Theme 2: Critical media studies - reflection

For this week’s theme I have prepared by reading chapters 1-4 in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment. I felt that it was easier to read this week, which could be of several reasons, maybe because of the format being a pdf or my increasing experience in reading philosophical texts or the fact that it was simply an easier text. I really liked chapter 4 and I’m guessing most of us did since it’s related to media technology. As Leif Dahlberg said on the lecture for this week as well, chapter 4 is also probably the easiest to read because there you don’t need to have any experience of reading the Odyssey.

When I have read everyone else’s blog posts from this week I think that the most interesting part have been the last question where you were able to do some own reflections by picking a concept/term that you found particularly interesting and to motivate that. This has also verified my belief in that chapter 4 was the most enjoyable one since most of the terms of question 6 figured in that chapter. A common notion when reading the blog seems to be that the discussion about the culture industry and the mass culture that Adorno and Horkheimer talks about is a very valid discussion even today although many things has changed.

An interesting point about mass media that was brought up in the seminar is that today we have so many more options in how we consume media than we used to. When the book was written back in the 40s you didn’t have so many different media, for example the television was not used so much because there wasn’t much content. So it was harder to “escape” the message of the mass media at the time, which meant that it was easier to spread propaganda. Today we have many different sources of information, especially the internet, which can be used to select whatever information/culture you want and also whenever you want. So I think that you can, in a sense, see why Adorno and Horkheimer were critical to mass media and the culture industry. If they had reflected on it today, then maybe they would have been of another opinion because, at least in my opinion, it’s not as easy to be deceived today as it was 70 years ago.

In the seminar we also talked about how we consume media in different ways which relates a bit to my previous paragraph. Adorno and Horkheimer do not in their book think about how medias can be consumed in different ways. Instead they think that each media are used by all people in one certain way. Thinking about how you consume television today, it can be done in several ways. You can use it as background noise (having it on all the time) or you can put it on only on specific times when you want to see a certain program. The point I’m trying to make with this is that there are, in my opinion, some flaws in Adornos and Horkheimers reasoning around the nature of mass culture.