Popular culture is the entirety of ideas, viewpoints, attitudes, images and other occurrences that are preferred by an informal consent within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid-20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass media, these collections of ideas fill the everyday lives of the society.
Although terms popular culture and pop culture are sometimes used in place of each other and their meanings partially overlap, the term "pop", which dates from the late 1950s, belongs to a particular society and historical period. Pop refers more in detail to something containing qualities of mass appeal, while "popular" refers to what has gained popularity, regardless of its style.

Popular culture is often viewed as being unimportant and irrelevant in order to find diffently acceptance throughout the norm. As a result, it comes under heavy criticism from various non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and counter-cultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted.

Examples of popular culture come from a wide array of genres, including popular music, print, cyber culture, sports, entertainment, leisure, fads, trends, advertising and television. Sports and television are maybe the two of the most widely used up examples of popular culture, and they also represent two examples of popular culture with great continuing power.

Sports are played and watched by members of all social classes. Some sporting events, such as the World Cup and the Olympics, are consumed by a world. Sports are widespread in most civilizations and represent a major part of many people’s lives. Furthermore, cheering by a fan for a sports team or a favorite athlete is a way any individual can become part of popular culture.
Many people watch a lot of hours of television every day. It is such a routine aspect of modern-day culture and it is difficult to imagine life without it. There are those who believe TV is responsible for the down bringing the society; that children watch too much television; and that the couch potato condition has added to the epidemic of childhood obesity.
The popular TV show The Simpsons provides us with an interesting viewpoint on television. Long-running television series The Simpsons routinely refers to the mainstream media properties, as well as the commercial content of the show itself. In the episode "Bart vs. Thanksgiving", Bart complains about the ridiculous commercialism (5) of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while watching television. When he turns his head away from the television, the screen shows an oversized inflatable balloon of Bart Simpson floating past, which living in a world without television is not really living. It is even more difficult to imagine a world without popular culture.
Versions based on traditional folklore provide a source of popular culture.( A. W. Smith , 1993) This early layer of cultural mainstream still persists today, in a form separate from mass-produced popular culture, spreading by word of mouth rather than via mass media and in the form of jokes or urban legend.(4) With the widespread use of the Internet from the 1990s, the distinction between mass media and word-of-mouth has become blurred. The reason I picked these icons was because growing up as a kid, my TV shows were different than today. I had a black and white TV and most of my shows were shown in
Black and white, in the spring of 1969, my grandfather, owning an appliance store, got a color TV (the first one the street). It looked something like this:

The first thing you need to know is that it was black and white. Actually, it was various shades of gray. Even if color TV had been offered, your black and white set wouldn't have known the difference. And, ladies, just think of it, No Remote Control! The second thing you need to know about the early days of TV is that there wasn't much of it, mostly, in the afternoons and evenings. You received your TV shows via an antenna. A big ugly pole, that stuck up way above the roof line of your house. The thing had to be pointed correctly to receive your local stations. Usually this directional adjustment was made by someone going outside to manually turn the antenna while someone with an eye on the TV yelled out an open window, "no, too far, come back a little. By 1962 a million color sets had sold, by 1965, 5 million and the networks had gone to color, by 1970 there were 37 million color sets in the U.S. So today is a lot different from what I grew up with in TV, Today's TVs looks and does a lot more things than back in the 1960's.

Popular Culture to me means that technology is always changing. Computers, cell phones, and video games have come a long way since before the late 70's and early 80's.Very few people even had computers and didn't even know anything about them. The computer was everything. In the late 1970's and 1980's, buying a computer was a huge investment, like costing thousands of dollars and determining what kind of software you'd be running for years. The IBM PC cost about $1600 in a base configuration, which was affordable for a powerful computer at the time. Today people have computers on their phones, a laptop or even a tablet they use for personal use or even business. Computers are in cars to help them run and most people have a computer in their home or possession. I have chosen this topic because computers are changing every day and they will someday be in everything we do in life

Source:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_cul...
2. http://philosophynow.org/issues/64/Pop_C...
3. On the Ambiguity of the Three Wise Monkeys A. W. Smith Folklore, Vol. 104, No. 1/2 (1993), pp.144-15
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_legend
5. www.yourdictionary.com/commercialism