Mass information systems destroy the aesthetic experience they claim to promote

Evidence

Mass culture is a system of signals that signals itself. The millions who belong to the underclasses formerly excluded from the enjoyment of cultural goods but now ensnared provide a welcome pretext for this new orientation towards information. But this grandiose system of elucidation, transmission and rapid familiarization in the sudden shock of imposition destroys everything that the ideology of cultural products claims to promote so widely. The jokes which were made in the symptomatic programme called ‘Information Please’ not only express the truth about the system of information but also the truth about what the information is about. Information emphatically promotes the decay of the aesthetic image. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 128

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ and the idea of informational chatter as ambient noise from the silence material in this library. — connects to: Mechanical reproduction of beauty destroys the unconscious idolatry that made beauty vital; The masses’ enthusiastic participation destroys the cultural apparatus that courted them. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 220; Mass reproduction’s erosion of the aura destroys experience rooted in tradition. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 629 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘Information Please’ as a 1940s proto-Quiz/Jeopardy phenomenon — the essay explores how knowing-about replaces experiencing as a mass cultural mode, directly relevant to modern trivia and content-farming.

Related

• The masses’ enthusiastic participation destroys the cultural apparatus that courted them. (similarity 0.79)
• Mass culture replaces genuine art experience with identification and evaluation (similarity 0.78)