Legacy of fear

As with its predecessor technologies, the Internet suffers from a certain "legacy of fear" about its impact on children, youth, and others.

As with cinema since the 1940s and TV since the 1950s, the Internet has been accused of promoting mindlessness; exposing people to pornography, violence, and other examples of society's lowest common denominators; and enabling sedentary behavior. The Internet is said to facilitate activities of society's hate groups and to teach children and others how to construct bombs and obtain weapons. Unlike some other mass media, the Internet is presently not universally available across socioeconomic strata due to cost and other barriers.

It is possible that this lack of universality has already contributed to existing information gaps between society's "haves" and "have-nots."


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Power to a few and corrupted media

The problem is not with media in general, but with mass media, namely those media that are produced by relatively few people compared to the number who receive them.

Most large newspapers, television and radio stations fit this description. Mass media by their nature give power to a few and offer little scope for participation by the vast majority. The power of the mass media is corrupting. The only surprise is how responsible some mass media are. Given the corruptions of power, reform of the mass media, although useful, should not be the goal. Instead, the aim should be to replace mass media by communication systems that are more participatory.

In fact, mass media should be replaced by participatory media organised as networks, such as telephone and computer networks.

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High quality media productions

How will news organizations survive when their advertising base is rushing into search engine marketing? The simple truth is that selling products or services next to a search engine box is far more effective than next to a news story.

Yet news is what gets people to return to the Internet. We desperately need a value recovery mechanism that rewards high quality news production. We don't have it yet but, maybe, web 2.0 companies have now the brain power and one day the scale to create one.

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Personal writing tools

Perhaps philosophical media products must today include personal writing tools such as e-marketing on the net, direct mail, mobile internet, full market and individual station database marketing as well as research such as focus blogs, forum textual tests, callout, weekly audience reporting, long-form telephone and Internet perceptual and format studies...

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Ecology and humanism

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.

Christopher Lasch


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Changing technology and new audience

We all know statistics about the decline in newspaper readers and network television viewers. The polls show increasingly negative public attitudes toward the press.

According to recent polls, large segments of the American population think the media is attentive to trivia, and indifferent to what really matters. They also believe that the media does not report the country's problems, but instead is a part of them. Increasingly, people perceive no difference between the narcissistic self-serving reporters asking questions, and the narcissistic self-serving politicians who evade them.

In part, it is a failure to respond to changing technology - particularly the computer-mediated technology known collectively as the Net. And in large part, it is a failure to recognize the changing needs of the audience.

But, in fact, the good reason is that news on television and in newspapers is generally perceived as less accurate, less objective, less informed than it was a several decade ago.


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French marginalized programs

If our language, our programs, our creations are not strongly present in the new media, the young generation of our country will be economically and culturally marginalized.

Jacques Chirac

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Unanticipated and unintended

The most important benefits of most technologies are immediate benefits that are implicated by their instrumental role.

The major benefit of an ax is that it cuts wood, and the major benefit of an automobile is that it transports people from one location to another. Technologies may have benefits that are unanticipated and unintended, but these often pale in comparison to such immediate benefits.


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Distracting the watch dog of the mind

We can hold media influence to be a question not of content --as Adorno obviously does-- but of far more opaque features of media form and the general media environment. This perspective is commonly subsumed under the heading “medium theory”.

With this theory, Marshall McLuhan went as far as to describe media content as “like the juicy bit of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watch dog of the mind” (McLuhan, 1964) famously stressing that “The medium is the message” .

The latter should be taken to mean that the medium itself, that is its characteristics and mode of production, is what matters in terms of the medium’s effects on the individual and on society.


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Social utility of mass media products

Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art.

The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

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Productions and means of production

The expression 'industry' is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself - such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer - and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process.

Although in film, the central sector of the culture industry, the production process resembles technical modes of operation in the extensive division of labor, the employment of machines and the separation of the laborers from the means of production - expressed in the perennial conflict between artists active in the culture industry and those who control it - individual forms of production are nevertheless maintained.

Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life.

Adorno
Essays on mass culture


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Superficial satisfaction and social order

Products of the culture industry keep people sufficiently occupied that they are unlikely to think critically about the whole system, much less seek to overthrow it and realise their true potential as human beings.

With media products, superficial satisfaction is not considered to be genuine contentment. In fact, culture industry 'promised happiness, but delivered only amusement.
Nevertheless, an interesting situation arises when individuals have the opportunity to produce their own media products, which inevitably bear some similarities to mass media products, but which apparently challenge the social order to a certain extent, through their environmentalist agenda. In this case, superficial amusement can also be seen to have a role!

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Transformation of the utility value

To Walter Benjamin, media products should contribute to the dethroning of art´s aura.

But the technical reproduction of art does not at all lead to the dethroning of works of art -- on the contrary it leads to a new fetishism. The oeuvre becomes available as a product and has to submit to the conditions of its technical commercialisation .
Actually the booming culture industry carries out the complete transformation of the utility value of works of art to their mere exchange value.


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Autonomy and mass cultural products

The real art should be like influenced on his criticism against culture industry.

To Adorno, the gist of real art is autonomy. Both of the production and the consumption of cultural product should be originated by autonomy which arouses uniqueness of real art. Culture industry which products and consumes the mass cultural product is not based on autonomy but passivity so that it never seeks for uniqueness of real art or culture.

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Gathered progressive ideas

The products of media culture are aimed at gathering audiences and thus must resonate to audience experience, desires, and hopes.

Consequently, if there are progressive images and ideas circulating in society, the culture industries will appropriate and circulate them, occasionally advancing the discourses of movements like the 1960s counterculture, the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the civil rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and other new social movements, and encouraging resistance to oppressive cultural and social forms.



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Culture industry remains external to its object

According to Adorno, the concept of technique in the culture industry is only in name identical with technique in works of art.

In the latter, technique is concerned with the internal organization of the object itself, with its inner logic. In contrast, the technique of the culture industry is, from the beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and therefore always remains external to its object. The culture industry finds ideological support precisely in so far as it carefully shields itself from the full potential of the techniques contained in its products. It lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the material production of goods, without regard for the obligation to the internal artistic whole implied by its functionality (Sachlichkeit), but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic autonomy.


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Spheres of high and low art

The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above.

To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total.

Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.


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Stereotypes and schemata

Adorno's bon mot concerning Kafka--"He over whom Kafka's wheels have passed, has lost for ever both any peace with the world and any chance of consoling himself with the judgement that the way of the world is bad"-- holds as well for him: once one has genuinely appropriated Adorno's insights one cannot see the media and society in quite the same way.

Once one has appropriated Adorno's vision, one finds his ideas instantiated and confirmed over and over, day after day. One has lost one's innocence, one finds one's self distanced from media culture, detects its standardization, pseudo-individualism, stereotypes and schemata, and the baleful effects of cultural commodification and reification.

In a postmodern scene that celebrates the active audience, that finds resistance everywhere, that ritualistically acclaims the popular, Adorno is thus a salutatory counterforce.


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Products of the culture industry

Needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries.

These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness.
Commodity fetishism (promoted by the marketing, advertising and media industries) means that social relations and cultural experiences are objectified in terms of money. We are delighted by something because of how much it cost.

Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again.

Boiled down to its most obvious modern-day application, the argument would be that textual object with memory low value leads people away from talking to each other or questioning the oppression in their lives. Instead they get up and go to work (if they are employed), come home and switch on TV, absorb TV's nonsense until bedtime, and then the daily cycle starts again.

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Beyond the state and capital

After disastrous attempts during the twentieth century, after bloodshed and betrayal, is liberation still possible?

Of course it is. We just have to change the world without taking power by going beyond the state and capital and creating our own social relations based upon mutual recognition.

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World at large

Media has a remarkable way of influencing people because it can reach into every facet of each individuals life, and ”most” of the population lacks the media literacy to understand and dissect the messages that are communicated.

People construct their own identity, at least in part, and adapt their behavior from what they see and hear in the media. Outside of your immediat usual reality how do you construct your perception/knowledge of the world at large, beyond your spatial and temporal fixity?

Construction comes now through media and your interpretation of it.


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Former elite cultural values

Traditional humanists see the new media as a threat either to democratic institutions as they were (anarchy, mob rule etc) or to elite cultural values.

Essentially a conservative, pessimistic view of mass education, democratisation and modernisation, suggesting the decline of deference and of elite values. Less common now, at a time when most writers and politicians pay at least lip service to mass democracy and when few would seek to defend a particular elite culture.

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Consumption of popular culture

According to Adorno, popular culture is like a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity.

The easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.

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Impersonal appeal

The claim is that the process of rationalization – the domination of scientific rationality in intellectual life, the bureaucratic rationalization of practical life in the context of indefinite economic expansion - has led to a radical disenchantment such that the world and the people in it are stripped of their power to (rationally) motivate and guide our practical orientation.

The morally good can determine action only if it demands and receives approval. The problem with “rationalized reason” is that by progressively replacing our experience of others as unique and vulnerable individuals with an impersonal, “externalist” appeal to laws and putatively universal norms, it drives this demand out.

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Textual mass products as double-edged sword

Walter Benjamin argued that mass media products could be used to educate and mobilise the masses, and therefore was a tool for social change.

Adorno argued that it was indeed a powerful tool, but that it could be used by anyone, not just the left-wing, and probably more effectively by those already in power as they had more resources. He said it was therefore a double-edged sword. He also said the best use of film would be to show alternative realities, rather than blunt social realism as Picasso did with painting. This would prompt people to be critical of their lives. Benjamin called Adorno an elitist and said he missed the point.

This debate has continued to run through film and video history ever since.

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Transformed tradition

The radical quality of Adorno's aesthetic theory is that it redefines the enterprise of aesthetics by insisting on its link not to beauty as such but to the 'beauty' of human emancipation.

Tradition must be confronted 'with the most advanced stage of human consciousness', and in this way self-replicating tradition may be transformed, the process of self-replication interrupted–if only for a moment.

Critical Theory's continued relevance lies precisely here, where its aesthetics more than its politics confronts the beast from its belly.

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Still and without any change in history

Adorno described natural beauty as history standing still and refusing to unfold; today there appear to be many who want to prevent the history of landscape from further unfolding...

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