Objects and media messages interrogate consumers rather than being consumed

Evidence

At the deepest level, another kind of work is at issue here, the work of acculturation, of confrontation, of examination, of the social code, and of the verdict: people go there to find and to select objects - responses to all the questions they may ask themselves; or, rather, they themselves come in response to the functional and directed question that the objects constitute. The objects are no longer commodities: they are no longer even signs whose meaning and message one could decipher and appropriate for oneself, they are tests, they are the ones that interrogate us, and we are summoned to answer them, and the answer is included in the question. Thus all the messages in the media function in a similar fashion: neither information nor communication, but referendum, perpetual test, circular response, verification of the code. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 256

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘referendum, perpetual test, circular response’ model of media connects to Baudrillard’s own theory of polling/simulated democracy, and reverses the Marxist commodity-form analysis. — connects to: The influencer’s real commodity is content produced from objects’ attention, not the objects themselves — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 217; Advertising compels consumers to identify with and demand the products imposed on them — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 98; Storage-unit content makes visible the human precarity beneath commodity alienation — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 253 (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the third-order status of the object as ‘test’ rather than commodity or sign.

Broader Connections

• Advertising compels consumers to identify with and demand the products imposed on them #contradicts (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 98
• The influencer’s real commodity is content produced from objects’ attention, not the objects themselves #expands (0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 217
• Mass media transmit behavioral prescriptions rather than mirror real life #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 240
• Consumers buy culture-industry products knowing they are being manipulated #complicates (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 31
• Storage-unit content makes visible the human precarity beneath commodity alienation #expands (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 253
• Formal balance and impartiality in media mask real dominance of prevailing interpretations #complicates (0.72)
• Media codes suppress self-gratification to bind organisms into social communication #corroborates (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 706