Popular Culture in Everyday Life: A Critical Introduction - Paperback

by Charles Soukup (Author), Christina R. Foust (Author)

An accessible and engaging introduction to the critical study of popular culture, which provides students with the tools they need to make sense of the popular culture that inundates their everyday lives.

This textbook centers on media ecology and equipment for living to introduce students to important theories and debates in the field. Each chapter engages an important facet of popular culture, ranging from the business of popular culture to communities, stories, and identities, to the simulation and sensation of pop culture. The text explains key terms and features contemporary case studies throughout, examining aspects such as memes and trends on social media, cancel culture, celebrities as influencers, gamification, "meta" pop culture, and personalized on-demand music. The book enables students to understand the complexity of power and influence, providing a better understanding of the ways pop culture is embedded in a wide range of everyday activities. Students are encouraged to reflect on how they consume and produce popular culture and understand how that shapes their sense of self and connections to others.

Essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and other related subjects.

Author Biography

Charles Soukup is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Northern Colorado, where his work engages the social impacts of communication technology and media ecology. Soukup is the author of Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices: Life through the Looking Glass (2016), and has published work on digital ethnography, representations of technology and pleasure in film, television and conspiracy, video games and masculinity, and fandom.

Christina R. Foust is Professor of Communication Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where her work engages rhetoric, power, and social change in a variety of contexts, including social movements and popular culture. She is lead editor of What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (2017), and author of Transgression as a Mode of Resistance (2010). Her recent work considers media ecology and memes in social movement.