The rise of mass media and consumer leisure transformed American life at century’s turn.

Evidence

On the other hand, the ever-mounting waves of immigrants would have been stilled but for the realistic prospect of better-paying work. New affluence, however unequally distributed, gradually combined with ingenuity to produce a new culture of leisure and materialism. The invention of the phonograph and movies between 1896 and 1902 portended a radical transformation in the nature of mass leisure in the new century. As early as 1908 New York City alone had more than six hundred five-cent storefront movie theaters, or “nick-elodeons.” In 1914 half a million records were produced annually, and by 1921 this figure would balloon to over one hundred million. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1315

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mass commercial media were changing older working-class attitudes and values. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 142; Mass media emerged with agrarian capitalism as culture itself became a commodity.; Broadcast networks actively molded homogeneous postwar Americans into a unified consumer mass — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 618 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Mass commercial media were changing older working-class attitudes and values. #exemplifies (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 142
• Broadcast networks actively molded homogeneous postwar Americans into a unified consumer mass #exemplifies (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 618
• Popular media shape values and identities amid deepening crises. #expands (0.80) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 27
• A modernism absorbed into mass media serves the existing socio-economic structure. #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 787
• Mass media emerged with agrarian capitalism as culture itself became a commodity. #complicates (0.75)
• Early twentieth-century American journalism repackaged European racial superiority for US consumption. #exemplifies (0.75)
• The modern media emerged with eighteenth-century agrarian capitalism #complicates (0.75)
• Digital-era capitalism shifted the focus of consumption from the mass to the individual #qualifies (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 95
• Commercial television and experimental video now constitute the cultural dominant. #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 207