« The wide distribution of popular culture not only reduces the level of cultural quality – or civilization – of the society, but also encourages totalitarianism by creating a passive audience peculliarly response to the techniques of mass persuasion used by demagogues bent on dictatorship »

« The criticism of the process by which popular culture is created consists of the three related charges: that mass culture is an industry organized for profit; than in order for this industry to be profitable, it must create homogeneous and standardized product that appeals to a mass audience; and that this requires a process in which the industry transforms the creator into a worker on a mass production assembly line, requiring him or her to give up the individual expression of his own skill and values »

Gans, Herbert J. (1999), Popular Culture & High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (Revised and Updated Edition), New York: Basic Books, pp. 29, 30