The term “cultural industries,” often known as “creative industries,” refers to a group of businesses that combine the development, production, and marketing of original works of art, which may take the shape of a product or a service.
Theodor W. Adorno, a prominent member of the Frankfurt School, which was made up of academic refugees from Nazi Germany, introduced the idea of cultural industries in the early 1940s.
This new understanding of culture has given rise to a variety of private and public institutions, including clubs, galleries, newspapers, books, journals, political and religious organizations, scientific institutes, and intellectual societies.
By convincing people that the current social order can meet all of their needs and desires, dictating what those needs should be, and terrorizing people with threats of violent consequences, least of which is destitution and exclusion, should they resist, the culture industry populates people’s inner worlds.
Since sound in a movie overwhelms viewers and keeps them from thinking or reflecting on what they are witnessing, sound in a movie has weakened people’s ability to resist this indoctrination. The commercial interests that the cultural sector originally pursued no longer even need to be pursued directly everywhere.
Just saw media and culture as way in which individuals could gain a significant amount of power over consumers, especially through national propaganda as a influential method of manipulating the masses. This enlightenment of the exploitative nature of media create bias within their argument as they were not able to comprehend a less pessimistic view of media consumption.
Drawing on radio and television which relied on certain time slots, they suggest media standardises everything so that consumers are subjected and regulated by these particular times. However, with the advent of the internet, and until only recently, subscription-based screening services like Netflix, the industry appears to be moving towards a model that encourages individual media experiences.
The culture industry populates the inner world of people by making them believe the existing social order can satisfy all their desires and needs, by dictating what those needs are, and by terrorising people with fear of the violent consequences which would befall them, the least of which is destitution and exclusion, were they to resist.
The introduction of sound into movies has destroyed people’s ability to resist this brainwashing because sound in a movie overwhelms the audience and prevents them from thinking or reflecting on what they are watching.
The culture industry no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These interests have become objectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities which must be swallowed anyway.
The goal of mass propaganda is to accomplish quantification and replication through mass culture, not for the masses, according to the system of the cultural industry. The culture industry created what people wanted, but it doesn’t produce spiritual art.
The only thing it produces is a product with an endless surplus value. Pop culture, or mass culture, is therefore a commodity rather than an artistic form. The one-way brainwashing that occurs in mass culture instead of two-way communication between the culture and its audience makes the audience a virtual passive participant in the process.
From a content perspective, popular culture trivializes artistic creations and reduces classics to entertainment. Mass culture has embraced reality, resulting in rather than analyzing and meditating on life, entertainment.
REFERENCES:
1.How Culture Industry Shaped the Masses – Atlantis Press https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125969566.pdf
2.Cultural Industry: Changing Nature of Technology Essay – IvyPanda https://ivypanda.com/essays/cultural-industry-changing-nature-of-technology/
3.https://youtu.be/_94MLjZ43lM?si=fwKxhFkdnYLfRnwb
4. https://www.kait8.com/2023/10/20/arts-culture-industry-delivers-over-300-million-arkansas-economy/
