Advertising-saturated media itself demonstrates the flattening of critical thought.

Evidence

Perhaps the most telling evidence can be obtained by simply looking at television or listening to the AM radio for one consecutive hour for a couple of days, not shutting off the commercials, and now and then switching the station. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 101

Categorization

• SHARE: The self-administering experiment — sit through commercials for an hour and the thesis demonstrates itself — is an oddly practical research method worth passing along.
• CANDY: A movable, quotable research tip: the whole argument proven by listening to AM radio with commercials on.
• XREF: Ties to the attention economics thread: media consumption as the empirical proof of administered thought. — connects to: Repeated slogans sever language from lived experience, linking advertising with totalitarian control. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121; Advertising’s suspicion-inducing logic extends to political propaganda; Advertising-funded media gravitate toward the lowest common denominator, limiting representational change. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 1419 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Ideology ends by being flattened into inert material signifiers in media. #corroborates (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 360
• Advertising-funded media gravitate toward the lowest common denominator, limiting representational change. #expands (0.82) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1419
• Media presence itself becomes the model that precedes and drains meaning from events #expands (0.80) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 187
• Culture that is fully commodified becomes unusable and merges with advertising #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120
• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers #expands (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219
• Media’s pseudo-realism infuses everyday life with meanings that block direct experience #complicates (0.74) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 234