What is Popular Culture?
Popular Culture is a constantly changing area that includes the fads of the day, such as music, technology, movies and TV shows. Tim Delaney, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, defines popular culture in his article in Philosophy Now (2007) as "the products and forms of expression and identity that are frequently encountered or widely accepted, commonly liked or approved, and characteristic of a particular society at a given time." To me, this means that what becomes popular culture is whatever the masses of a particular society accept or approve of, for instance, the iPhone.Why is an understanding of popular culture relevant?
Understanding popular culture in the business environment can be crucial to the success of a business. An example of this would be a business that does not keep up with current technology trends, and therefore the public masses are not enticed to interact with that business because they don't have a mobile app to connect them to it. My career in IT is very relevant to popular culture, especially in the area of delivering computer training content to the end user community. Today's end users want to have several options of consuming their training content, and want to be able to access these options from anywhere at any time. This culture has changed drastically over the last 20 years, and is a perfect example of popular culture. What was popular 20 years ago, is no longer relevant in today's computer training classroom.What is an example of a pop culture artifact?
Pop culture artifacts do not necessarily have to be something material, like an iPhone. It can also be represented by an idea, trend or value. A new trend that is very important in the world of technology right now is Cyber Security. I work in the legal environment, and it is a top priority to protect our clients' confidential data. With the addition of cloud computing and mobile devices, it is becoming harder to contain and protect this data. I chose this pop artifact because it is something very new and something I think is very important to not only the business world, but the private sector as well.
