Pop Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception Analysis

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
I believe my problem with this reading is not the fancy vocabulary but the comparisons the authors make. Sometimes I am stuck trying to decipher what the authors are talking about and if one thing has any relationship with the other or if this essay is a metaphor for a larger picture. Better yet, is the community, policies, or the structure of buildings the metaphor for the mass media or is it the other way around? Or maybe they are all just points to his argument against the “sameness” our communities suffer due to capitalism? Then I read, “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 …show more content…
How do we take back what we thought was the purpose of media? I realized after reading more of the passage the authors’ problem came with the idea that media served a purpose greater than entertainment or informational purposes. If I were them I would ask; Do you ever think about how great life must have been back in the day? Watched a movie or a spanish soap opera where you are taken to a time where people had to talk face to face and travel? I do it all the time. Yes, it must be very time consuming having to go back and forth and to constantly follow up with people to have good leisure and company, however, that time is now being spent with media and technology becoming tools of the economy and capitalist to become deviant of its purpose with what I assume to be the advertisement, ongoing filming of powerful …show more content…
However the overall message became pretty clear to me once I read the following sentence, or at least I believe it did; “The more strongly the culture industry enhances itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers-producing, controlling, disciplining them..the original affinity between business and entertainment reveals itself...as society’s apologia”. There is an undeniable relationship between entertainment/media and the business world. The authors of this article play a case of Law and Order as they try to compile facts and ideas as to how the relationship is, still, everytime I begin to think I understand those minor points to prove such idea I am distracted by a new analogy. In this quote it is stated that entertainment is society’s apology. I did not understand if the authors meant in the sense of a entertainment being a constant reminder of what is going on in the world, which it must apologize for since it does not let us escape reality, or if it is in a sense that it apologizes for constantly taking our minds out of the world it is in. In terms of media as a capitalistic tool I imagined what exactly could this apologia be an example of. I searched media and power to see if it had anything to do with the fact that media could take us out of