Mass Culture: The Popular Arts In America

Interesting book on mass culture written back in the 1950s. This book is a collection of 49 essays on mass culture from authors such as Marshall McLuhan, George Orwell, Walt Whitman and several others. There is good information about the beginnings of manufactured mass culture with regards to books, magazines, newspapers, radio, film and art. One of the biggest takeaways I got from this book was that when we became an industrialized society that is when mass culture began to really get started and different mediums were invented in order to influence and socially engineer us. The mediums such as radio and television changed families. No longer did families communicate with each other the same way after radios and televisions entered the homes. Suddenly an invasion of privacy began. Instead of families gathering around a table for a meal to talk, families looked to the television or radio as a gathering place and listened or saw what was propagated out to them.


I think anyone who reads this book from a conspiratorial/critical thinking perspective will understand how the powers that be started to really get a firm handle on every aspect of our lives once we went from an agricultural based society to a industrial based society and of course up to now. Industrialization allowed for all these to new technologies to be invented to influence us like radio and TV and other technological mediums. Also since we have and have had more leisure time than ever before with technology helping to practically replace jobs, the powers that be just come up with stuff to control this leisure time. So though we might have more leisure time then previous generations, it's mostly controlled and no longer organic like in the past. I can see where the ideal for a psychopath is to have control over every aspect of the persons life regardless of whether it's leisure time or work.

This book seems to be rare and hard to find. Archive.org allows you to borrow the book and download it as a pdf or read it online for free: Mass Culture: The Popular Arts In America | Archive.org

Used and New Copies from Amazon: Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America.