Introduction

The basic premise has been to try to understand popular cultural practices as meaningful activities: as part of people’s ongoing attempts to make sense of their lives and the specific class, gender, race, and other identities which they inhabit. A picture is now beginning to emerge in which popular media audiences are characterised not only by a degree of resilience to the dominant ideological meanings encoded in mainstream cultural products, but also by their cultural connoisseurship, their sensitive and often sophisticated appreciation of the aesthetic creations of the cultural industries. The consumption and enjoyment of American goods and popular culture thus came to serve for these working-class consumers as a symbolic resistance to the paternalism of the national cultural establishment, as expressed most visibly in everyday life through the public-service broadcasting institutions that until recently commanded the public cultural space in most West European countries.