The influence of seeing popular culture as mass culture is very difficult to overestimate: for more than a century it was undoubtedly the dominant paradigm in cultural analysis. Indeed, it could be argued that it still forms a kind of repressed “common sense” in certain areas of British and American academic and nonacademic life. The principal problem is its working assumption that popular culture as mass culture always represents little more than an example of cultural decline and potential political disorder. Given this assumption, theoretical research and empirical investigation only ever confirm what they always expect to find. It looks down from the splendid heights of high culture to what it sees as the commercial wastelands of mass culture, seeking only confirmation of cultural decline or the need for regulation and social control.