Adorno and Horkheimer were able to anticipate the birth of the culture industry years before it became the machine it is today. According to them the culture industry sprung by the industrial revolutions mechanical mass production and distribution of art products would lead to a series of clichés and archetypes to formulaically create art. This art would serve no purpose for the art world, rather be a mechanism to pacify and distract the public while making the captains of industry richer and richer at the publics’ expense.
They saw the powerful end of convergence with the television. Now not only could the factory workers, exhausted from connecting cog 1 to cog 2 fourteen-thousand times that day, distract themselves at the cinema, they could watch television at home. They would sit in their living rooms and allow themselves to be distracted by the prototypical sitcoms and unrealistic romantic comedies broken up by a series of advertisements. At the end of any given day they would be left thinking the universe of the television was a realistic one and for some reason they should go out and buy Levis Jeans and a Toyota car if they wanted success or happiness.
From the businessmen’s point of view this is brilliant. They were able to appeal to the least educated and most susceptible of the masses and manipulate them to make money. First Old School came out and made those businessmen millions. So they decided to make 40-year-old Virgin, Anchorman, Superbad, Knocked up and The Hangover. They had found something the public liked and recycled it over and over squeezing billions out of the viewers.
These prototypes have prevailed because they appeal to our senses and make sense in the language of media communication. When we watched the selective attention test in class we discussed how each of us focused in on the basketball and how we would translate that to the language of film: by zooming in. our eyes do not actually zoom in on the objects we focus on but this translation to the language of the camera makes sense to us. Similarly, these archetypes the culture industry recycles at us have prevailed because they are logical and make sense to us. They have similar jokes and narrative structures that appeal to the viewer who simply wants to watch a movie and laugh. They are not making us uncomfortable or forcing us to ask larger more daunting questions as is the effort with most art. They are engineered to simply entertain and they do so very well.
Not all viewers of these films or purchasers of Levis are the un-intellectual factory workers Adorno and Horkheimer were talking about. The educated consumers are aware of the lack of authenticity of the goods they consume. They know that they are playing a role and are aware of the presence of those who gain from their consumption. However with the standardization of education, and life long conditioning and socialization even those aware of this dynamic still exist and understand the world within the rigid confines of this cultural machine.
Adorno and Horkheimer had no concept of how the Internet would change the world. With the advent of the Internet now any consumer has easy access to finding and obtaining niche art in the long-tail. The short head is still successful; blockbuster movies still make more money on the whole in the theaters and when they’re sold in mass at every Walmart across the country, but, this market grows more and more marginalized without diversity. The fact that any consumer interested in seeing an indie film can easily find it is a vast improvement from the world Adorno and Horkheimer anticipated in 1944. Adorno and Horkheimer's hypothesis on the pasification of the masses depended on the fact that television programming was produced by a powerful elite. they had no idea that with the advent of the internet the means of production would be democratized allowing any old factory worker the liberty and materials to produce from home and widely distribute to any interested parties. the internet is the one technological hole in their argument.
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