A Response to Horkheimer & Adorno

Reading” The culture industry as mass deception” by Horkheimer and Adorno gives you much to reflect and think about. As the title indicates, the picture of the culture industry that they want to show or give their opinions about is not very positive.

I do agree with them saying that films, radio and magazines are uniformed and that all mass communication is identical. If you watch any movie, they are all built up the same way and you often find them to be very predictable. The same goes for radio and magazine. Even though you listen to different radio channels or read different magazines, they often talk and write about the same subjects. Everything is controlled by the people in society that holds the greatest economic power. Often there are only a small number of owners to the many different publication companies that exist. The people are reading, watching and listening to what they think comes from different actors, but in the end there is no difference and it is all actually coming from the same owner. That makes you as a consumer feel pretty dumb and gullible.

Horkheimer and Adorno also say that “talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in”. Performers that we see on for example TV or read about in different magazines, we tend to believe that they are real people that act how they want to act without somebody controlling them. But a lot of what we see performers do is already made up and constructed by somebody else in charge so that the industry can make more money on them, and many people don’t realize that.

All of these ideas might be true and it gets you, as a consumer of the industry, thinking. Are we as consumers so easy to play? We accept everything that the media hands us without asking too many questions. We accept that everything is formed by the people that control the culture industry. So I agree with the thoughts of there being some kind of mass deception in the culture industry.