The Culture Industry: Enlightment as Mass Deception

The reading for this week was taken from the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightment as Mass Deception" from "Dialectic of Enlightment" by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two members of the Frankfurt School. As previously warned this was a very complex piece of writing and that warning should not be taken lightly, I think the only thing that got me through the reading was the big bottle of barefoot that I purchased beforehand.

One interesting idea that Adorno and Horkheimer convey is that the media industry runs on a production line model, churning out the same repetitive forms of televion, film and radio texts, as the producers of these artifacts know they have been tried and tested and in a way give back the same positive results that previous texts have given.

With Adornos and Horkheimers beliefs on mass entertainment, I do believe that there is a high power, the 1% as people call them who are creating tastless media artifacts to help distract the rest of the 99% from more important real life issues that are occuring everyday in the world, they also use this to set forth their own propaganda onto the rest of the general public and in a sense try and manipulate them into their artifacts and advertisements.

Marshal Mchluhan- The medium is the message

Upon reading Marshall
McLuhans ‘The medium is the message’ I found myself asking if McLuhan had
actually given a definitive answer to his initial theory, I know that this is a
dated text and in some cases and in some examples it does relate to the present
tense but some opinions he expresses very old. In some cases he can break down
his theory with relative simplicity and understanding which frustrated me
whenever he went off course and in a way distracted me whenever he would quote
Shakespeare, which after reading over time and time again I could still not see
the relevance he was trying to portray.
One particular quote I found
interesting was, “The content of any medium, is always another medium”, this
can be used in many forms of digital media today, such as the film industry for
example, the big cinema screens or the smart phone where you can view a film is
seen as the medium, and it is this technology which displays the message, but
without the use of new technologies it would be harder for the message to get
across to a wide audience.
When discussing the
notion of Cyborgs in the seminar class, many people believed that we depend
heavily on technology and thus is therefore shapes our lives, I had to disagree
with this theory for I believe technology does not cover our basic essentials,
such as food, drink and reproduction, none of which technology can accommodate for,
yes you can order food and drink online and get it delivered to your house, the
same as trying to find a partner, but you yourself have to consume either the
food or drink which still makes us human, this contradicts what McLuhan has
stated about the medium is the message because most of the mediums that carry
messages now are new technologies which in the past tense humans never had, so
the message can still be carried without the mediums and still contain significance.
Overall I found the
reading of ‘the medium is the message’ to be somewhat confusing and off topic
in some cases, some examples that McLuhan uses do build up a point he is trying
to prove but there are too many curveballs located within the text which took
me off topic so much when I was trying to get a definitive answer to theory.
The Reading - McLuhan, M. (2001, 1964) Understanding Media, Chapter 1. London:
Routledge