Meyersohn, Rolf (1977). The Sociology of Popular Culture: Looking Backwards and Forwards. This article discusses the field of study of popular culture and traces its history from 1930 to the present. The study of popular culture consists of examining all elements of human activity and life style, including knowledge, belief, art, and customs that are common to a large group. These popular culture elements have been disseminated mainly, not necessarily, through the mass media. Popular cultural analysis has suffered greatly from the value orientation of its researchers. Negative views of popular culture resulting from its linkage in the minds of social scientists to facism and capitalism predominated the field from the 1930s through the 1950s. In the 1960s popular culture became linked with political forces approved of by many social scientists and has since then been treated in a more positive manner. The tendency in both periods was to regard the study of popular culture as valuable only in terms of the effect of popular culture on political and social institutions. The… [PDF]