Mass culture – active consumers, passive citizens? Implications in the public sphere

The research problem brought up by the author of the present article is the activity vs passivity of citizens of mass culture in the widely understood context. The technological progress, globalizational processes, the unification and creation of needs, the appearance of new media, a bias in favour of success and prestige, the broadely defineded consumerism are only a few of the factors which contribute to break off the relationships with space and time. They cause, inter alia, the standardization of transmissions and distorting reality. These phenomena are an inherent part of the mass culture, its positive and negative implications in the public sphere.