Popular culture, or pop culture, is the currency or iconography of a contemporary culture. An example is United States popular culture.

For example (from wikipedia) "The giant panda...is a favorite animal in popular culture."

Esotericism, although nominally the opposite of popular, may be part of popular culture, for example, freemasonry.

Popular culture is constantly changing and is specific to place and time. One may speak of mainstream popular culture, thus contemplating subsets, "Kraftwerk have impinged on mainstream popular culture to the extent that they have been referenced in The Simpsons and Father Ted."

A very widely held opinion about popular culture is that it tends to be superficial. Items of culture (e.g. beliefs, fictional characters, music) become part of popular culture primarily because they have the capacity to spread rapidly through a broad population. This usually results from an item possessing a form of instant appeal. Cultural items that require extensive experience, training, or reflection to be appreciated seldom become items of popular culture.

Although popular culture is not especially prestigious, it nevertheless gives rise to interesting and important intellectual questions, for example, how it spreads or what traits are needed for a particular items to become a part of popular culture. For this reason, popular culture is studied by scholars, who invoke the usual apparatus of the scholarly association (e.g. the Popular Culture Association) and the scholarly journal (e.g. the Journal of Popular Culture).

See also: Pop music, popular music, Canadian popular culture, British popular culture, List of popular cultures by country, American popular culture

• http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/popc/bkgrnd.html (a definition of the discipline of Popular Culture Study)
• Popular Culture Association
• Journal of Popular Culture