In Progress

“The Culture Industry” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer must have been groundbreaking when it was first written, transformative in its breathtakingly cynical assessment of how culture has been reduced to a set of economic imperatives. In some ways, this feels like the flip side of McLuhan’s positive-by-comparison treatise on the power of mediums to extend the contours of our existence. Horkheimer and Adorno add a villain to the piece — an economic system waiting in the wings, developing nefarious ways to rein in the medium and harness its possibilities for profit.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s reductivist doctrine is dated. The article addresses only older mediums, and its many examples are confined to older references that I hadn’t in many cases even heard of. But the ideas still remain compelling in their essentials. Many of the declarations were sadly familiar to me as either thoughts I’ve had in the past or early examples of issues I’ve seen in more modern incarnations. I was forcibly reminded of the formulaic complaint about Hollywood and now Bollywood and every other major movie industry around the world … and the popular music industry … sigh.

And the battle over net neutrality is yet another example of the struggle to retain access to content production, not just reception. H and A mention a similar fight over radio, where “private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom.” But this time around, the breadth and complexity of the internet medium means the stakes are much higher.

Posted on September 24th, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Media, Politics, School, Uncategorized