In the late 1960s Jean Baudrillard was in many ways in the right place at the right time. Baudrillard's initial book was his doctoral thesis published in French as Le Système des Objets in 1968, the year of the May events. In the early 1960s he had published some literary reviews for Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. There were also many translations which Baudrillard conducted in this period, from German into French, mainly of key figures like Karl Marx and Bertolt Brecht. He then studied for a PhD in sociology. Working under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre, with whom he collaborated on the journal Utopie, Baudrillard subsequently took up a teaching post in sociology at the small University of Nanterre in 1966 where Lefebvre was based and had just publicly broken with the situationists. The second book by Jean Baudrillard was La Société de la Consommation, a work strictly written to the order of the publisher, effectively made up of essays and published in France by Gallimard in 1970. Sage published the whole book in English translation twenty-eight years later as The Consumer Society. ‘Mass Media Culture’, a section from La Société de la Consommation, was included in a collection of Baudrillard's writings in 1990 by Pluto Press entitled Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny 1968–1983 edited and translated by Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis. The extract here is a section from the 1990 translation of ‘Mass Media Culture’.