Reading the Popular

In this book, John Fiske analyzes popular texts to reveal both their explicit, implicit (and often opposite) meanings and uses, and the social and political dynamics they reflect. He examines the multitude of meanings lying beneath the cultural artifacts that surround us in shopping malls, popular music and television. It highlights the conflicting responses that cultural phenomenon such as Madonna and the Chicago Sears Tower evoke; locates popular culture as the point at which people take the goods offered them by industrial capitalism and turn them to their own creative, and even subversive, uses; and refutes the theory that a mass audience mindlessly consumes every product it is offered.