ABSTRACT
The study of popular culture-radio, movies, comics, popular music, and fiction-is a relatively new field in American social science. Much of the pioneering in this field has been done by or on behalf of the communications industry to prove to advertisers that it can influence buying habits, and to pretest its more expensive productions, such as potential bestsellers and movies. At a more theoretical level, a good deal of current interest in popular culture springs from the motives, seldom negligible in scientific investigation, of dismay and dislike. Gifted Europeans, horrified at the alleged vulgarization of taste brought about by industrialization, or left-wing critics in the traditions of Marx or Veblen who see popular culture as an antirevolutionary narcotic, highbrows who fear poaching on their preserves by middlebrow “culture diffusionists”— all these have contributed approaches, and sometimes methods as well, to the present state of research in this field.
