Who Is Max Horkheimer's Work?

Jenkins talks about how the consumption of media products is a collective process, in other words, the collective intelligence is seen as an alternative source of media power. He describes how within popular culture, the collective meaning making is shaping and changing the ways religion, education, laws, politics, advertising and how the military operate (4). Jenkins discusses a process called “convergence of modes”, he explains that media and communication are becoming interconnected like the telephone and television.

With the proposed concepts, such as branding in commercialism, High Culture/Low Culture, and the false promises made in uniform products, one is granted to see today’s society as hovering closely to a capitalistic system set up to facilitate the vast desires of the masses. As Adorno and Horkheimer bluntly put it, “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions” (71). We can only think of ourselves as just another gear in the American machine, churning away endlessly and waiting to be fed with the uniformity of culture, the greed, manipulation, and

In the chapter “What is Popular Culture and Why Study It?” from the novel The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture, author Deanna Sellnow deliberates on the influential supremacy of popular culture in our current society. Sellnow wrote this passage to inform those affected by pop culture on a daily basis. Everyday individuals in first world countries are somehow impacted by pop culture. Pop culture’s influential power can often times mold our outlook on the world around us. It is important to realize when pop culture is trying to reevaluate your ethical beliefs so you can have a say in whether or not you want your morals to be altered.

“The average American home has more TV sets than people, and our TV sets are turned on an average of nearly 7 hours per day and we see about 20,000 TV commercials per year (Herr, 2007).” (Sellnow 7). This sentence alone just shows us that we are around popular culture more than we may think. In the first seven pages of “What is Popular Culture and why study it?” Deanna Sellnow talks about how popular culture influences everyone in the world. The whole passage is to explain how popular culture persuades all the people in the world. There are different ways that Sellnow explains in the passage, that popular culture shapes people from how you should act and how you should not act, to what you should believe and what you should not believe. For

In the text Adorno and Horkheimer primarily focuses on the issue of art such movies, radio program and etc becoming a commodity and the fusing of the market and art areas. The criticism of the culture industry stems from the fact that for Adorno and Horkheimer culture held the answer for liberation, however the mass produced culture that they found in America was instead enslaving people. Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument regarding mass culture produced products and its effects and commoditization of art remain important to contemporary society because these issues have continued to have a negative effect on contemporary society this can be observed by analyzing contemporary mass culture products such as television, movies and the internet.

Conformity was once a common concept accepted by many Americans. Citizens were expected to participate in similar behavior, activities, and lifestyles. Advertisers used the desire to conform to societal ideologies in order to endorse and sell their products. However, during the 1950’s cultural revolution, Beats movement, individuals began dismissing the need to conform and began expressing their own individual endeavors. As the result of the rejection of collective conformity advertisers converted their strategies and began using freedom of expression as a ploy to get people to buy their products by promising them rebellion with said product. In the article “Commodify Your Dissent”, Thomas Frank examines the strategic ways advertisers

The short story “Harrison Bergeron” brings into question the productivity that television contributes to society. This story, by Kurt Vonnegut, has been criticized as “a kind of desensitizing, numbing, and clearly thought-stifling, rather than thought-provoking medium that is partly responsible for the state of society.” Television, in reality, can be argued as a positive and negative medium that both benefits and hinders the public. Whether television is viewed as a beneficial or counterproductive mechanism is based its use. This form of media can be utilized as a source of knowledge, information, and education, or it can be used as negative propaganda, or as a form of brainwashing, as demonstrated in “Harrison Bergeron”. There is no cut

In 1929 Oppenheimer returned to the United States to take up teaching positions at Berkeley and Cal Tech. During the 30’s, Oppenheimer began to become associated with a variety of heavily left-wing organizations affiliated with Communism. This was mainly due to the repression of several Jewish relatives in Nazi Germany. He married Katherine Harrison in 1940, who was a member of the Communist party and had two children. He also started to distance himself from his former leftist friends and groups. This was probably largely done to make himself more attractive to obtaining the post of head of development for atomic bombs.

The question I have posed is a very contentious one, which has been debated by scholars and graduates for some time, with many arguing that popular culture and mass media are ways of brainwashing the 'masses' into the ways of a dominant social order. Others believe that popular culture is a type of 'folk' culture which encompasses the idea of an 'alternative' culture incorporating minority groups, perhaps with subversive values sometimes challenging the dominant control groups, as was scene with the advent of the 'Indie' music scene in the mid nineteen nineties. In this dissertation I aim to uncover whether aforementioned 'subversive values' can be uncovered in popular culture or whether popular culture is really a means by which the masses can direct dominant controlling forces.

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer is a pivotal article in history that changed the way in which many communications scholars viewed media. Both authors were members of the Frankfurt School, a school of thought which looked further into Karl Marx’s theories about capitalism and the issues of mass production. Published in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer revealed their beliefs that the media, much like the economy, is becoming mass produced, and is therefore turning people in society into media-consuming robots. Industrialization created work lives for people in which they would work on only one part of a larger machine. As a result, they felt less involved in the completion of the project as a whole, and therefore felt less pride in their jobs and their lives in general. Instead, these people turned to media and pop culture so that they would feel more fulfillment within their lives. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that these people had a reduced capacity for original thought because media is now force feeding them the ideas of what they can think and feel. This essay will prove that although Adorno and Horkeimer’s points were justified through the eyes of authors George Lipsitz, Lev Manovich, and Susan J. Douglas, there are still exceptions to their theories that they do not account for.

Hannah Arendt is a German Jewish philosopher, born in 1906 and died in 1975. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger as Professor. Her works deal with the nature of power and political subjects such as democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. She flew away to France in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in Germany. She flew away from Europe to the United States after escaping from the concentration camp of Gurs. She became a Professor in New York city, in which she became an active member of the German Jewish community. In 1963, she was sent to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann’s trial by The New Yorker. Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on Eichmann’s trial were expected to be harsh, considering the philosopher’s roots. However, her

According to Theodor W. Adorno in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, the culture industry is the entertainment business. “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry” (1113). While people are consuming products from the entertainment manufacturers “with alertness even when the customer is distraught,” real life is not becoming indistinguishable from the movies (1113). The majority of consumers are able to distinguish products from the entertainment manufacturers such as movies, TV shows, radio and books from reality.

Today’s society focuses more on the idea of mass media and of things that are portrayed with this. Because of advancements in technology, a person could simply turn on a television set, a computer, or just their phone to find out things that are going on in the world. In dealing with pop culture, one would see that the ideas and objects generated by a society are being promoted by the media. Mcdonald's and other restaurants use this to promote their items.

Adorno and Horkheimer suggest ideology as the reason dominant culture industries are able to sustain themselves. They argue that “The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order” (Adorno and Horkheimer 17). Thus, we can think of these “authoritative pronouncements” as methods Hollywood employs to sustain its dominance. By proclaiming a certain set of ideas which convinces the public that no other authority or ideas exist otherwise, Hollywood mystifies and obfuscates all other traces of thought. It normalizes its manipulation of the public by ostracizing other values and ideas outside the predominant notions of standardization and mass production.

Economism, or vulgar Marxism, is a key feature in explaining the media’s role according to Marx. This is also referred to as the base/superstructure model. In economism, “the economic base of society is seen as determining everything else in the superstructure, including social, political, and intellectual consciousness.” (Marxist Media Theory 1) This maintains that the media is used as the base of society. Society is referred to as the superstructure. Clearly, media shapes society even today. Since consumers rely on the media for information and entertainment, (ex. Television and radio new, magazines, newspapers, Internet), they are shaped by whatever forms of media they chose to be an audience to. The media manipulates everything from popular fashion to the food people consume.