Mass media’s industrial constraints make author psychology analytically useless

Evidence

Even in the sphere of autonomous art, the idea of projection has been largely overrated. Although the authors’ motivations certainly enter the artifact, they are by no means so all-determining as is often assumed. As soon as an artist has set himself his problem, it obtains some kind of impact of its own; and, in most cases, he has to follow the objective requirements of his product much more than his own urges of expression when he translates his primary conception into reality. To be sure, these objective requirements do not play a decisive role in mass media, which stress the effect on the spectator far beyond any artistic problem. However, the total set-up here tends to limit the chances of the artists’ projections utterly. Those who produce the material follow, often grumblingly, innumerable requirements, rules of thumb, set patterns, and mechanisms of control which by necessity reduce to a minimum the range of any kind of artistic self-expression. The fact that most products of mass media are not produced by one individual but by collective collaboration - as happens to be true with most of the illustrations so far discussed - is only one contributing factor to this generally prevailing condition. To study television shows in terms of the psychology of the authors would almost be tantamount to studying Ford cars in terms of the psychoanalysis of the late Mr Ford. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 230

Categorization

• XREF: The Ford-cars analogy is the methodological move the reader can replicate: the correct unit of analysis is the production system, not the author — directly useful for analyzing modern streaming-influenced television.