I decided to read the optional paper What is Popular Culture because I always had a hard time describing or defining the term. I always kind of understood what it meant, and how to use it, but I could never give it a definition. After reading this, I have a better idea of how it became, and maybe some ways to formally describe it, but mostly what I got is that there are a lot of ways to define it. They even attempted to give it a scientific approach which was appealing to me, but there were flaws with the approach. At the end of the paper they concluded that between all the many ways pop culture can be defined, they all have one thing in common, culture only emerged after industrialization and urbanization. I guess according to their definitions this might be true, but I can’t help but feel like there has always been culture, maybe that’s the distinction, pop culture vs culture. One definition stuck out to me as the way I’ve always imagined it, folk culture, of the people for the people. Not to be imposed on people as other definitions describe it but almost derived by the people. Mass culture, an imposed and impoverished culture, described as an imported American culture.