Adorno certainly has a pretty negative view of culture. He makes some fair points, but he seems overly scared of its effects on the masses. In fact, I don't think he mentioned any of culture's benefits. Prove me wrong for a potential comment topic, guys. Now I'm not saying the "cultural industry" is good. The movie and games industries, for example, suffer from the rather elitist stances of publishers. It's hard to rely on talent alone, you also need to know the right people and it's unfair and I get that. However, Adorno seems so offended by it. For example, on page 103, he says "The advice to be gained from manifestations of the culture industry is vacuous, banal or worse, and the behavior patterns are shamelessly conformist." Google tells me none of these adjectives are positive.
Adorno's just getting started with this verbal onslaught. Wait, I guess it's a written onslaught? Anyway, he goes on to talk about how the world wants to be deceived, even if they know the deception is occurring. He paints this in such a bad light, which I think is a little undeserved. Lots of peoples' lives aren't that great, if we're being honest. Let's use a modern day example. I sometimes would rather watch a movie where Batman drives a train through a parking structure and then flies out the window as the train explodes behind him than worry about my student debt. Is this the most productive thing I could be doing? Nope. Could I probably be out working to save money or improve my life in some other way? Absolutely. However, in today's world more than ever, people need some means of escape from day-to-day life. Times have changed since this book was written. The world gets more and more complicated as technology advances. Maybe that's the point Adorno was making. That, because we can't recognize an ideology when we're in one, we can't see any other way to run the world. We think this is just how the world works. We are a lot less likely to demand change if we wearily accept that this is as good as it gets. We don't say to ourselves "Maybe things could be better." Who knows, maybe there is some undiscovered way to fix everything. If so, I hope people get around to inventing it soon. I haven't got all day, people. The Dark Knight is on at four, and it's not going to watch itself.
I think the point that you are making is exactly what Adorno is worried about. People distracting themselves with popular culture instead of focusing on real issues can be very harmful for society in the long run, and Adorno realizes this. He wants people to recognize that being a part of this culture will contribute to buying in to the ideology of the dominant class, or at least not caring about it as much as they really should.
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