After theme 2

First of all: having a lecture and seminar this week helped immensely with understanding the material. For me the turning point was when Leif Dahlberg in the lecture pointed out the circumstances during which the book was written. Knowing it was written during the second world war, by germans exiled in the United States, (living at least part of the time in Los Angeles), helped me understand and see through a lot of the anger in the text.

An aspect of the text I found really interesting was how many of the arguments used by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s are still used today in discussions of the media industry. The ideas that mass media is dulling the minds of consumers, the ideas that the latest form of consuming culture is worse than the ones used before, it has been said so many times and will surely be said again. I feel the fact that these arguments have been used for over 50 years at least indicates that there is at least a core of truth in this. As a student of media technology, my view on the latest in media is fairly positive, but that is no reason not to be cautious of negative consequences from consuming media today. A central point in Adorno and Horkheimer's argument seems to be that mass media trains the population to listen to authoritative voices. At first I found it a bit silly and conspiratory, but again, taking into account that the book was written during a war started by a Germany that had been turned from a democratic state to a dictatorship, I think I get their point. The development of mass media has, among other things, enabled propaganda to be spread more easily than ever before.

My biggest problem with the text is how culture conservative I find it. I don’t think holding back or preventing the use of “new” media would benefit anyone. The authors may well have a point when saying mass media have negative aspects, but as far as I can tell they completely ignore any positive aspects that would make their arguments more nuanced, (and interesting to me). As a student of modern media technology I’m not that interested in hearing how things were better in the past. What concerns me is how to make things better in the future.