ABSTRACT
‘Popular culture’ has become a ubiquitous term in contemporary social life in the greatest part of the socially organized world. The use of the term is especially prevalent where televised communication and digital networking became fully integrated into (cultural) industrial image management – where, in other words, creative and cultural industries became apparatuses that manufacture and/or disseminate global signs in various combinations with local cultural idioms. ‘Popular’ as an adjective commonly suggests an overlap of ‘mass’ and ‘favourite’, with ‘culture’ as reference to imagined (abstract) and material sites of collective reverie (tangible objects of consumption and the places in which these are consumed). This reverie is enacted through cinematic, televisual and digital engagement with such sites, objects and memories to which both are tied, as well as with the help of embodied technologies (through travel and tourism to such foreign sites). In what follows, I attempt to not only map distinctive modes of understanding what popular culture is and how it is experienced in contemporary societies, but also explain how such conceptual and experiential modes connect to the social and cultural activity of tourism.
