Popular & Folk Culture - AP Human Geography

Western popular music, based off of the larger Western musical tradition, has become the popular music of much of the world. This is not due to the intrinsic quality of the music as much as it is to the influence of American and Western European media companies, which are the largest such companies in the world.

All of these answer choices are accurate descriptions of the differences between folk culture and pop culture. Folk culture tends to be local, rural, consistent over time, but inconsistent over geography. Pop culture, on the other hand, tends to be widespread and uniform over a large geographic distance, it tends to be based in urban centers, and it generally experiences fairly rapid change over time. Pop culture is often used to refer to popular music, movies, and TV shows. On the other hand, folk culture is used to refer to the traditions and customs that make up the cultural identity of a local group of people.

While nonmatieral cultural deals with the intangible, idealogical aspects of culture, like beliefs, folk and popular culture are the two primary divisions of material, tangible culture. Folk culture represents homogeneity, or sameness, and is usually practiced in isolated regions, free from the influence of pop culture’s diffusion. Since popular culture diffuses over wide areas of diverse people, it is very different from the homogeneity of folk culture, and so while folk culture may remain unchanged for years, popular culture diffuses and this changes rapidly. Moreover, the Internet and television have only increased the speed and expanse of popular culture’s diffusion, and have allowed new ideas to reach farther places faster. Thus the upper-hand of technology in pop culture diffusion means it is often spread from the most-developed regions of the world.

Popular culture is typically focused on ideals including but not limited to: celebrity influence, social media, urban culture, and Western society. Rural culture is not typically associated with popular culture because less influence is placed on cultural trends in smaller towns.