 Introduction: Popular Culture and Social Change
Because popular culture charts social change exactly and swiftly, it is commonly held responsible for the changes it reflects, and denounced as the harbinger of social disIocation. in the early years of the century, jazz and the movies were held responsible for juvenile deIinquency, as television continues to be today.
Cultural conservationists blame the spread of popular culture for their discomfort, believing that if only it could be kept under proper control, then the stability of the old ways of life might return. But this is to punish the messenger for the news he delivers. The media of popular culture are not themselves the origin of social change, although they encourage its novelties by making them appear desirable.
In one important respect popular culture is itself conservative, since, to be popular, it must speak a language that is already common to its consumers. To sell the people what they want to sell, the producers of popular culture must say what they think people most want to hear. In this sense popular culture is a form of dialog which a society has with itself.
The debates over censorship reflected a widespread belief that popular culture was an instrument of informal education and influence, and that as a result care needed to be taken over its content. Non-capitalist countries supervised their information and entertainrnent media at least as closely as they supervised their state education systems. In the United States, by contrast, the industries of leisure accepted "escapism" as a definition of their activities, since it has provided them with an easy means of avoiding responsibility for what they represent.
Entertainment, industry and politics
Throughout the 20th century the industries of leisure have expanded to constitute an ever greater part of the economies of industrialized nations. From the Korean factory worker producing televisian sets to the part-time saleswoman in Stockholm who sells them, ever-increasing nurnbers of people are employed in the production and servicing of leisure activities.
All these activities are couched in the idioms of advertising and entertainment: theyall respond to real needs, but as they do so, they define what constitute the legitimate needs of the people of their society.
As critic Richard Dyer has expressed it, "The ideals of entertainment imply wants that capitalism itself promises to meet.. .entertainrnent provides alternatives to capitalism which will be provided by capitalism."
Yet such ideals and alternatives, dismissed as merely entertainrnent, are held to be unworthy of serious consideration. As a result, we are alienated from our own dreams and utopian desires, persuaded instead that they can be fulfilled, or just disposed of, by two hours at the movies or a new dress and in the process reassured that, like the commodities that have replaced them, the dreams were never "about" anything important in the first place.
Broadcasting has been one of the most profitable commercial enterprises of the century. Within 15 years of its appearance, television became an integral part of American culture: not simply recording in distorted form, but its dominant medium of social expression. To watch was an act of citizenship, participation in the national culture. On a typical auturnn evening in the Iate 1970s, over 100 million people, in 60 percent of American homes, chose between the programming output of the three national television networks.
The particular genius of the medium came not from its intensity but from its sheer volume, its pervasiveness, and its extraordinary capacity to integrate everything - news, entertainment, talk, sport, comedy, commercials, action - into a single entity. To an even greater extent than movies, sport or radio, television filled its consumers' lives with drama, so that, as the British literary critic Raymond Williams wrote in 1972, "More drama is watched in a week or a weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period."
Politics and show business became increasingly entangled; it became ever harder to disentangle "the media" from political or social history. Subjected to increasingly sophisticated advertising pressure, viewers have been constantly presented with politics as a drama of personalities in which the object of the game has been to pick the winner. Certainly television obliged politicians to become performers in a way radio never had, and the "image" they presented was scrutinized as intensely as their policies.
The coverage of elections by television has grown to concentrate increasingly on campaign strategies and the techniques of voter manipulation, and less on the substantive political issues at stake. One consequence has been an increasing apathy towards the political process, a lower regard for the ethics and integrity of politicians and a greater volatility in voting behavior.
The extent of media influence is reflected in the observation that when an industrially developed country is occupied or liberated to day, whenever there is a coup d'etat or a revolution, the new regime will take over the radio and television stations, the telephone and telex exchanges, and the printing presses. But the most striking way in which the media, and television in particular, have come to set the political agenda in the last quarter of the century can be seen in the extent to which the politics of personality and image have come to predominate in American and European politics.
Whether in the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, whom novelist Gore Vidal called "the Acting President", whose most effective skills have been in communications rather than administration, or in the increasing employment of advertising agencies by political parties of all persuasions in the West, issues of style and image have come to dominate issues of political substance. The impact of Mikhail Gorbachev's more acceptable face of communism is evidence that such notions are not limited to the West.
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Introduction
