POPULAR CULTURE.

Popular culture in twentieth-century Europe is the culture of mass appeal. In contrast to earlier periods when "popular" described essentially non-literary, folkloric, often local forms of culture, culture is seen as popular in the twentieth century primarily "when it is created to respond to the experiences and values of the majority, when it is produced in such a way that the majority have easy access to it, and when it can be understood and interpreted by that majority without aid of special knowledge or experience" (Bell, 1982, p. 443).

This modern idea of popular culture was linked to the rise of the mass media that dominated public life in the twentieth century. The popular press, the cinema, the gramophone, and its successors, radio, television, and the Internet, all addressed the mass public that came to characterize modern, industrialized Europe. Its rise had begun in the last decades of the nineteenth century, brought about by a number of interlinked economic and social factors, among them increased primary education, a rise in disposable income, the effects of urbanization, new means of transport and communication, increasing leisure time, and the commercialization of this leisure time with the rise of new forms of tourism, recreation, and entertainment.

SPECTATOR SPORT AND THE POPULAR PRESS

Spectator sport, one of the most popular forms of twentieth-century mass entertainment, was part of the commercialization of leisure that began in the late nineteenth century. Of the many forms of sport that became an integral part of popular culture in modern European societies, none has been more influential than football. Its professionalization was signaled by the foundation of associations (in England in 1863, in the Netherlands and Denmark in 1889, in Switzerland and Belgium in 1895, in Italy in 1898, and in Germany in 1900) that regulated rules, competitions, and leagues. As early as 1888 the first professional league was established, the English Football League. The Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA), founded in Paris in 1904 as an amalgamation of national football associations, signaled the European-wide success of spectator sport.

The new mass-circulating newspapers of the late nineteenth century, and all other important media of popular culture after it, discovered and cultivated sport as a prime arena of entertainment. Indeed, the merging of sport, entertainment, and mass media became one of the driving forces of popular culture in the twentieth century. There were already clear signs for this before 1914. A prominent example was the Gazzetta dello Sport, one of the most popular twentieth-century Italian newspapers. Founded as a weekly in April 1896 but published daily from 1913 on, it organized mass sporting events as much as it disseminated them. The title page of its first issue announced a regional cycling race hosted by the newspaper; in 1909 the Gazzetta organized the first Giro d'Italia, the nationwide cycling contest.

In merging media and sports, the Gazzetta provided an early model for twentieth-century popular culture. Its deliberate distance from established politics and its direct participation in mass culture can be seen as paradigmatic for the popular press that expanded rapidly in most European countries toward the end of the nineteenth century. Innovations in printing technology were a contributing factor, but decisive for the rise of mass-circulating newspapers was the fact that they combined commercial success with popular appeal. Their economy relied primarily on advertising revenue rather than on the income from news vendors; they ensured mass circulation through a comparably low selling price, new forms of distribution, and new styles of journalism. Instead of politics and international affairs, the popular press focused on entertainment, sports, sensation, and practical advice. In Britain, the Daily Mail was the pioneer. Started by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, in 1896, it was the first British morning paper to sell for a halfpenny. It began with a circulation of 200,000 issues a day, rising to 400,000 in 1898 and 989,000 in 1900. The Mail's success was soon imitated: the Daily Express was founded in 1900 and the Daily Mirror in 1903. From 1911 onward the Mirror topped the Mail 's circulation and was the first British "tabloid" (the word was coined in 1900 by Harmsworth) to reach a million copies.

It was in France, however, that Europe's biggest-selling popular newspaper was produced. With 1.5 million copies by 1914, Le Petit Parisien was the most widely read of the four popular papers that dominated the French market from the turn of the century (Le Petit Journal, Le Matin, and Le Journal being the other three). Together, they enjoyed a combined circulation of 4.5 million before World War I. In Germany, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung was the first to reach a circulation of one million. By 1914, the popular press was an established factor all over Europe, not only in the large urban centers, but also in smaller cities and their hinterlands. Kraków, Poland, with a population of approximately 120,000 people, had two hugely successful popular dailies by the outbreak of World War I. As elsewhere, their titles indicated a new readership and a new style of journalism: Nowiny dla wszystkich (News for everyone) and Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny (The illustrated daily courier).

CINEMA AND THE GRAMOPHONE

The second important agent of twentieth-century popular culture that was already well established by 1914 was the cinema. The Grand Caféin Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, has a reasonable claim to being the location of its birth. It was here, in December 1895, that Louis Lumière introduced his "cinematograph" to a public audience. In the two decades between then and World War I, Europe experienced a breathtaking expansion of the new medium. From the turn of the century, cinemas became a common feature of cities and smaller towns. By 1914, the number of registered cinemas in large European cities had reached hundreds, typically seating between two hundred and eight hundred guests. Rapidly expanding to regional and rural areas, the cinematograph overtook earlier popular art forms such as the music hall. By the outbreak of World War I, the cinema was firmly established as "the most popular form of amusement of the day," as an early historian of the cinema observed (Steer, 1913, pp. 11–12).

As with most other new forms of mass media after it, the rise of the cinema triggered debates about morality, education, and "the masses." Politicians, intellectuals, and self-acclaimed moral authorities, many of them associated with the "reform movement" that accompanied the cinema in its early days, advocated a range of restrictions for the new medium. Their moral concerns were not only about the content of films but also about the unregulated public space and the "semi-darkness" of the cinema, which they saw as encouraging loose morals. The cinema channeled anxieties about "the masses" and "the crowd," perceived as a threat by many intellectuals. The German novelist Alfred Döblin described the spectators in cinemas as "a monster of an audience, a mass cast out by that white, staring eye." For this crowd, entertainment was "necessary like bread." With a "reflex-like lust," the consuming crowd satisfied its "hunger for sensation." Advocates of the cinema, in contrast, stressed the educational and artistic potential of the new medium. The stage was set for future debates about the influence of popular culture on moral and cultural values.

In parallel to the cinema rose the gramophone. First demonstrated by the American inventor Emile Berliner in 1888, this was a device that could reproduce the sound stored in acoustically generated, laterally cut grooves in the surface of a rotating disc. Different formats and technologies coexisted during the decades before World War I, but the gramophone increasingly won over the "phonograph" developed earlier by Thomas Edison. There were to be many changes in the way music was recorded and reproduced during the twentieth century, from the shellac disc to the vinyl plastic record, the magnetic tape to the compact disc, but the underlying model introduced by the gramophone changed very little until the 1990s: music was stored on a record that was then mass-produced and sold. There was a mass market of music consumption in Europe as early as 1904 when the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso had his first million-selling record.

WAR AND ENTERTAINMENT

The year 1914 marked a new era in the development of popular culture. Although governments had attempted to influence and manipulate popular culture before the war, its use for propaganda purposes was only fully explored during World War I. A number of important developments, among them the consolidation of national film, media, and entertainment companies, were the result. This went perhaps the furthest in Germany, where the founding of the Universum Film AG, or Ufa, in December 1917, brought the most important production and distribution companies into one government-owned holding that was to play a major part in the expansion of mass culture in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, the relationship between popular culture and war was about more than propaganda and censorship, power and manipulation. World War I was the first of the major European conflicts that was experienced and made sense of through mass entertainment. The cinematograph and the gramophone made it possible for even remote audiences to participate in as well as seek diversion from the war. It was during World War I that the aesthetic strategies by which popular culture approached and represented war in the twentieth century were first experimented with. This could be seen in the novelty of violence, killing, and death represented in film and in the nostalgic and romantic framing of the radically challenging effects of modern warfare—themes that were taken up with new intensity during World War II, when the radio offered an additional medium of popular culture.

RADIO

There were other important pioneers, such as Eduard Branly in France, Augusto Righi in Italy, and Alexander Popov in Russia, but Guglielmo Marconi is usually credited with the invention of the radio in 1895, harnessing the achievements of earlier innovators such as James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, and Oliver Lodge. Having failed to win support in his native Italy, Marconi brought the technology to Britain, where he demonstrated the potential of radio waves as a means of telegraphic communication. In 1914 he succeeded in transmitting speech over the radio, and in 1920 Marconi invited opera star Dame Nellie Melba to perform at his works in Chelmsford, demonstrating the potential of the "wireless" for entertainment. Whether state-controlled or industry-run, there were initially only a very few nationwide stations in European countries. The Netherlands led the way in regular broadcasting, putting out programs from The Hague in November 1919 through a station set up by the Netherlandse Radio-Industrie. In France the first radio station to broadcast was Radio Tour Eiffel, established in 1921 as a state station. In Britain, initial experimental stations were followed by the formation of the British Broadcasting Company, which began its daily schedule in 1922.

The radio soon reached much larger audiences than any other contemporary medium. By the late 1930s, roughly three out of every four households in both Great Britain and National Socialist Germany had a radio. In the context of popular culture, two aspects were particularly significant. First, these were simultaneous audiences. Programs could be heard at the same time by millions of listeners who did not have to be in the same location. Second, these were increasingly international audiences. The Geneva Plan for European wavelengths, drawn up in 1926, signaled that the new medium transcended national boundaries, a phenomenon that became a defining feature of popular culture in the twentieth century. While it offered a new experience of simultaneity, the radio did not make other agents of popular culture redundant. On the contrary, gramophone records, spectator sports, the cinema, and popular newspapers continued to flourish in the "age of radio."

During World War II the line between entertainment and propaganda was indistinguishable, in radio as in cinema and other arenas of popular culture. Indeed, forms of entertainment that were less directly political often proved to be more efficient in the mobilization of consent both in National Socialist Germany and in the Allied countries. The radio was the most important medium, in particular because it did not stop at boundaries and check points. To talk "live" to audiences all over Europe that could be reached simultaneously was a technological innovation that propagandists and politicians made use of in all countries. Charles de Gaulle's appeal on 18 June 1940, in which he coined the phrase "France has lost a battle; but France has not lost the war," became the most famous instance. Talking on "Radio London" over the airwaves of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), he rejected capitulation to Germany and appealed to French listeners in Britain and on the Continent to join him in the resistance movement.

TELEVISION

It was not until after World War II that the most important medium of twentieth-century popular culture began its rapid rise. The technological foundations of television had been set in the first half of the twentieth century through experiments and inventions by William Crookes, Paul Nipkow, Karl Ferdinand Braun, and Boris Rosing. Drawing on their achievements, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated a workable system in the 1920s, holding the first public display of television at the department store Selfridges in London in 1925. In 1936 the BBC began to broadcast experimental television programs using Baird's system. However, the age of television actually began only in the 1950s when it became possible in large parts of Europe to receive images transmitted as electrical signals. Just as in the 1920s, when radio broadcasting had begun as a mostly state-controlled medium, publicly controlled institutions were given the license to transmit television programs: the BBC in Britain, RTÉ(Radio Telefís Éireann) in Ireland, RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane) in Italy, TVE (Televisión Española) in Spain, ARD (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten Deutschlands), a consortium of public broadcasting services, in West Germany. In the 1980s and 1990s European countries began to "deregulate" and "liberalize" television, resulting in a competition between "public" and "private" channels and in the rise of new formats and programs of televised entertainment.

The number of households owning television sets increased steadily during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1955, only three out of one thousand inhabitants owned a television set in France, five out of one thousand in West Germany, and ninety-five out of one thousand in Britain. By 1972 there was roughly one television set per four inhabitants in these countries. Twenty years later the number had doubled. There was now one television set per two inhabitants in most countries of the European Union. Outside the European Union the picture was more diverse. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates for 2000, San Marino was, with 849 television sets per 1,000 people, the European country with the highest and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with 111 sets per 1,000 inhabitants, the country with the lowest density of television receivers. The Europe-wide success of television did not necessarily result in the decline of other media of popular culture. Indeed, the average amount of time per day spent listening to the radio by European adults in 1989–1990 (174 minutes in Switzerland, 159 in Britain, 131 in France, 154 in Germany, 90 in Portugal, and 73 in Spain) represented an increase on the figures for 1950, when there had been very little competition from the television.

THE CRITIQUE OF POPULAR CULTURE

Of the many intellectual critics of popular culture in twentieth-century Europe, the sociologists and philosophers of the "Frankfurt School" have perhaps been the most influential. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer provided a deeply pessimistic assessment of what they called the Kulturindustrie, the "culture industry," in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1947). They saw popular culture as primarily driven by economic interest. This "commercial imperative," resulting in the commodification of culture, had deeply negative effects. Because they were produced according to economic considerations, advertising, television, film, and popular music encouraged a standardized and mechanical consumption of culture. Audiences were manipulated into becoming uncritical consumers of mass entertainment. The resulting conformity of society suited the economically powerful and ruling classes. Ultimately, the culture industry made mass audiences willing subjects in a repressive system of thought and organization.

Jürgen Habermas, the key representative of the generation of the Frankfurt School after Adorno and Horkheimer, offered a similarly pessimistic, but more historically based interpretation in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 1961). His model centered on the change from an eighteenth-century public in which a "rational-critical discourse" was cultivated, mostly by educated and propertied men supported by individual printers and publishers, to the modern public sphere in which mass consumption and the domination of a few capitalist enterprises, primarily interested in the generation of profit, resulted in the degeneration of critical discourse. This model did not go unchallenged, and Habermas accepted some of the objections in the foreword to the 1990 edition of Strukturwandel, acknowledging that his interpretation had suffered from too stark a contrast between an idealized depiction of the eighteenth-century and a pessimistically painted twentieth-century public sphere.

The various forms of "cultural studies" that blossomed at universities in the 1970s contributed significantly to the revision of models such as those by Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Habermas. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in Britain, founded in 1964, was one of the pioneering institutions developing the interdisciplinary study of popular culture. While many authors associated with the cultural studies approach saw the Frankfurt School as founding fathers of their enquiry into the relationship between society and culture, the new academic discipline produced important revisions of earlier, predominantly pessimistic, approaches to popular culture. Thus Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (Resistance through Rituals, 1976) still saw popular culture as shaped by hegemonic forces, yet simultaneously as a territory in which people could genuinely resist manipulation and conformity. Toward the end of the century popular culture became increasingly conceptualized as a space in which power and values were contested and negotiated. John Fiske (Understanding Popular Culture, 1989; Reading the Popular, 1989) was influential in emphasizing the capacity of popular culture to articulate the contradictory values of diverse audiences. Popular culture became interpreted much less as a form of coercion or as effecting a "cultural decline." Writers instead focused on the way in which popular media and cultural forms could be seen as a process of struggle and negotiation, the outcome of which was open-ended and continuously reevaluated.

INTERNET, CONVERGENCE, AND FRAGMENTATION

The experience of the last new mass medium of the twentieth century, the Internet, perhaps contributed to a less monolithic and pessimistic interpretation of popular culture. The Internet, a worldwide network of computer networks, developed out of a government initiative in the United States in the 1970s, under the direction of the Department of Defense, which aimed to connect computers in military and research establishments throughout the United States and overseas. European universities and research institutions joined this network in the mid-1980s. While its technology originated in a government initiative, the Internet had no central governing body or authority that regulated it. With the growth in the ownership of personal computers, the network expanded dramatically in the 1990s and became mostly used in the form of the World Wide Web. Technically speaking, the "web" was the entirety of all computers linked to the Internet and storing documents that are mutually accessible through the use of a standard protocol. The computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, credited with the creation of the World Wide Web, defined it as "the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." In September 2004, the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union, an organization representing the telecommunications industry, estimated that there were 230,886,000 Internet users in Europe, an increase from 2000 of 124 percent. In countries such as Denmark, Germany, Finland, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, roughly half the population used the new medium regularly. Within the European Union, Sweden had the highest Internet penetration with 74.5 percent and Greece the lowest with 15.3 percent. Outside the European Union the divergence was even stronger: while only 1 percent of Albanians used the Internet, 66 percent of Icelanders were "online."

By the end of the twentieth century, the extraordinary growth of the Internet had begun to transform many established practices and forms of popular culture. Convergence and fragmentation were two key words in the interpretation of these changes. The first was not necessarily a new phenomenon: the gramophone and the radio had "converged" just as much in the 1920s as television and Internet seemed to at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The second, however, reflected a trend that was suited to transform popular culture more profoundly. It had arguably begun in the 1980s when the success of the video cassette recorder (VCR) had brought about a change in viewers' relationship with television schedules. For the first time, patterns of individual demand could be accommodated: no longer did viewers have to conform to television schedules, they could store and view programs at their chosen time. The phenomenon of empty streets during the broadcasting of popular dramas or comedies, a visible sign for the simultaneous audiences and shared experience of popular culture, became increasingly rare. A number of new digital recording devices introduced in the 1990s accelerated this effect, as did the arrival of satellite, digital, and online transmission. The numbers of subscribers to these new services varied naturally greatly across Europe, but the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) estimatedin2003thatonaverage73outof1,000 inhabitants in the European Union owned a satellite dish and that 162 out of 1,000 subscribed to cable television. By 2004, governments in a number of European countries expected digital television to supersede analog television during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Whether available via satellite, cable, or terrestrial aerials, new forms of television allowed for not only an unprecedented multitude of channels to be received, but also the selling of programs and films "on demand." As a result, a television program was no longer a singular event, but a commodity that could be selected, stored, and repeated at the consumer's choice.

The technological availability and changing formats of mass entertainment that came with the Internet pushed this process further, especially with the increasing success of "broadband" services. This was a transmission technique that used a wide range of frequencies, allowing for higher volumes of data and several channels to be communicated simultaneously, even when using existing networks such as telephone circuits. According to media analysts, fifty-four million people in the European Union used broadband access to the Internet in 2004, twenty million more than in the previous year. This meant that consumers could browse Internet pages at high speed, download music or films as files, and play online games. Market researchers found that, as a result, Europeans changed what they did in their spare time. A quarter of broadband Internet users in Europe said in 2004 that they spent less time watching television and more time using the World Wide Web. The development of mobile phones and other portable devices capable of downloading Internet items of popular culture almost without any geographic restriction contributed further to the challenge of the television as the dominant medium and to a process that critics interpreted as the fragmentation or individualization of popular culture. Yet, while there was evidence that audiences did become more fragmented, the opposite continued to characterize the entertainment and media industry. Popular culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century continued to be dominated by a comparably small number of international companies that exercised a far-reaching influence by shaping and channeling tastes and fashions, issues and debates. Their power and its regulation remained at the heart of public debates about popular culture.

See alsoCinema; Football (Soccer); Leisure; Television; Tourism.

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Jan RÜger