Pseudo-realistic crime shows train audiences to read daily life as crime scenarios
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. … 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, 249
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to cultivation theory in media studies (Gerbner) — heavy viewing of crime TV correlates with distorted perceived reality.
- QUESTION: Adorno’s claim that pseudo-realism ‘excludes adequate experience’ proposes a mechanism — could be productively tested against modern serial-killer-chic media saturation.