Theme 2: Critical Media Studies

Myths and Enlightenment 

Myths are a very subjective and often superstitious way to describe the world and explain phenomenon. It’s making use of deception to as a narrative instead of actual knowledge and facts. It is absorbing factuality, takes empirical repetitions and “lends some symbolic significance to them, pretending that regular repetitions are pre-determined”. Enlightenment started out as a project trying to free thought from its reliance on rumors and superstitious powers, that is mythology and religion. Enlightenment attacked values, ideas and where there was any emphasis on subjectivity and instead tried to focus on science and “real truths” through different techniques, which were extended and universalized to produce a universal science. Nature was demystified and became a matter of mere objectivity, an object for control. But since the majority of people who learn things by science are not involved in the subject themselves, but rather told how things work and that the science does not necessarily have to be one hundred percent correct, science could also be considered some kind of myth, and in extension also the enlightenment.

Culture Industry, mass media and mass deception

The “old” media is considered to stand for quality, innovation, intellectually challenging and is a “one-user” form of media, like books. The “new” media however is considered to be media whose goal is to have as broad spectra as possible, to fit as many people as possible and the goal is to make as much money as possible, which is reflected in the “new” medias television and radio and its programs and films. New media is not about innovating or advanced art or culture but is more like a business. In the old media the audience were allowed to make the rules of their experience whereas the new media regulates the audience by making them passive. The old media is more intellectually challenging since it forces you to think for yourselves and being critic of the content, whereas the new media does all the thinking for you.

A fabric producing cultural goods – movies, radio programmes, magazines – that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity is used as metaphor for popular culture. Adorno and Horkheimer theorized that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, that all forms of popular culture are parts of a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market their interests. All products of the mass-produced entertainment with its appeal to vast audiences are not always necessarily viewed as inferior, but rather that they have replaced other forms of entertainment without fulfilling the important roles played by the now absent sources of culture.

The culture industry defrauds the masses by making them think that they are providing products that are conveyed by the representations of the masses and to meet their needs, a seeming democratic participation, when it is in fact the culture industry that are shaping these needs. They are selecting what counts as culture with their standardized products, and thereby absorb any creativity. The masses are reduced to a passive, unthinking, unreflective possibly dumber blob and the capital triumphs over culture.

The true physiological needs are freedom, creativity and genuine happiness. The culture industry neglects these and cultivates false physiological needs that can only be satisfied by their products of capitalism, which threatens the more technically and intellectually advanced high arts and the industry keep their cultural power over the masses.

“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers

 of what it perpetually promises”. 

Topic/term of choice

I especially enjoyed the part with culture industry because I think about this almost every time I watch a movie. How standardized they are and how little you actually have to think for yourself, which I guess is why some of my favorite movies have a more open ending left for own interpretation. Which is very rare. More times than not you can almost predict the ending. I cannot even watch romantic comedies since every single scene are so predictable, almost copied directly from other high grossing rom-com movies with their mandatory happy endings, and it is so obvious that they are produced just to make money.