FloRida, Horkheimer/Adorno

“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together” (41). Horkheimer and Adorno make remarkable statements in order to explain how the concentrated mass media is and how the control is in the hands of few individuals. Mass media is identified through TV, film, and radio (in this article). The idea of ‘sameness’ is a major focal point that the authors address. Our society looks at ideas, cultures, and ways of life to combine and create a finished product that will be successful to the masses. All stores, television shows, movies, posters, and media as a whole all provide the same or similar concepts or visuals to get us to believe that this how something should be or look. Media involves a lot of “supposed to.” Horkheimer and Adorno remark that, “for the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production” (44). The ideas behind all of Horkheimer and Adorno’s definitely coincide with what our CMC300 class is currently studying. Ideology formulates all our thought, feelings, and actions (sometimes without us evening realizing it) and connects very strongly with this idea of sameness and its link to society’s belief in the media. Somehow we all know and use the same actions within the same scenarios. As discussed in our lecture of Hebdige, we all raise our hand and wait to be called and we all go to class because in our minds we assume that not going will come with some sort of punishment. The ideas and notions that are ingrained within us connect why we as a culture would view something as cool or un-cool, good or bad. Horkheimer and Adorno are interconnected with these ideas when they state that “freedom to choose an ideology, which always reflects economic coercion, everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same…the choice of words in conversation, indeed, the whole inner life compartmentalized according to the categories of vulgarized depth psychology, bears witness to the attempt to turn oneself into an apparatus meeting the requirements of success, and apparatus which, even in its unconscious impulses, conforms to the model presented by the culture industry” (71).