I think that most traditional media (e.g. TV, movies) are still largely manufactured by those who control the studios that make them. It seems that every year you see big blockbuster movies or new "hit" sitcoms that follow a very basic formula that is extremely similar to their predecessors, but they still are a commercial success, because people become convinced that this is the type of entertainment they really want, even if it is something that they have seen countless times before. I think this is really well represented by the Transformers movie franchise. Every time a movie in this series comes out people say it's going to be terrible, watch it, discuss why it was terrible, then go see the next one anyway and help it be a box office success. A movie company is essentially deciding what people want to see, and the people go along with it.
However I believe that the internet is constantly spontaneously producing new culture all the time. While it is usually not shoved down people's throats and exposed to the mass population, but it is still a big part of the individual culture of the creator and consumer of whatever it happens to be. Culture, in my mind, does not exist solely at the societal level, but changes from person to person based on their thoughts and beliefs. In this sense I think it is impossible for a higher power to fully control culture, because it is nearly impossible to control people if you get to a high enough level.
I think this is a really interesting point, I didn't even consider the internet in thinking about Adorno's applicability to today. I suppose the internet is a space for culture without a market, and a perfect place for the kind of cultural products that Adorno wants to be produced; someone's website is up and available for anyone to look at however many times they want. That is, the internet provides a perfect place for the dissemination of challenging and critical cultural products in absence of the profit motive.
ReplyDeleteI think the obvious limitation is that most popular 'products' on the internet aren't challenging or critical, and that while the internet provides a marketless space, a lot of the space on the internet is within a market. We should consider things like how the fact that youtube pays popular channels affects their content.
These "authentic" cultural products on the internet, as Luke pointed out, have often been compromised by commodification. It would be interesting to know how much money facebook or youtube makes off of the personal profiles of its users, for example. The institution of platforms, that direct content in certain ways, makes possible the generation of profit. I do think there may be hopeful sites on the internet (Wikipedia, perhaps?), but for the most part it seems like a resource of raw cultural material for capitalization. If your blog is exciting enough, you might be hired as a staff writer by a company scouting for talent.
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