ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Hoggart’s concerns in the original book were around the mechanisms behind the production and subsequent consumption of popular cultural texts for, and by, the working classes. His position was to repudiate the view that such activity depended on mass culture being designed in a conspiratorial way to dumb the masses down. He recognised that this was simply not the case, even without a theory of consumption and cultural production prominently proposed. Instead, he took the reader through the complexity of cultural (re)production and representation in popular weekly magazines, weekly and daily newspapers, popular songs and in how these reached out to audiences noting by the end that popular culture was, in some ways, breaking down divisions between lower and middle classes.
In updating this to 2020 the aim will be to think about the sites of cultural (re)production, how they have changed and how they are (at the very least) proposed as spaces for personal curation and co-production. The focus, though, will initially be on the ways in which digital culture reaches particular audiences who consume, remediate and produce cultural texts. It will be important to consider the ways in which, for example, ‘celebrity culture’ operates in the newer ‘candy floss’ world and how the invitations to join such a world are expressed and taken up across mass media and social media and how/where the blurring audience segments (working class, working poor, middle class and more) meets the blurring of production/ consumption.
