Mass Culture & Mass Society

ALABARCES, PABLO

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd edition

Wiley Blackwell

Lugar: London; Año: 2015; p. 1 - 15

The category of mass society appears in the early nineteenth century as a way to describe contemporary societies after industrialization: the demographic, economic, political and cultural social transformations between the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Thus, mass society went on to describe any society in which the masses occupy roles and spaces previously reserved to its ruling classes or social groups dependent on them. Meanwhile, mass culture begins with the popular press in the late nineteenth century, and after World War I there were mass film and radio, literature and popular music, whose audiences were recruited, especially, among social sectors that made up the new mass societies established definitively. The article describes a history of both categories and its relations, as well as the different perspectives from academia, from the early twentieth century to the present.