Just a sidebar, since I haven't finished the article. I had no idea Richard Hogarth turned his work into a program. Hogarth was one of the most depressing series of reading I ever did. What he started out studying was the effects of the social transformation of the illiterate and semi-illterate working class and the social ideal of bringing literacy to the masses, a longtime goal of public education in the US and whatever free primary-secondary education is called in England.
So they learned to read? They mostly pissed it away in the endless chatter and scandal sheets of newsprint. So much for the 19thC social reform movements dreams of educating the masses. These developments were particularly wrapped up with child labor laws and reforms to teach children in factories as a way to limit their gruelling hours.
After reading some of Hogarth's work, I realized that reading wasn't the same as literacy. That was the first mistake. The second was that learning to read was a lifelong project that only developed if you pushed the envelop of what you understand and know about the world. If you never get beyond the newspaper or any other fast production media in a downward spiral of electronic productions, produced for the LCD, then you can't possibly develop much.
The conclusion I drew on Cultural Studies was rather grim, because it seemed to reproduce the division between the educated elite and the broad mass of people who have even less time and remain a one inch deep prolitariat. This tendency has reached epidemic proportion as each generation under mass higher education regimes seems to deteriorate (in some less than measurable intellectual capacity) especially in the broad spectrum of humanities, arts, and sciences.
Adorno is often cited as a founder. But how many people in the field have studied Adorno's education and the cultural elite circles he inhabited? Well, his education was staggering at the high point of the German university system, along with his political development in Weimar and his haute culture friends in modern music and literature. But somehow he could not bridge the gap between his period of modern high culture music and jazz. You need to read Mann's Doctor Faustus somewhere along in here, and go back to 1920s-30s compositions of Duke Ellington.
What's the point? There are several levels of cultural studies that have to become integrated with their historical, technological, and social contexts. While the lower orders seem to have gotten dimmer, so has the haute bourgeoisie. The profound intellectual rot of capitalist class is even more staggering than that suffered by the lower orders. Nevermind.
Cultural studies became a centerpiece in the pomo wars and post-68 theory stuff, where I tried to follow but ultimately got disgusted by the shallowness of its concepts of intellectual history for which pomo seemed complete immune.
Nevermind. I'll go back to your essay...
CG