1. A Critique of Modern Society
The Culture Industry
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.
A Critique of Modern Society

2. Destroys the individual and absorbs it into mass society.
Culture Industry- The industrial/political creation of cultural products (film, radio, print media, etc) in order to subordinate individuals to the will of the capitalist, profit-driven system.
The ‘culture industry’ mass produces and distributes cultural goods to cultivate false psychological needs that can only be met with the products of capitalism.
Destroys the individual and absorbs it into mass society.
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

3. Origins of the Culture Industry
The Frankfurt School
Siegfried Kracauer
The Mass Ornament (1927)
Uniform mass culture is overtaking the unique and individual.
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

4. Impact of Fascism
Mass culture is increasingly being made by industrial and political forces, not the masses.
Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

5. Mass Communication
Designed to reach and appeal to everyone, homogenizes audiences
Rudolph Arnheim
Radio: An Art of Sound (1936)
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

6. Perpetuating the Culture Industry
Political and economic forces have colonized the cultural sphere from above
Culture industry persists in post-WWII America
Adorno and Horkhiemer
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1947)
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

7. Advertising
“The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even thought they see through them.”
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

8. Leisure Theodor Adorno
Free Time (1977)
Free time, supposedly the opposite of unfree work time, is still bound by the same principles of consumption and domination
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

9. Adding Empirical Analysis
Propaganda
Narcotizing Dysfunction
Sedation of audiences through saturation to perpetuate the existing capitalist system
Merton and Lazersfeldt
Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Action (1948)

10. Study of the Culture Industry in History
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.
Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902)

11. All’s Fair at the Fair (1938)
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.
All’s Fair at the Fair (1938)

12. Alison Landsberg Prosthetic Memory (2004)
Created by Tyler Stump, Please do not reproduce without permission.

13. Created by Tyler Stump, 2013. Please do not reproduce without permission.