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Analytical
Frameworks some analysts, in the 1980s/1990s heyday of postmodernist cultural theory, undoubtedly risked lapsing into an uncritical celebration of contemporary popular culture (such as Fiske, 1987; see also McGuigan, 1992, for a critique of such ‘uncritical populism’). This was hardly the same kind of cultural studies as that practised by writers
such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Edward Said.
The legacy of such populist analysis can be found in various writing on the media and popular culture today. The intention is often a good one – to complicate simplistic dismissals of commercial culture, whether from audiences, journalists, or other researchers.
Such commercial culture may, the neo-populists suggest, be considerably more fruitful, empowering and enriching than its critics make out. Some of the research at least makes an effort to talk to audiences about their experiences of, for example, reality television (Hill, 2005). But other contributions risk massively overstating the democratization of the media that was made possible by the expansion of the cultural industries and by associated developments in information tech- nology.
John Hartley, for example, has written provocatively about a pro- cess of ‘democratainment’ in the proliferation of media and the increasing presence of ‘ordinary’ people in their products (see Hartley, 1999: Chapter
12). As Graeme Turner (2010: 16) has noted, the democratic part of Hartley’s neologism is ‘an occasional and accidental consequence of the “entertain- ment” part and its least systemic component’.
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Perhaps the main legacy of postmodernist cultural populism is to be found in a more recent generation of cultural studies writers who celebrate the emancipatory effects of digital technologies (for
example Jenkins, 2006). These cultural studies writers are part of a powerful movement of
digital optimism,
along with researchers
from
other disciplines, such as management and business studies (Shirky,
2008), law (Benkler, 2006) and sociology (Castells, 2008).
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