ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines approaches to media and advertising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a cultural perspective. It begins with an exploration of the culture and civilization tradition of thought that dismissed advertising as a debased form of culture. The chapter presents an account of culture and civilization thinking, which followed in the tradition of Matthew Arnolds work of the nineteenth century. Associated with F. R. Leavis, high culture was perceived as an elite preserve and popular culture an inferior form of expression. The Frankfurt School of critical theory shared certain concerns the culture and civilization critics. The Birmingham Centres exploration of contemporary popular and mass culture and Halls use of the encoding/decoding media model to explore this occurred at a moment of profound social, media and cultural change. Stylistic postmodernism, including nostalgia as a cultural form and referencing of the past often as an ironic allusion to previous advertising styles, became familiar.
