Adorno's 'The Culture Industry'.

Theodore Adorno’s 1944 book, The Culture Industry looks at the effect the culture industry, and in particular, the effect that films and television are having on society. One of Adorno’s (1944 in Rivkin & Ryan 1998) main arguments is that television is ‘stunting [..] consumers powers of imagination and spontaneity’ (p.1039). This is, that television, is preventing the audience from thinking. In the chapter How to Look at Television, Adorno (1944 in Bernstein 1991) argues that the different genres available to the consumer are predictable, therefore promoting a ‘false-realism’ (p.158). Adorno (1944 in Bernstein 1991) says that the false-realism produced, upholds dominant social ideology as the unsuspecting public are being given hidden meanings which are ‘likely to sink into the spectator’s mind’ (p.165). In other words, Adorno argues that the television and film industry are manipulating the audience into believing the social ideology of a particular state when they think are simply watching a programme on television.

However, Fiske, in his book, Television Culture (1987), disagrees that television serves to promote the dominant social ideology, although, he does agree that the dominant social ideology can be found in television programmes. Fiske (1990 in Rivkin and Ryan 1998), believes that reality is encoded according to the social ideology of a culture and so when any culture produces a television programme, the codes of that culture will be reproduced in the programme. Instead of believing that this in fact promotes those ideals, Fiske (1990 in Rivkin and Ryan 1998), believes that by showing the dominant social ideology on television, people can ‘resist the dominant ideology [..] and make sense of their existence’ (p.1097). In other words, by being shown the social ideals of their culture, people can explain the world around them and make a choice of whether or not to accept, and go along with the dominant ideology.

Whilst Adorno and Fiske both agree that television presents ideological views, their evaluations of why this is the case are at opposite ends of the scale. I personally feel that Fiske credits the public with too much intelligence and Adorno not enough. I agree that some people would use popular television programmes to question the ideology that is being presented but there are also many people, who immersed in television programmes for a large amount of their spare time, would, as Adorno suggests, become to expect life in reality to be as it is in television programmes.


References
Adorno, T (1944), The Culture Industry. In Rivkin, J & Ryan, J (eds) (1998). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell: Oxford.

Adorno, T (1944). How to Look at Television. In Bernstein, J. M. (eds) (1991) The Culture Industry. Routledge: New York.

Fiske, J (1990) Television Culture. In Rivkin, J & Ryan, J (eds) (1998). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell: Oxford.