{The Middle Classes [continued (4)]}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:228-229][19900823:1142d]{The Middle Classes [continued (4)]}[23rd August 1990]

19900823.1142

[continued]

Intermediaries,* I suppose, tend to be conventional, by the requirements of the job: an intermediary, whether the ‘media’ be economic or (for example) communicative, requires the kind of financial and mental investment which arises most easily from, and tends to re-inforce, bourgeois values. The intermediary class and the middle class are nearly identical: the fact that a practitioner of art-dealing or stock-broking or publishing had working-class parents is no more relevant than that mine were middle-class.

All the same, television probably stands a better chance of presenting choice to the market than any other intermediary, if only by virtue of its hunger for material and its fluidity and transience of form: the problem, of course, is that it is the most active of the media by comparison with its market, and tends to overwhelm the more passive consumer by the sheer force of its projection. The exercise of intuition and conscience is aided by some pause for reflection, which television does not encourage.

*[See last previous entry but one]

[continued]

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