Theme #2 - Post-reflections

This week I was able to attend the seminar, which was great since it gave me some perspective on the text that I read by Horkheimer and Adorno. We first discussed in groups about what we thought was rememberable from the text and what caught our attention. Since I really like the part about mass culture as mass deception I reflected on this within my group. We came to realize that you can actually make many connotations to mass deception (in some way) when talking about the introduction of new mediums.

If we take the personal computer as a start. For example in the new movie "Jobs", essentially about Steve Jobs and how he came to introduce the first, modern, computer for the masses. You can actually see this as something that, at first, didn't really resonate with the market at the time. What do you really want a "Personal computer" for? Who should use it? There were no market and they essentially had to create it themselves, "this product is for You", by converting one person at a time to a customer of this PC, they actually introduced their commitment to this new medium, and in the long run, their dependance on this medium.

If you sell a PC to a person highly dependent on  economic calculations in his daily work, the computer can now do that with ease, instead of using pen and paper. By getting rid of the pen and paper way of working he/she is now dependent on someone else to do his/her work. This is also the reality today in an even more computer dependent society. If you don't have a computer you're part of a really small group who really can't communicate that good with the rest of the world. If you want to, you need to be a part of the group that owns a PC. The same thing can be said in more broad terms if you talk about the "connected" society of today. If you are not connected, you are probably in some way dependent on someone who is. An example was brought up in the seminar to give an example of this. For example old people who are more seldom connected than the younger generation, they are, for example more dependent on this generation to help them with banking tasks since these can often exclusively be made with an online connection.

To connect to mass deception, one can argue that the "deception" in this case is the fact that some big organ has decided that "this is the way we do things now, if you want to be a part of it, this is what you need to do". This can, in my opinion, be interpreted in a way that society did work before this new medium, but someone changed the rules and now demand us to by this product x to continue with this activity. So in a way the deception is to make us believe we really need to do this in order for our lives to work in perfect harmony, but in reality, it is just so that this "organ" can make more money off of us.

This is of course my personal reflection and certainly not the point of view for everyone. But I don believe that Horkheimer and Adorno somewhat gave the impression that mass deception is something to be seen as big player who can control the behavior and needs of the mass. If and how this is done is somewhat subjective to your opinions on said "big player".