Hoggart’s landmark question asked how mass communication changed working-class values

Evidence

The project of The Uses of Literacy , as we know, was many years in gestation. Originally planned as an analysis of the new forms of mass publishing, the radical innovation represented by Part I —the attempt to contextualize this in a deeper “reading” of the culture of their readers and audiences—was only subsequently put in place. However, by its publication in 1957, its general intention was unmistakable. It attempted to provide a complex answer to the questions: What were the relations between attitudes in the popular papers and magazines and the working-class readers to whom they were typically addressed? More urgently, how were the newer, more commercially driven forms of mass communications changing older working-class attitudes and values? What, in short, were the “uses” to which this new kind of “literacy” was being put? — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 142

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The ‘uses of literacy’ question prefigures later media-reception and audience-meaning work in Cultural Studies.

Related

• Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy founded Cultural Studies. (similarity 0.89)
• Mass commercial media were changing older working-class attitudes and values. (similarity 0.86)
• Hoggart’s book about class entered the Labour Party’s affluence debate and electoral politics (similarity 0.80)