When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills
that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do th
e media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they
be a force for good? When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 boo
k "The Uses of Literacy", Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his lan
dmark work has lost none of its pertinence and power today. Hoggart gives a fasc
inating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing worki
ng-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of
a new, homogenous 'mass' US-influenced culture.
