Book Summary: Popular culture helps construct, define, and impact our everyday realities and must be taken seriously because popular culture is, simply, popular. Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture brings together communication experts with diverse backgrounds, from interpersonal communication, business and organizational communication, mass communication, media studies, narrative, rhetoric, gender studies, autoethnography, popular culture studies, and journalism. The contributors tackle such topics as music, broadcast and Netflix television shows, movies, the Internet, video games, and more, as they connect popular culture to personal concerns as well as larger political and societal issues. The variety of approaches in these chapters are simultaneously situated in the present while building a foundation for the future, as contributors explore new and emerging ways to approach popular culture. From case studies to emerging theories, the contributors examine how popular culture, media, and communication influence our everyday lives.

Excerpt: I am wearied by sexual repression in the family. I find parental obsession with virginity for its own sake tiresome. I am troubled by the neighbour boy who, when playing some form of truth or dare, dared my daughter, twice his age, to jump in the air and grab her penis; she says, “That’s going to be tricky, since I don’t have one.” He says, “Really? Why not?” He was seven. My own son figured this out in the bathroom with me at around two.

In a multiphasic study, the stories of 29 female Appalachian cancer survivors were collected through either a day-long modified story circle event (n=26) or an in-depth interview (n=3). Qualitative content analysis was used to identify emergent themes in the data. The analysis revealed 5 types of family cancer communication including both pre-diagnosis and postdiagnosis cancer communication strategies