Culture industry efficacy operates by exploiting consumers’ ego-weakness.
Evidence
If the culture industry is measured not by its own substance and logic, but by its efficacy, by its position in reality and its explicit pretensions; if the focus of serious concern is with the efficacy to which it always appeals, the potential of its effect becomes twice as weighty. This potential, however, lies in the promotion and exploitation of the ego-weakness to which the powerless members of contemporary society, with its concentration of power, are condemned. Their consciousness is further developed retrogressively. It is no coincidence that cynical American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the level of eleven-year-olds. In doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven-year-olds. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 145
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- The culture industry offers evidence of destinations rather than genuine escape (similarity 0.81)
- Culture industry’s total effect is anti-enlightenment fettering consciousness (similarity 0.80)
- Culture consumed as consumer goods manipulates people rather than liberating them. (similarity 0.80)
- Consumer conformity in culture industry is exploitation dressed as humanitarianism (similarity 0.79)
- The culture industry does not fully determine what consumers think and feel. (similarity 0.79)
- Even modernist art becomes infected by the schema of mass culture. (similarity 0.78)