The first thing I did was think about the images that come to mind when I think of pop culture: Celebrities both talented and useless, bad reality television shows, Lady Gaga, The Simpsons, award shows, reference humour, internet memes, and fast food. Though that hardly covers gambit of everything that is pop culture I did notice that a majority of the things I thought of were less than intellectually stimulating (except for The Simpsons and some good popular movies). It kind of seems like popular culture (or how I see it) is used for escapism. A way for normal people (like myself admittedly) to temporarily forgot about our stresses, obligations, and problems for a little while and be entertained.
Anyway, back to defining the term itself. Since Storey gives us four different definitions of the word culture, four definitions of the word popular, and six definitions of the term popular culture, it is evident that it will be pretty hard to hone in on one simple answer. I'm pretty excited to see where this class goes as it is already more complicated than I had originally assumed.
Below is a video by electronic music producer Madeon entitled "Pop Culture" in which he samples 39 different pop songs in to one beautiful mash-up.
Futurama Fry is an image macro series that uses a still of Fry squinting his eyes from the TV show Futurama, and is typically paired with overlaid text using a phrasal template. The top line reads “Not sure if X”, with “or just Y” as the bottom line, and is used to represent an internal monologue. (Source: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/futurama-fry-not-sure-if-x )
Here is one of my favorite Futurama Fry memes that was posted to reddit.com with the caption: "Whenever I don't get a pop culture reference..."
