The culture industry is responsible for all the rubbish we have in the media. Discuss.
The culture industry is responsible for all the rubbish we have in the media. Discuss. IntroductionThe purpose of this essay is to critically discuss who is ultimately responsible for all the rubbish in the media. In this argument I will prove that the responsible parties would in fact be both the producer and its consumers. I will elucidate the issue with Osgood Schramms model of communication and the concept of hegemony with TMZ, a tabloid website and television series, as representation of the culture industry, to develop my argument. TMZ began as a celebrity news website in 2005, drew traction among consumers when Nielsen reflected an audience of 4.5million in June 2006. (Newsweek, Inc., 2008) The increase in demand for TMZ suggests a feedback that the consuming population did not perceive tabloid as rubbish. Based on the feedback, TMZ debut its television series in 2007 to satiate its consumers demand for tabloid. The cycle then repeats. The Culture IndustryAccording to the Frankfurt School theorists, the culture industry is in fact mass culture where cultural products, like factory goods, are mass produced with low cost of production, standardised and commercialised for the sole intention of making a profit. It also indicates that large media corporations that control the means of production and circulation of ideas can ultimately influence societys ideologies. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin coined the term culture industry to signify the process of the industrialisation of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the system. The commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production commodification, standardisation, and massification. The products of the culture industry had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into the framework of mass culture and