Kandeep Lally: The Culture Industry

The Culture Industry In this popular culture class we looked at the culture industry which meant understanding the concept of the culture industry and the applicability of the idea to the work of Disney, James Bond, Tabloid Newspapers, television and The Beatles. The Culture Industry is one in and of itself that focuses on the media and the mass market. We looked at ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ written by theorist Adorno, in which he describes the industry as “ruthless” and “rubbish”. He argues that the culture industry is a mass deception in which we the passive consumers are conceived as ‘absent minded’ we buy the latest products weather if we may not need them; therefore feeding into Capitalism where ‘business is their ideology’. Additionally, by consuming most of these products we actually ‘alienate’ ourselves, for instance, film conflated as a product not art in which ‘the idolization of the cheap involves making the average the heroic’. Most of these ideas and concepts of the culture industry are significant for our popular culture exam.