In the 17thc and 18th centuries the public was small, but highly educated and cultivated........ In the 19th cent. there appeared a mass public, the readers of Dickens, thackeray and trollope. By the end of that century, there appeared a second and very small public interested in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and a little later , Proust and Joyce. There were two publics. Now, again we have a single public. The methods of the small-public master have been generally assimilated. even the mass media employ the techniques of Joyce .... In fact, all the traditions of art have been absorbed into movies, television, fashion and smart journalism. The audiences are by now university educated, but it would be incorrect to compare it to the aristocratic public of the 18th century. University education has not instilled good taste, has not refined the judgement of readers.

This absortion had been a two way process. If the techniques of the former ‘advanced’ writers and painters (Joyce, Picasso) were absorbed and utilized by the mass media helping to make the mass public more alert and quicker witted

As material objects as well as ideological constructs, books reflect events and changes in historical reality. Promising good literature in attractive form at the price of a packet of cigarettes, the Allen Lane/ Penguin paperback revolution in the mid-1930s cannot be divorced from the interwar expansion of an intellectual active, socially mixed readership, concerned to make sense of the large political movements in which it felt entangled.

The twentieth century technical developments produced a variety of mass media of communication- the cinema, the radio and, after the Second World War, the television- of a potency not susceptible to precise measurement, though it is already clear that the radio and television are of considerable political effectiveness. Think of Hitler over the radio.

‘Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. it was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man’. (Albert Speer)

In the years following the Second World War a good deal of work has been done in America, and later in UK, in an attempt to measure these influences in more precise terms than those of the last two hundred years.

The manisfestation of popular culture need to be seen as influences working among other factors in a total configuration.

Positive effects on cinema goers, as a matter of personal dress, hair style, make up and house furnishing, as well as in some of the intimacies of human behaviour

Great increased mobility implied a lack of continuity of environment and a subsequent superficialization of relationships. The antagonism between the generations, a theme as old as the gods, had become more overt and uncontrolled owing to moral uncertainties of the older generation, the acceptance of adolescence as a time of ‘revolt’ and the exploitation of young people for comercial and political reasons.