Reading: Horkheimer & Adorno "The Cultural Industry"
The primary topics that we discussed about Horkheimer and Adorno was the position and influence of mass culture on the individual, with an emphasis on the negative. To structure this conversation, I will provide several important quotations that we discussed during class followed by my analysis of the quote. "Culture today is infecting everything with sameness." This quote ascribes sameness to everything contained within mass culture, which is evident upon an analysis of the social media that consumes and documents our lives. We see people posting images featuring their friends, relationships, wealth, cars, and food without much deviation from portraying the best version of ourselves. Mass culture promotes people who ascribe to the expectations their culture provides them with, a cookie-cutter home with approximately 2.2 children, an average income, two cars, and retirement at age 61. "Pseudo-individuality reigns." This term describes the reality that we are all the same as each other, but the most successful people are those who hide this reality. The "pseudo" prefix describes a sense of lying to other people through the lens of "individuality" when the reality is that you are exactly the same as everyone else. This condition means that anyone who follows it "reigns," because they are pretending to be something they are not.
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