people in the pickle business should not know what pickle consumers prefer is a reminder of just how difficult it is to tease out the vagaries of why we like what we like, something Moskowitz has been trying to think analytically about his entire career. Granted, the food companies, often drawing on pioneering research by the U.S. Army, have figured out a lot of stuff-mostly, ply people with salt, sugar and fat, per Michael Moss' new book of that name, and modify the texture and so forth. But considering that, in one study, out of the 14,298 products that small companies introduced into supermarkets in 1995, only 11.9 percent could be counted successes, it would appear that the food industry doesn't know everything. Pepsi thought we would love Crystal Pepsi, but you can no longer buy it . "Tastes change," people say, or they reach for the default "there's no accounting for taste"-blandishments that don't explain anything. But what do the people who think about this seemingly simple, yet endlessly evasive question, actually know, and what lessons for our own behavior might we draw from it?

We are adamant in our likes and perhaps even more adamant in our dislikes. "I can't stand eggplant," my wife has said, on more than one occasion. But where do these preferences come from? My wife is not the only person to find eggplant off-putting, but in fact, there is no biological aversion to eggplant, or most other foods. As Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania (dubbed "the King of Disgust" for his work on aversions), told me over sweet-and-sour shrimp in Philadelphia, "our explanations for why we like and dislike things are pretty lame. We have to invent accounts."

What is curious is that as strongly as we cleave to these ideas of what we do and don't like, they are, as any number of experiments have discovered, surprisingly malleable. Add tasteless red food coloring to white wine, and people suddenly think they are drinking red, the floral talk of white replaced by more tannic thoughts. When a group of researchers (and acclaimed chef Heston Blumenthal) presented test subjects with a smoked salmon "frozen savory mousse," they liked it more than smoked salmon "ice cream"-even though the dish was the same. Change the order in which things are consumed, and liking changes; tests show people like goat meat less when it's served after beef than before. Some consumers of Mexican Coca-Cola, which lists sugar on the label, swear by its superiority to corn syrup-sweetened American Coke, even though the company's research finds that "from a taste standpoint, the difference is imperceptible."

We call our liking for all kinds of things-music, fashion, art-our taste. And in fact the physiological processes associated with liking seem to be broadly similar, no matter if we are talking about food or music. One day some years ago, Dana Small, who studies the neuropsychology of flavor at the John B. Pierce Laboratory, which is affiliated with Yale University, was working on a study coding areas of the brain involved in expressing pleasure as chocolate was consumed. She sat down mistakenly at the computer of a colleague who was studying listening to music. "I was working through the data and I noticed it was a little bit different-did I use a different threshold?" she says. "And then I realized it was an entirely different study. I thought, Oh my God it looks so similar to what we're looking at."

Or take the "mere exposure" effect, first described by the psychologist Robert Zajonc: "Mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it." In other words, the more times you try something, the more you will generally like it. The effect has been shown in everything from food (with young children, some researchers have found that around nine exposures are needed before liking sets in) to Pakistani music to unfamiliar languages to Impressionist paintings. As the old saying goes, we don't always know what we like, but we're pretty sure we don't like what we don't know.

But there's a twist to mere exposure. Whereas we learn to like more complex melodies upon repeated exposures, we tend to tire of (and like less) simpler ones. Moskowitz suggests an analogue in the food world. Consumers tend to tire less quickly of colas than beverages based on a single identifiable flavor like orange. There's not one overwhelming "salient sensory cue" in cola, but rather a complex melding of flavorings. Colas, in other words, are the jazz of soft drinks, while orange sodas are the bubble gum pop-fun the first time, but quickly cloying.

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For most of us, a pickle is a pickle. It is something that rests snugly beside a sandwich, or floats in a jar on a deli counter. It is rarely something that occasions cryptographic analysis. A number of years ago, though, Howard Moskowitz, a Harvard-trained psychophysicist and food industry consultant, was asked by Vlasic Pickles to crack "the pickle code."

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Top this list.  For you what have been the oddest moments in pop culture this year?

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Top this list.  For you what have been the oddest moments in pop culture this year?

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Blame dark forces or a conjunction of the spheres, but the zeitgeist has turned rather occult of late. Netflix's gloriously nostalgic Stranger Things was only the beginning - pop culture is about to get
even more arcane: dimension bending! Dark magic! Scientologists! Here's WIRED's guide. (Or is it?)

1. Westworld

Jonathan Nolan gives Michael Crichton's 1973 Wild West theme-park robots an existential angst upgrade. Sky Atlantic

2. Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker's cult techno-dystopian series moves to Netflix with 12 newly unsettling episodes. Netflix

3. Doctor Strange

By the crimson bands of Cyttorak! Marvel movies are getting magical (and we don't mean Benedict Cumberbatch's eerily high cheekbones).

4. Trolls

A movie based on the latest iteration of the 60s toy? This must have been the influence of a curse...

5. My Scientology Movie

Louis Theroux takes on the celebrity "church". E-meters, Thetans and Xenu? Now that is crazy.

6. Class

The Doctor Who spin-off is set in the school that featured way back in Who's first episode. Think Buffy, with added space-time weirdness. BBC Three

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Embrace your inner 'weird': we rank the most bizarre and dark pop culture of 2016

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Blame dark forces or a conjunction of the spheres, but the zeitgeist has turned rather occult of late. Netflix's gloriously nostalgic Stranger Things was only the beginning - pop culture is about to get even more arcane: dimension bending! Dark magic! Scientologists! Here's WIRED's guide. (Or is it?)

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Is all pop culture recycled pop culture? Respond with five examples to back your findings.  See the link below for help.

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Is all pop culture recycled pop culture? Respond with five examples to back your findings.  See the link below for help.

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Which pop song has 'held you hostage'? Describe what captivated you in 350 words. See the video for more:

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Which pop song has 'held you hostage'? Describe what captivated you in 350 words. See the video for more:

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Is Pop Music Holding You Hostage? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

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Love or hate pop music, it's pretty hard to escape. From Katy Perry to Lady Gaga, pop songs are recorded, packaged, and sold down a well worn pipeline, designed to make you, the listener, LOVE THIS SONG! But do you really?

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Review this Idea Channel response: "Does Pop Culture Have to Be Popular?" On a scale of 1-10 how satisfying is the response? Explain your score in 150 words.

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Review this Idea Channel response: "Does Pop Culture Have to Be Popular?" On a scale of 1-10 how satisfying is the response? Explain your score in 150 words.

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Does Pop Culture Need To Be "Popular"? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

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Post a 300 word opening argument debating one side of this motion: In 2016 Pop Culture is making us smarter.  See the link below for a little food for thought

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Post a 300 word opening argument debating one side of this motion: In 2016 Pop Culture is making us smarter.  See the link below for a little food for thought

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This week, Dana Stevens, Slate's TV critic, and Steven Johnson discuss whether pop culture makes you smarter. In a recent New York Times Magazine excerpt from his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson suggested that increasingly complex narratives are making primetime television more and more challenging. Stevens, responding in Slate, argued that challenging programming is still hard to come by. Sensing the beginning of a promising debate, we asked Stevens to read Johnson's book-which claims, more broadly, that video games and TV are far better for us than we think they are. Here, Johnson and Stevens continue their debate.

It's a usually unfulfilled fantasy of book authors to get to corner their critics after a harsh review and force them to take a little of their own medicine in return. So, I'm very grateful to you for agreeing to debate my new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, which makes the argument, as the subtitle suggests, that today's popular culture is actually making us smarter in all sorts of ways we're too quick to ignore.

I'd like to start by thanking you for adding a very useful phrase to our household discussions, at the point in your piece where you called my argument "deeply, hilariously bogus." My wife has started using that in casual conversation around the house, as in: "Your excuse about the lack of a real mother's day present is deeply, hilariously bogus."

I realize that in your original piece you were responding to the New York Times Magazine excerpt, and not the entire book, so I'm hopeful that now that you've had a chance to read the argument in a longer form its bogosity is less deep and less hilarious to you. But I'll start the conversation by responding to some of your objections and try to put them in the context of the book's larger argument.

Let's start with your general skepticism about the idea that television might possibly be making us smarter. I do believe, as the subtitle has it, that popular culture today on average is having a positive impact on our minds. But the truth is that I don't think that TV is driving that trend; I think that the interactive forms-games particularly, but also all the interactions of complex digital interfaces-are making us smarter, and TV has had to play catch-up with that newfound agility. In other words, if you take someone who has played Halo 2 all the way to the end and make them watch Three's Company or Dallas, they'll be bored stiff. They've been trained by a decade of cognitively complex interactive media to expect mental challenge from their pop culture, and not predictable, one-dimensional formula. And so television has responded to that development-and to the economic rewards of repeat viewing created by syndication and DVD aftermarkets-by producing shows that are much more complex on many different levels than the shows I was watching as a teenager.

So, this is a story of a trend in the media landscape: pop culture, in effect, making us smarter than it would have 30 years ago, when we were all sitting around watching The Love Boat.

Now let me turn to the part that I don't buy in your argument:

As long as Johnson defines intelligence strictly in quantitative cog-sci terms ("attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads," etc.), his case may seem solid.

As you know from reading the book, I don't believe that these cog-sci definitions of intelligence are the only kinds of intelligence worth measuring. But certainly they're crucial ones. And they're not just limited to raw problem-solving skills. Take our ability to model social networks as an example: One of the things we do incredibly well as a species is create elaborate maps of social connection in our heads-we know that Bill is feuding with Bob, and that Amy is flirting a little with John, and just coming out of a relationship with Phil, and so on. That's a key part of our real-world intelligence, and some people are better at it than others. So, one of the things I show in the book is that the social networks in play in the average television show have grown much more complicated over the past 30 years-in a sense, training our brains to follow ever-larger groups of interaction.

Now, it seems to me that if you accept that the case for the rise in this kind of intelligence is "solid," in your words, then, well, I think that's big news-not something to be casually dismissed. You know as well as I do that in the current debate about the state of popular culture, no one is saying "despite the fact that the culture has been getting more cognitively challenging, it's also become more violent and offensive, etc." They're just saying that everything is chronically dumbed-down and offensive. (The book begins with quotes from George Will and Dr. Spock, talking about how "infantile" the culture has become, and how most video games are a "complete waste of time.") There is nothing more conventional-on the left and the right-than the suggestion that the pop culture out there caters to the lowest common denominator. If the reverse is true even for part of the spectrum of intelligence, that's not something to be taken lightly, if only because it inverts a lot of our assumptions about how mass cultures tend to work.

When you bring up the question of the violence on 24, and what kind of learning that promotes, I'm sympathetic to the point. I dislike the torture in shows like 24 and Alias as much as you do, but that doesn't keep me from appreciating the formal complexity of the shows and the long-term trend toward increased complexity that I describe in the book. Fortunately, there are a thousand essays written about the problem of violence on TV, but almost none about the complexity. So, why isn't it valuable to focus on the positive developments for a change?

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This week, Dana Stevens, Slate's TV critic, and Steven Johnson discuss whether pop culture makes you smarter. In a recent New York Times Magazine excerpt from his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson suggested that increasingly complex narratives are making primetime television more and more challenging.

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Make your definition of pop culture visible.  Using the fundamentals of visual note taking, sketch a visual definition for popular culture as explored in the text below.

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Make your definition of pop culture visible.  Using the fundamentals of visual note taking, sketch a visual definition for popular culture as explored in the text below.

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Popular culture is the accumulation of cultural products such as music, art, literature, fashion, dance, film, cyberculture, television and radio that are consumed the majority of a society's population. Popular culture has mass accessibility and appeal. The term "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or earlier. Traditionally, it was associated with lower classes and poor education as opposed to the " official culture" of the upper class.

The Rise of Popular Culture

After the end of World War II, innovations in mass media led to significant cultural and social changes. Scholars trace the origins of the rise of popular culture to the creation of the middle class generated by the Industrial Revolution. The meaning of popular culture then began to merge with that of mass culture, consumer culture, image culture, media culture and culture for mass consumption.

John Storey and Popular Culture

There are two opposing sociological arguments in relation to popular culture. One argument is that popular culture is used by the elites (who tend to control the mass media and popular culture outlets) to control those below them because it dulls people's minds, making them passive and easy to control. A second argument is just the opposite, that popular culture is a vehicle for rebellion against the culture of dominant groups.

In his book, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey offers six different definitions of popular culture.

In one definition, Storey describes mass or popular culture as "a hopelessly commercial culture [that is] mass-produced for mass consumption [by] a mass of non-discriminating consumers." He further states that popular culture is "formulaic [and] manipulative," not unlike how he views the process of advertising.

A product or brand has to be "sold" to an audience before it can be entrenched in mass or popular culture; by bombarding society with it, it then finds its place in popular culture.

Britney Spears is a good example of this definition; her road to stardom and place in popular culture were based on marketing strategies to build look along with her fan base. As a result, she generated millions of fans, her songs were played frequently on numerous radio stations, and she went on to sell out concerts and garner the public's fascination with her meltdown. Like the creation of Britney Spears, pop culture almost always depends on mass production for mass consumption because we rely on mass media to get our information and shape our interests.

Pop Culture Vs. High Culture

Pop culture is the culture of the people and it is accessible to the masses. High culture, on the other hand, isn't meant for mass consumption nor is it readily available to everyone. It belongs to the social elite. The fine arts, theater, opera, intellectual pursuits--these are associated with the upper socioeconomic strata and require more a high brow approach, training or reflection to be appreciated. Elements from this realm rarely cross over into pop culture.

As such, high culture is considered sophisticated while popular culture is often looked down upon as being superficial.

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Popular culture is the accumulation of cultural products such as music, art, literature, fashion, dance, film, cyberculture, television and radio that are consumed the majority of a society's population. Popular culture has mass accessibility and appeal. The term "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or earlier.

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Read this article, and respond by describing the 'health' of your pop culture diet.  What does a week of your pop culture consumption look like?

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Read this article, and respond by describing the 'health' of your pop culture diet.  What does a week of your pop culture consumption look like?

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In a recent blog post, I railed against popular culture as being an unhealthy force in our lives . In response, Dr. Lawrence Rubin, a fellow blogger who studies popular culture, commented that "If we simply consider popular culture as banality, it certainly seems meaningless...even potentially destructive. However, if instead we recognize that it is simply an expression of our collective experiences, its importance becomes more clear." I would have agreed with that statement 30 years ago when popular culture was, in fact, an expression of our collective experiences. But I think it's time for those who study popular culture to wake up and smell the Starbuck's (popular-culture reference intended): popular culture is not popular!

As TerryS, another commenter, noted, there is nothing popular about popular culture these days: "90% of what is considered popular culture is churned out by corporations...with the sole purpose... that we can be converted into voracious consumers..." We didn't demand, for example, Desperate Housewives, Grand Theft Auto, or Facebook. They were created to make money and then marketed as "must-haves" which, admittedly, the masses then embraced.

I believe in truth in advertising, so we should stop calling popular culture popular culture because, well, it no longer is a reflection of popular sentiment. I think a more accurate phrase is "synth culture" because it is a synthetic product created by corporate conglomerates rather than being an expression of the shared experiences of real people.
We Are What We Consume
TerryS also offered a wonderful metaphor for popular culture. She likened authentic popular culture to organic food, which is grown and consumed by people who have a deep respect for themselves and healthful living. In contrast, synth culture, like processed food, is largely artificial, unhealthy, and driven by the profit motive. And entire generations are being force fed this unwholesome diet while the synth culture is sating its own rapacious appetite.

TerryS concludes her metaphor beautifully, suggesting that "pop culture is fast food for the soul." American Idol, People Magazine, iPods, and Brangelina (just to name a few) are tasty and addictive. But, extending her metaphor further, just as fast food isn't healthy for the body, synth culture isn't healthy for the soul. Neither provides real "nourishment;" in both cases, our bodies, minds, and spirits remain hungry for real sustenance.
A "Diet" of Empty Calories
So what happens when a genuine popular culture is replaced by a synth culture? Well, what happens when you replace an organic diet rich in nutrients with one that is artificial, calorie intensive, and nutrient poor? The answer is self-evident, yet we continue on this diet without realizing that that it may very well be slowly killing us individually and collectively.

Why would we not recognize this unhealthy diet and make a change for the better? In the face of global instability, economic uncertainty, and unsettling societal change, synth culture offers us mighty fine "comfort food;" it's delicious, fills us up, and makes us feel good. Synth culture really has become the new "opiate of the masses," dulling our existential and all-too-down-to-Earth angst with a diet of tasty, though empty, calories.
And what is really scary is that the current generation of young people is the first to be raised entirely in this synth culture with no experience of what an authentic popular culture is.
The Real Harm
Most people think of popular culture as the most common forms of entertainment, whether television, movies, music, or what's on the Web. But popular culture is grounded in expressions of shared experiences that are much more fundamental to our society, including the values and beliefs that have shaped it, for example, integrity, community, compassion, courage, sacrifice, respect, hard work, and justice.

Here's what worries me: if our popular culture is no longer this deeper expression of our collective experiences, then something important is being lost. We may be entertained by The Biggest Loser, Knocked Up, or Jay-Z, but we are also unwittingly influenced by the messages that underlie this popular entertainment and which form the basis of synth culture, messages of greed, consumption, schadenfreude, win at any cost, and misogyny, just to name a few.

Collectively, a popular culture that is an expression of a society's shared experiences has essential value and a beneficial function to that society. It is an important contributor to the formation and growth of a healthy society. Perhaps as much as the rule of law, an authentic popular culture acts as a societal truth, a shared bond that holds societies together and communicates that "we are one." And maybe more powerfully than the top-down government-provided glue, a genuine popular culture, created "of the people, by the people, and for the people," acts as the real, bottom-up glue that unites diverse people into a cohesive society.

As individuals, a genuine popular culture instills a sense of ownership and empowerment in our society because each of us knows that we contribute to that culture. We are more likely to act in our society's best interests because we know that those best interests are also our own. An authentic popular culture also gives us a sense of shared identity, meaning, and purpose that transcends differences in geography, race, ethnicity, religion, or politics. All of these then encourage us to lead a life in accordance with our culture's values and norms because they are our own.
Tyranny By Any Other Name
Consider other societies where a genuine popular culture was suffocated. Until now, the only examples have been found in totalitarian societies, such as those under Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler. What we saw in these societies, when the lid finally came off, were deeply injured populaces that took years of freedom to recover from the individual and societal damage and reestablish their authentic popular culture. And, sadly, the people of Cuba and North Korea have yet to have this opportunity.

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In a recent blog post, I railed against popular culture as being an unhealthy force in our lives . In response, Dr. Lawrence Rubin, a fellow blogger who studies popular culture, commented that "If we simply consider popular culture as banality, it certainly seems meaningless...even potentially destructive.