Cultural Studies, however, is not related to all aspects of mass media. What it is particularly interested in include issues of meaning creation, cultural reproduction and integration. As Durham and Kellner write in the introduction to their edited volume Media and Cultural Studies (2006):

“It is increasingly clear that media and culture today are of central importance to the maintenance and reproduction of contemporary societies. Societies, like species, need to reproduce to survive, and culture cultivates attitudes and behavior that predispose people to consent to established ways of thought and conduct, thus integrating individuals into a specific socio-economic system .”

Why do we think alike about certain things? How is there a commonality within us as social beings? Kellner and Durham believe that it is mass media cultural forms like television for instance that help to cultivate certain attitudes and behavior in the population by which people give consent to a dominant ideological order. Ways of thinking that are established through mass media forms integrate individuals into ideological and socio-economic systems, for instance, into capitalism or feudalism.

The function of mass media, as we saw above, is not simply to entertain but to disseminate information and knowledge among people. That knowledge may not be highly specialized knowledge, yet there is a powerful common pool of knowledge which leads us to integrate ourselves into the system.