Popular Culture and Media Intellectuals

This chapter aims at investigating the relationship between popular culture, the recently dominant culture, and media intellectuals. Popular culture can be defined as daily practices preferred widely by the people. In fact, the term popular culture stems from the word, people, in English. Thus, it refers to a unification of supra-class experience of the majority. Due to its specific characteristics, popular culture stems from culture, mass, high, and folk culture, but it also reflects a more independent and common culture. It is modern, civic, entertaining, and close to consumption. It is also based on dominant values. Therefore, recent intellectuals, whom we cannot think apart from the media, play a significant role in the reproduction of popular culture. Those media intellectuals, a new and defining class, are fed from the popular culture and also contribute to widen this culture among masses. Media intellectuals are primary focal points affecting the system in terms of both consumption culture, daily life, and popular politics. Thus, one of the main actors of popular culture is media intellectuals. Such concepts and the relationships among them will be discussed in this study along with their daily examples, and the role of media intellectuals in reproducing popular culture will be analyzed by means of literature review.