Media’s pseudo-realism infuses everyday life with meanings that block direct experience

Evidence

The way the spectator is made to look at apparently everyday items, such as a night-club, and to take as hints of possible crime common settings of his daily life, induces him to look at life itself as though it and its conflicts could generally be understood in such terms. This, convincingly enough, may be the nucleus of truth in the old-fashioned arguments against all kinds of mass media for inciting criminality in the audience. The decisive thing is that this atmosphere of the normality of crime, its presentation in terms of an average expectation based on life situations, is never expressed in so many words but is established by the overwhelming wealth of material. It may affect certain spectator groups more deeply than the overt moral of crime and punishment regularly derived from such shows. What matters is not the importance of crime as a symbolic expression of otherwise uncontrolled sexual or aggressive impulses, but the confusion of this symbolism with a pedantically maintained realism in all matters of direct sense perception. Thus, empirical life becomes infused with a kind of meaning that virtually excludes adequate experience no matter how obstinately the veneer of such ‘realism’ is built up. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 234

Categorization

• SEED: A ready-made essay angle: apply the normality-of-crime mechanism to true-crime podcasts and prestige murder dramas, testing whether the pseudo-realist veneer still blocks adequate experience.
• XREF: connects to: Media act as a genetic code mutating the real into the hyperreal. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 112; Media presence itself becomes the model that precedes and drains meaning from events — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 187; Modern life erodes integrated experience, replacing narration with information and shocks — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 623 (+5 more)