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This is a Media Culture reading response to Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’”.

The ever-changing nature of popular, according to Hall, makes the term highly difficult to define - equally difficult is the notion of culture. This chapter looks at defining popular culture and how different definitions take into consideration different areas of both popular and culture.

Complexities in the term popular arise mainly from issues surrouning periodisation; Hall notes the mass changes between the 1880s-1920s, but also the ever-changing and advancing preferances of “the people”. From this, Hall draws three definitions:

1. Popular by consumption - media is popularised by mass consumption, which Hall says implies to passive audiences.
2. Popular culture is everything “the people” do or have done, which is considered far too descriptive and broad by Hall. Also, a difinitive list can never be achieved due to mass-media consumption.
3. Popular is the ever-changing ‘prefered’ choices of “the people” - this gives a dynamic list which can chance dependant on the cultural dialectic and periodisation.

Hall prefers the third definition as it dynamically changes as per mass consumption as well as consumer preference, rather than the static, endless lists of the first two definitions. Whilst the first two definitions also allude to popular as class, the third definition is not reliant on the links between popular culture and class.