„Zwoje muskułów monstrualnych rozmiarów i dużo nagiego ciała.” Kultura popularna, nowe technologie medialne i legitymizacja socjalistycznego...
„Muscle knots of monstrous size and lots of naked bodies” Popular culture,new media technologies and the legitimization of the socialist...

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to show how the popularity of video recorders and satellite television in the Polish People’s Republic in the late 80s has become the subject of debate on the social role of media and the socialist cultural apparatus. Cultural magazines of the era criticized satellite TV programs and hugely popular Western movies available on video cassettes as productions that promoted “brazen Americanism” and posed a threat of “satellite colonialism”. The author reveals that such debates on the new media and popular culture were part of a broader discussion on the negative “imaginary West”. Articles in question described in great detail the triviality and cruelty of action movies and pornographic content that the new media provided access to. The article also argues that texts of that kind functioned as a legitimization of socialism as a system where the development of culture was not to be tied to profit, as it was in the West. The socialist system of cultural production and distribution was to constitute a better alternative by providing access to cultural education. Instead of primitive contents of popular culture, the socialist cultural project was to provide the citizens with valuable culture representing “universal values”.

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