When a society becomes more prosperous, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions of people wasted in consuming pop culture? Does the media force us into a world of the superficial and material, or can they be beneficial? In 1957, when Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his book The Uses of Literacy, Britain was undergoing great social change. However, his work has not lost relevance today. Hoggart offers a fascinating insight into the closely knit values that make up the vanishing working-class communities of the North of England, and sets out his views on the arrival of a new, homogeneous, American-influenced mass culture. Blending personal experience with social history and cultural criticism, this pioneering work examines the changes in the lives and values of the English working class in response to the media. Hoggart charted a new methodology in cultural studies based on interdisciplinarity and a concern with how the texts of mass publications are woven into patterns of lived experience.