aro0823, 2-27

Two primary topics we discussed in class on Thursday troubled me greatly for reasons I cannot quite pinpoint. The first is the notion of what would happen to the world as we know it if people decided they no longer needed so many things. The culture industry functions on the absent minded public’s inability to critically analyze their actions, but what if the public suddenly became educated? Would the culture industry lay in ruin? To posit a hypothetical situation, say that the field of media studies gains widespread acceptance and is adopted into elementary school curriculums worldwide. Generations would then grow up realizing the illogicality of the “frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods.” So, in this hypothetical world, people may start purchasing only what they needed and contemporary forms of advertising would essentially be rendered useless. In theory, advocates of globalization argue that the world would improve significantly with an educated population. Ironically, the more educated the population gets in terms of postmodern absurdities, the more potential the capitalist system that globalization advocates would crumble under its own weight.

Continuing along with the world-is-doomed-if-the-population-gets-common-sense theme, how would the media function if people came to realize what kinds of messages they were actually receiving? As we discussed during our Adorno lecture, “countless people use words and expressions which they either have ceased to understand at all or use only… as trademarks.” By and large, conversation today is the opposite of analytical. Individuals merely repeat verbatim the messages the news media delivers to them. Thus, we live in a society of parroting drones. The media thrives because they focus all of their stories around certain catchphrases like “wasting taxpayer money.” When the populace hears these dreaded three words, they automatically go up in arms, regardless of the actual issue. However, if the public actually understood any economic principles, they would be able to dissect the given messages and formulate (gasp) individualistic opinions. The formation of said opinions is exactly the opposite of what the culture industry is trying to do. If pseudoindividuality didn’t reign, just imagine the horrors that could come from a freethinking community. If such a travesty would occur, we may actually have enough resources to last more than the next 30 years. Woe are we.