The problem of popular culture

This article argues that concept of popular culture, as conceptualized within the media/cultural studies tradition in the Anglophone West, is in crisis. The idea of the “popular” that continues to be embraced by many critical media/communication and cultural studies scholars derives from postwar assumptions about mass media which no longer accurately fit present conditions. However, the resilience of these assumptions has created “the problem of popular culture,” a complicated and longstanding series of dilemmas for contemporary scholarship. This article documents several manifestations of this problem and proposes that scholars reserve the term popular culture for instances of popular practice.