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Adorno Vs Horkheimer

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Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s essay, The Culture Industry (1944), juxtaposes the words culture and industry to describe a state where cultural forms, such as television, music, and film are no longer creative outlets but industries dominated by commodification and profit. The production of meaning, creation of stories, symbols, and experiences that we use to make sense of the world is an industry or a full profit venture. David Hesmondhalgh’s ideas, in The Culture Industries (2013), differ from Horkheimer and Adorno’s because he offers a more ambivalent approach. Horkheimer and Adorno discuss a solely negative angle, while Hesmondhalgh offers a more mixed point of view. Hesmondhalgh explores the culture industry as a complex system, for …show more content…

How does this happen? Hesmondhalgh suggests, “companies have to compete with each other… and so they attempt to outstrip each other to satisfy audience desires for the shocking, the profane, and the rebellious.” (5) On YouTube there are thousands of videos in the beauty genre alone, and it is so easy for videos to get lost in the sea of other videos. Content creators must generate new, exciting, different content in order to grab audience’s attention. If there were only videos on how to do eyeliner, then every video would be somewhat the same and no one would watch. The most successful YouTubers have to come up with content that is completely unique to their channel. The competition pushes content creators to make videos that are distinct in order to get the most views, likes, and subscribers. What Adorno and Horkheimer discuss as standardized and mass produced products, Hesmondhalgh instead suggests the very opposite – a constant search on how to come up with something new and creative that audiences haven’t seen

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