The mass media culture of the 20th Century has been killed by the internet, as the so-called intellectuals of our day tend to proclaim.
Possibly, and yet the internet binds us in multiple new prisons of our choosing, making it easy to identify us as consumers in ready-made subdivided categories to the marketers who have long since created/controlled our desires and dreams in the garish material world of modern capitalism.
No wonder advertising rates are down. The products no longer are required to hunt for us. We are captured, and the tags identifying us are clearly marked on each cage.
Caught in an invisible web, which differs from the 1940s only in that today we are connected by the newly improved media technology as "users", more tightly bound than ever, and thus less likely than ever to create anything new or different to challenge the hard wired totalitarianism inherent in the infoboobtubez era.
The internet revolutionized global capitalism and yet all we hear is the forever delusional attempt to convince ourselves that the internet is a tool for human freedom, when in fact the internet simply adds a more efficient, invisible lock on the jail cell of mass conformity than radio TV or movies ever could, albeit through sub categorization of the mass into non-dialectically-minded-conformists-within-the-subgroup.
All brought to us in living colour within the safety of our delusions by the Global Infotainment Industry.
Adorno/Horkheimer from 1944:
As late as Schönberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter. What Dadaists and Expressionists called the untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. 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 thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too.
However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity.
In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralised. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematisation and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialised, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.
Adorno/Horkheimer: "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception".
Prince, yesterday, The Daily Mirror:
Prince has banned both YouTube and iTunes from using his music, calling the web obsolete. "The Internet's like MTV", he told the Mirror. "At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."
