The Culture Industry as Mass Deception

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their chapter on “The Culture Industry as Mass Deception” seek to show how digital culture today isn’t something new and unique but rather has become uniform in its character.

They argue that digital culture is a system of power that “impresses the same stamp on everything” (p. 1037). From films to the internet, the style may be different, but the substance is all the same. In essence, everyone is creating the same thing, but just going about it in a different way. There is a sense of unity that no one wants to break the knot that binds in fear of looking weird so to speak.

Digital culture the authors suggest is all about power over society and the effects of that power which in turn makes everything the same. The authors argue that no matter “how formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end” (p. 1038). This unity, this lack of spontaneity, this idea of wanting to fit into a box stifles production and publication because it completely erases and leaves no room for a person’s imagination. Horkheimer and Adorno state, “that which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled this with the ideas of true generality” (p. 1040). Nothing new and creative (i.e. painting like Picasso or Mozart’s music) is going to come from this form of digital technology that the authors discuss because everyone creates the same thing.

In the end, Horkheimer and Adorno, somewhat harshly send the message that digital culture is nothing but style while substance goes by the way side to conform to the social hierarchy established.