Out of Print: Prosumption and the Triumph of New Media
[Old Books]
Tagged: Adorno
Consuming in a Recession
by bmckernan While at the start of the economic downturn many media outlets were claiming the video game industry to be “recession proof,” recent sales figures seem to indicate that even an industry often characterized as “escapist” seems not to be fully impervious to financial realities. A recent article in the New York Times reports that sales figures for the game industry were down in March from the previous year, leading the article to conclude that the economic downturn may...
Mass Deception and the Watchmen
Over the weekend, The Watchmen grossed approximately 55 million dollars in its opening weekend in the United States. More than sixty years ago, sociologists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that movies no longer need to pretend to be art and are in reality, just businesses made into an ideology in order to justify “the rubbish they deliberately produce.” The recent big budget gates in hard economic times suggests a fresh reading of this classic. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as...
The end of storytelling?
On November 18, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Center for Future Storytelling. One of the center’s primary concerns, according to a recent NY Times article, is to examine whether the “old way” of telling stories is on the decline. By “old way”, the center is apparently referring to stories told with a traditional beginning, middle, and end. Not surprisingly, given that the center is receiving $25 million a year from a film production studio (Plymouth...
Bull Market, Bear Market, Chihuahua Market?
by bmckernan For decades, social scientists interested in studying ideology have been grappling with how to appropriately examine cultural texts. On the one hand, scholars such as Adorno assert that popular texts should be primarily treated as superficial products designed to not only distract audiences but also to deny them critical agency. On the other hand, Gramsci’s conceptualization of ideology views popular culture as one possible method employed by the dominant classes to route potentially destabilizing sentiments into more ideologically...
