Book excerpt: 'Understanding Popular Culture' takes an approach to studying such cultural artifacts as jeans, shopping malls, tabloid newspapers, and TV game shows, which remains relevant in the 21st century. Fiske differentiates between mass culture - the cultural 'products' put out by an industrialized, capitalist society - and popular culture - the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and messages. Rather than focusing on mass culture's attempts to dominate and homogenize, he prefers to look at (and revel in) popular culture's evasions and manipulations of these attempts.