Pre Blog 10/24-Riehle

I found Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s reading straightforward interesting at first, but soon after I started to loose my grasp on all the connections they were making. Nevertheless, I gathered their argument to be that “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (53). Essentially they claim that all different forms of media have lost their athletics and are simple just modes of income for industries that manipulate and profits from the consumerist society it helped create. They state, “Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce” (53). In my research for another class I found that America is the most consumer-oriented society in the world where shopping can range anywhere from a leisure activity to a necessity. A large factor in the exponential growth of this epidemic can be traced by to commercial media. Starting in the 1920’s the boom of psychological advertising took over. For example “scare copy” which are advertisement that manipulate people into feeling something for their products. Implying that by having such a material good would help afford them anything from self-esteem, love, or friendship. Conversely it implies that not possessing a particular product could result in a negative effect on one life. Consumerisms foundation is based on the notion of “dissatisfaction.” Meaning no matter what one has, it’s never enough.  This is not unlike Habermas theory of the “cult of the new” in which people are obsessed with having whatever the latest thing is. The original definition for consumption was eat, devour, waste, and destroy. However, social constructs of modern society have morphed it to refer to wanting, buying, using, and discarding. And that is precisely that mass deception of the culture industry we have all –bought into.