Horkheimer and Adorno - Courtney Sparling

I felt that this reading had a lot of big ideas packed into it and was a little overwhelmed with the amount of information I was trying to intake. On the other hand, I think I was able to pull out some good quotations and relate them to examples that made more sense to me.

"Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system."

I feel as though this quote sums up the term "culture industry" in the form of mass media. We are all influenced by the systems in which we live in, especially through things like film, radio, TV, the Internet, magazines etc. as consumers. We see these things everywhere and really cannot escape them. And the important thing to remember is that these systems are completely fabricated and manipulative.

Another quote I found crucial to this theory is:

"The products of the culture industry are such that can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction."

This made me think of the 90s when the Furby was really popular and a huge part of the toy culture. I always wondered just HOW these little annoying toys became such a huge deal! We as consumers are distracted beings, especially in stores and in front of commercials on television. The Furby was able to become a phenomenon in the 90s culture because of the way the company was able to manipulate consumers (children/parents) and make them think that they needed a Furby in order to be in the loop and up-to-date. 

Another major quote I found is:

"Beauty is whatever the camera reproduces."

This made me think of how celebrities are idolized as "The Most Beautiful People" in the world. This magazine cover above shows Beyonce, a famous and successful woman in the music industry who was recently given the title of the "World's Most Beautiful Woman." This magazine does not look at the everyday women who are not constantly in front of a camera and photoshopped to look and embrace "beauty." This type of beauty is reproduced over and over again and as consumers, we are supposed to follow along with the ideals of beauty that the camera creates for us. Beyonce may in fact be a beautiful woman, but is only able to receive this kind of recognition because the camera makes it that way. 

I also really thought that this quote said a lot about the culture and entertainment industries:

"There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh about."

How can that even make sense? If we laugh watching a show on Comedy Central, it MUST be funny, right? Or are we constructed as consumers to laugh at absolutely nothing. When someone falls down a flight of stairs or tells a racist (harmful) joke, we laugh. It is the reaction that we come to use in order to make up for the real "happiness" and "meaning"that the content is lacking. Humor is used by these industries as a way to release consumers' grips on their own logic. We know it is wrong to laugh at a person's pain or a racist joke, but we are already so far disconnected from the control of our own brains when watching these types of things that all we can do is laugh.