From popular culture to media culture

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the issue of culture for a majority of people became a major political, ideological, and aesthetic challenge. Anathemas were pronounced, concepts were proposed and discussed. These discussions were resumed a century later when history and social sciences began to take greater interest on such problems. Popular culture, mass culture, media culture became new battlefields where once again ideological and scientific approaches find themselves in confrontation. We propose we should map these debates, stressing historians' role and highlighting the main achievements in the study of culture targeting general public.