To talk about the culture industry, i mainly want to discuss the part of ‘The Culture Industry: Englishment as Mass Deception’. This chapter outline how the culture industry controls the masses through culture and creates the passive consumer. And the consumer without critical makes their own oppression. “The culture industry for Adorno and Horkheimer meant “thecommodification of art forms which now succumbed to the productionmethods and sales techniques of mass-production” (Scanell,2007). I think this also caused cultural homogenization, I found this phenomenon in many places, for example, there is a region in my hometown called Dongshan.
Dongshan is famous for its popular culture and new fashion, at first it was famous for its old, beautiful red brick wall and history, but since several niche brand stores opened there, Dongshan started to become knowing as a fashion block that more and more streetwear brand and buyer shop setting up there in these two years. However, i found the formulaic nature of entertainment in Dongshan. When Dongshan is the indictor of fashion culture, everyone wants to post something about it to show how much they love it, and their fashion sense, then things start to go wrong.
The formula for shopping around here is to buy a cup of coffee then walk through the street and take photos over there, walk into a “nice” shop and buy the usual clothes. Buying coffee is not because people like coffee or because they are thirst but because walking with a coffee cup looks cool and nicer to take photos. A nice shop is not as nice as people think, nothing new with the decoration and clothes are the worst part. Whatever the T-shirts, trousers or skirts, they are similar, all are conservative colors with logos or simple paintings–to make sure it is suitable for everybody so that everybody could take one.
It is hard to tell anything truly valuable or unique in Dongshan now, it is not the same as before, it is totally a tool for people to achieve ‘self-satisfaction’, and this ‘self-stisfaction’ is made by complex capital operation and design, which is part of culture industry. I believe Dongshan is not the only place experiencing serious homogenization and cheap reproduction of identical, with the name of fashion culture. It killed creative ideas, surprise and imagination, when there is such culture industry formed, it’s like an inexhaustible purse for capital. Just like Adorno and Horkheimer noted, it has became mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness.
photo: YAO MA
In 2020, summer, Dongshan
- Chapter 1: Mass Communication: Lazarsfeld, Adorno, Merton, USA, 1930s and 1940s
https://sk-sagepub-com.uow.idm.oclc.org/books/media-and-communication/n2.xml
- Media and cultural studies: keyworks (pages: 41-72)
https://r2.vlereader.com/Reader?ean=9781405150309
The entry point is very precise, pointing out the homogeneity problem in Dongshan District. However, I personally think that the explanation of the remaining phenomenon is too general. It can be seen that so-called “cultural districts” like Dongshan actually exist in every major city. But this does not mean that the homogeneity of such places in every city is serious. If you want to strengthen the comparison, it is recommended to select some neighborhoods that are really developing new culture as a reference. If no comparison is made, some other cultural neighborhoods with equally serious homogeneity can also be used as evidence.