27.3: Mass Culture and Its Discontents

A. Television: Tube of Plenty 1.Television’s development as a mass medium was eased by the prior existence of radio. 2.The high cost of TV changed advertising as sponsors left production to others. 3.Early TV replicated radio formats including situation comedies set among urban ethnic families. 4.By the late 1950s, situation comedies featured idealized, white suburban families. 5.As revenues declined, movie studios sold off old films and began to produce westerns and cop shows for TV. 6.Television also created overnight fads and sensations.

FIGURE 27.3 Radio and Television Ownership, 1940– 60 By 1960 nearly 90 percent of American households owned at least one television set, as TV replaced radio as the nation’s dominant mass medium of entertainment. Radio ownership rose as well, but Americans increasingly listened to radio as an accompaniment to other activities, such as driving.

A 1950s family watching “I Love Lucy,” one of the most popular situation comedies in the early days of television. Manufacturers designed and marketed TV sets as living room furniture and emphasized their role in fostering family togetherness.

Fess Parker, the actor who starred as Davy Crockett in Walt Disney’s popular television series, greets young fans at New York’s Idlewild Airport in The series generated enormous sales of coonskin caps and other Crockett inspired merchandise, demonstrating the extraordinary selling power of the new medium of television. SOURCE:© Bettmann//Corbis.

B. Television and Politics 1.Prime-time shows made no references to contemporary political issues and avoided being tainted with communist influence. 2.Television did bring important congressional hearings before mass audiences and by 1952, slick ads began to shape presidential campaigns.

C. Culture Critics 1.The new mass culture prompted a growing chorus of critics. 2.Intellectual critics bemoaned the great “Middlebrow Culture” that was driving out high culture. 3.The Beats articulated some of the sharpest dissents from conformity, celebrating spontaneity, jazz, open sexuality, drug use, and American outcasts. 4.The Beats foreshadowed the mass youth rebellion of the 1960s.

Jack Kerouac, founding voice of the Beat literary movement, in front of a neon lit bar, ca Kerouac’s public readings, often to the accompaniment of live jazz music, created a performance atmosphere underlining the connections between his writing style and the rhythms and sensibility of contemporary jazz musicians. SOURCE:Globe Photos,Inc.(YULSMAN).