Definition of Culture
The question of what is culture has fascinated scholars for many decades. It is a learned system of meanings, laden with values, that helps you to process and make sense of your everyday life. Culture helps create a particular sense of shared identity and solidarity among its members. One of its products is the reinforcement of the boundary between "we" the ingroup, and "they" the distant outgroup. Ingroup identity is defined essentially as emotional attachments and shared fate that we attach to our selective categories. We remain emotionally detached from outgroups, and are skeptical of their words or intentions.
Scholars have myriad definitions for the term culture. Here, we will define it as a learned meaning system that consists of patterns of traditions, beliefs, values, norms, meanings, and symbols that are passed on from one generation to the next and are shared to varying degrees by interacting members of a community. Members of the same cultural community share a sense of traditions, worldviews, values, rhythms, and life patterns.
Scholars have postulated various levels of cultures, likening it to an iceberg; only certain aspects are visible on the surface. Deeper cultural traditions, beliefs, and values are generally unseen, as we tend to be able to only see and hear the most superficial layer of culture in its tangible cultural artifacts (fashion, pop music, and widely popular films). However, to actually understand a culture to any degree of significance, you have to match underlying values systems with their respective norms, meanings, and symbols. The way people think, react, and behave are driven by undergirding sets of cultural values and beliefs.
Popular culture, or pop culture, is essentially the cultural systems or artifacts with mass appeal and that infiltrate our daily life. Popular images as seen in television, films, popular music, advertising, and other image formats reinforce our cultural and gender ideologies in a society. Further, global pop culture spreads through the many U.S. films, television shows, corporate icons such as Disney, Starbucks, McDonald's and Nike, together with pop music.
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