Page 16 - Decoding Culture

THE STORY SO FAR 9

firmly entrenched view of culture. At its foundation was the idea of
critical discrimination and the assumption that it was essential to
distinguish between high and low culture. On this account, the
twentieth century had seen the spread of new and largely undesir­
able forms of mass culture - cultural artefacts produced in
industrial style for the diversion and entertainment of the urban
masses. The goal of literary and cultural criticism was to ensure
the preservation of quality in the face of this challenge, and to
analyse culture, therefore, was to make such informed judgements.
Even in sociology, where the question of cultural value was less to
the fore, it was widely assumed that mass culture was inferior and
required little in the way of sophisticated analysis for its proper
understanding. Media research was thus dominated by a concern
with the (adverse) effects of popular cultural forms and by the
then widely discussed concept of 'mass society'.
For those engaged in higher education in the late 1950s and
the first half of the 1960s this established view of culture became
increasingly unacceptable, in part because of its insistent elitism,
but also because it precluded a coherent and appropriately sensi­
tive analysis of popular culture. The widespread assumption that
'mass culture' was intrinsically crude meant that little or no atten­
tion was paid to the everyday culture of most of the population,
whether the historic class-based traditions Oike that described by
Hoggart) or the newly emergent youth cultures of the period. In lit­
erary criticism, in educational studies, in the sociology of the
media, there was growing dissatisfaction with the inability of the
prevailing view of culture to say anything interesting about the
new and vibrant popular cultural forms. All that was available was
simple condemnation and a somewhat patronizing desire to equip
the young with the ability to discriminate.
It was in this context that what might be called 'popular cultural
studies' emerged, initially without a clear programme other than to

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