Theme 2: Critical media studies

Enlightenment

In the classical term, the Enlightenment stands for the cultural and intellectual movement in the 17^th and 18^th century Europe (Wikipedia 2013). Its purpose was overthrow fantasy and myth with knowledge (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002: 1) but the authors question the positivity of the Enlightenment. From what I understood they are not necessarily referring to the cultural movement when they are speaking about the Enlightenment but instead of the demythologization of society. They use a broader term, which prefers objectivity to subjectivity and putting things under well-defined rules.

Myth

When writing about the Enlightenment, the authors say that; “It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities” (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002: 4). Myth is the knowledge we had before the Enlightenment and it tried to explain entities of the nature subjectively. It also tries to understand nature but, in contrast to the Enlightenment, does so by, to some extent, use incalculable variables.

“Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization… Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized”. So, according to Adorno and Horkheimer we are less afraid when we know what we are facing and that is ultimately the function of myth. They argue that myth still can contribute to the Enlightenment and despite what you call it; the thought of a really fundamental change is impossible (Zuidervaart 2011).

“Old” and “new” media

I’m not sure if I understood this part of the text right, but I think that the old media stands for the media produced before the culture industry’s entrance. Nowadays Beethoven or Tolstoys works are being used in order to fit into the expectations of the audience (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002: 96) and by doing so, it converts it to “new” media – media tailored to the public norms.

Culture industry

The culture industry refers to the mass production of culture in order to capitalize on it. Movies, for example, are produced more or less on an assembly line according to a recipe for success. Movies and radio gets standardized for the masses who passively watches/listens “…to the same programs put out by different stations.” (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002: 95). Take for example the classical model for dramaturgy, Disney’s copy-paste-strategy, or the more up to date example of the re-usage of scenes in Transformers 3 and The Island.

Mass media and "mass deception"

The culture industry produces their products in order to meet the public needs because that will yield the highest income. By doing so, the producers manipulate mass society into a passive form of consumption of media. The “deception” being that they think that they got a lot of possibilities to choose from, when in fact, the possible alternatives are very much the same.

Discussion

The thing I found most interesting was under what circumstances the authors wrote the text. You get a whole new perspective of the somewhat negative attitude towards mass media when you know that the authors are of Jewish descent, fleeing their home during the Hitler years and ended up in the commercial United States of the 1940's (Thompson 2013).

From their point of view, everything that the Enlightenment stood for resulted in their exile and two big bombs to end the war. Despite our “enlightened” minds and advancement in technology, we ended up going back to barbarism. And their claim that; “Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them.” gets a little bit easier to understand.

Thereby, the concept of domination of the masses through technology gets more comprehensible, for me. Coming from Nazi-Germany and their use of mass media to brainwash its population, maybe it’s not so hard to understand that they look for the same flaws in the American system.

References

Horkheimer, Max, & Adorno, Theodor W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. (E. Jephcott, Trans.).

Thompson, Peter (2013). The Frankfurt school, part 3: Dialectic of Enlightenment.

        http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/frankfurt-school-dialectic-of-enlightenment

Zuidervaart, Lambert (2011). "Theodor W. Adorno", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta (ed.),

URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/adorno/>.