ashlayla, 3/24

During Tuesday's class, I was able to relate two quotes from the Horkheimer and Adorno essay together. The first quote is, "The standardized forms…were originally derived from the needs of the consumers…” (42). To me this quote is saying that the want becomes the need. I today's society we want new and we want better. If a new model of a cell phone comes out on the market we want it because it is new and better than the old model. We wanted and needed transportation, so car companies like Ford began making cars for the consumers. We are transitioning from like homemade products more to liking homogenized products more. We are blending products together that have very few similarities to create a new and better product. This is where I was able to tie in the other quote, “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness.” (41) We have to have similarities with each other in order to be a culture, which is similar to mash-up culture, when we combine the different elements and make them something new. I was also able to relate this to Jencks' notion of radical eclecticism...when you take two things that are as far apart as possible and put them together. Like, for example, at the Louvre where there are classical and modern types of architecture present. Or when a power plant was turned into the Tate Museum in London. I was able to connect all three of these ideas together because, in today's society we are constantly wanting something new but we want it to be better. So, we create a product that is unique and much better than the original by combining two different elements. For example, people wanted a phone that they could also use to take pictures with, so we "mashed" together a phone and camera to create a camera phone. Camera phones were new and better than the original cell phones which pleased the consumer. Our society will continue to bring together different products to create newer and better ones because consumers are going to always want something that is new and better than what they currently have.