Adorno's Concepts Today

While reading Adorno's 'The Culture Industry" I couldn't help but notice how many of his ideas and theories about the industry of culture still ring true today.  Even just by looking at the title, we can start to pinpoint a similarity between the way society used pop culture as a tool for profit then, as it still does today.  It's almost impossible to think of a single movie, TV show, magazine, newspaper, or even radio show that doesn't advertise something.  TV shows, specifically, were made exactly for this purpose; the entertainment content often being tailored to the advertisements they came after, rather than the other way around.  Pop culture succeeds in making money not only directly by 'selling entertainment,' but also indirectly by selling itself, in a sense.  Adorno discusses this concept at length, explaining the self-sustaining nature of culture in the way that it can promote itself through its own content.
Another concept I found interesting in the reading was the idea that "conformity has replaced consciousness."  I think that this may have been true in the 20th century, and more recently even in the early 2000s, but in the last few years we have started to see a shift in the way we view culture as a society.  Rather than taking it all on faith, we have begun to take a closer look at pieces of pop culture through a more critical lens.  In fact, I would argue that the 'cool' thing to do now is not conform to the ways of society, whereas before, conformity was what society was basically built around.  However, one could also argue that trying to not conform to everything, can be a type of conformity in itself if everyone else tends to have this same idea.  Either way, I think that as a society we are continuously moving further and further away from this idea of conformity replacing consciousness.  Evidence of this can be seen in not only the way we look at pop culture, but the ways in which we are taught to think about culture and other aspects of life.  We are focusing more and more on teaching our youth how to think, rather than what to think, a process that inevitably steers us further away from the path of conformity.