This week we had our
first seminar in this course. The theme was Critical Media Studies and read Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). I found parts of the literature
hard to understand on a deeper level. The seminar was helpful to give me some
input on how the other students interpreted the text and also get some examples
that made it easier to understand the text. It was also good to hear Leif
Dahlberg mentioning that this book is always included in the literature in
Media studies, for me this makes it easier to put more focus on actually
remember things I read if I have a purpose for it.
On the seminar
we discussed Mass Deception and Culture industry for quite a while and it was
interesting to hear different points of view of the two terms. We got a bit
into how art has developed between what Adorno
and Horkheimer call old and new media.
Art in old media mainly consisted of lets say actual paintings. In the new
media print made it possible to mass-produce paintings that could reach a
bigger group of people. Same thing happened with written art. Adorno and
Horkheimer were critical to the new media that made it possible to reach
basically everyone in the world, but at the seminar we discussed that we still
have a group that is keeping the art just the way it was in the old media. I
remember someone in the seminar group called this group an elite group, but I
would rather say that this group is a group that by their own decisions based
on their passion chose to be a part of it. I believe that it is like that with
a lot of things connected to the culture industry. There will always be an
exclusive group that are a bit more interested in some thing more than an
average person. I also think that this can be applied to a lot of different
subjects. For example filmmaking. Filmmakers can, if they want to reach a big
group of people, but usually those films are made by a smaller group of people
that knows exactly what the crowd wants. The films become commercial, and
obviously their main goal is to get as big profit as possible. Then we have
this exclusive group that decided to take a step aside from the whole
commercial part of the industry by making independent movies, because to them
the films are pure art. I argue that this group is more passionate about making
films and to them and their peers film is what Adorno and Horkheimer says that
culture was before the new media came. This can also be applied to basically
any other interest, for example video games, coffee, food, books, TV, music
etc.
I found this
part of the culture industry extra interesting to talk about. I kind of had a
picture in my head what Adorno and Horkheimer wanted to say, and also had my
picture about how to apply this to todays’ discussions, but I definitely got
some input from the other students at the seminar that broadened my view which
I think was valuable.
I think that there is a very interesting idea in your post, about flims that become commercial. A think that now media is a bussines, more than propaganda tool or anything else. Media provide a contact with the audience to companies and get money from commercial. We, as viewers, are good or commodity, and media companies sell us. But the case of film undustry is more complex. I think that films that are shown in the cinema are still the art objects.
SvaraRaderaThe reason Adorno and Horkheimer were critical to the mass produced media as opposed to the old media or "art", is that they themselves were part of this small intellectual elitist group that enjoyed the "real art". Mass producing it takes away the originality I suppose. However, the benefit of mass reproduction is that it also reaches outside the small intellectual group.
SvaraRadera