Theme 2: Critical media studies

1.The Age of the Enlightenment began in the late 17^th century. It was a new way of understanding the world by dispelling mysterious rumors and powers with knowledge and facts, empowering the human that earlier had been restricted by fear of the unknown. The human became master of nature, a position prior held by god.

2. A myth is something that helps us try to explain what we don’t know or understand through fictional stories. Enlightenment and science is supposed to dispel myth. For example in China people though a dragon was devouring the sun during solar eclipses. Science has thought us that is not the case, merely the moon passing between the sun and Earth. However, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that science and enlightenment itself has become myth. Instead of exploring the unknown through myth we now claim to do so through a belief in science.

3. My interpretation is that the difference between old and new media is how we consume it. New media is a streamlined process to produce content for a large audience that doesn’t reflect upon the content to any larger degree and has therefore a larger potential to control the masses. This could be any broadcasting media such as radio and TV. The text was written in the 1940s so Internet was unknown to them but as a phenomena it’s a new media. The Internet is still a very interactive media allowing people to  New media also has more of a business approach where money talks and decides what content to produce. Old media is considered media that doesn’t reach as many is of higher quality. It allows the viewer or listener to reflect and use his or her own imagination to a larger extent then new media. I would consider art, books and classical music as old media.

4,5. Culture has been forced to give in to the capitalistic society we live in and become an industry. When culture is being treated as a standardized product to fit a large audience, creativity gets lost on the way an sometimes losses its relevance. Money talks and if you don’t have financial or political backing, your message is not likely to be heard. Those who have the right backing (often only a few) can control and manipulate the masses that aren’t exposed to new ideas anymore, therefore mass deception.

6. I found the content about the culture industry and mass media to be interesting. I agree with the notion that the culture that gets most attention these days are often productions involving big money and are produced with almost the same template. In the 90s there was a lot of boy bands consisting of the same type of characters, singing similar songs and being promoted to the same audience. This was in no way a rare occasion; today we see similar things with shows like Idol. It’s not only music but also movies. Many movies have similar plots where it begins with introducing the character. The character often face some kind of challenge it has to overcome and in the end they usually do. Not very demanding to watch but people still do since it’s what we are being fed. Today we also see a lot more sequels to older movies. In this case, room for creativity and introducing challenging new ideas seems far away.