American Television and Consumer Democracy

Among contemporary students of popular culture, a consensus has begun to emerge about American television quite different from the view dominant only a few decades ago. The theorists of “mass society” criticized commercial television from a standpoint informed both by intellectual disdain for cultural trash, and political fearfulness in the face of cultural conformity. Today, the cultural field is seen by postmodern theorists as a realm of plurality, play, and multiple meanings, where mem...