Gabe Snyder Blog 2 (Reading of my own choosing) - Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry"

 It's been a while since I've read this, as it was required for my History of Literary Criticism class in the fall semester of 2023 with Dr. Jason Carney (lovely professor, difficult but very informative class). This piece was about something that I've been thinking about for a while, which is the dissemination of mass culture. For example, in the last ten years, it feels like every major movie has been just another addition to a massive franchise or a sequel or a reboot. Does this take out the artistic merit out of all of these films? Not at all. But when of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2023, 8 of which are either sequels or additions to a franchise, it feels demoralizing to the smaller, independent films that are just trying to gain some traction. Additionally, all of these high grossing movies plague social media (which is another aspect of mass culture that Adorno and Horkheimer probably did not predict) with references, jokes, memes, etc. And this isn't indicative of all culture and whatnot, nor does it mean that things were inherently better in the past. I'm just using the modern movie industry as an example. However, it feels like through advertisements, social media, and marketing, we are being told to buy and consume certain things, which gets exhausting. Terribly exhausting. And this is no new phenomenon, as I've alluded to above, as this chapter of writing in which I am writing a blog about was published in 1947. However, as time has progressed and screens have seemingly become extensions of ourselves, so have advertisements and the mass culture we are sold.