Page 146 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Introduction to Part 2

An important aspect of Part 1’s critical analysis of the media is its
unwillingness to take the media’s content at face value. Rather, past
writers illustrated the subtle (but all the more, not less, powerful for
that) ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) created by the media
in the wider social environment.
Benjamin optimistically explored the decline of aura and the rise of
distraction. He found hope in the qualitative changes that occur in
our experience of mass culture due to the rapid quantitative
increases in its content produced by mechanized technological
reproduction. In Part 2 we develop further the more negative
implications of the socio-technical processes he tried to view posi-
tively. We suggest that contemporary manifestations of the culture
industry require a complete and critical re-evaluation of Benjamin’s
Essay to explore in:
Chapter 6 – the decline in aura in the context of new democra-
tized forms of celebrity.
Chapter 7 – his concept of distraction as revisited in the light of
daytime and Reality TV – Banality TV.
Chapter 8 – the political consequences of the decline of aura and
the rise of distraction.
Kracauer’s terms mass ornament and Ratio provide the basis of a
consistently pessimistic assessment of the rise in mass-media culture
and its alienating cultural properties. The topical examples in Part 2
illustrate the essential accuracy of his early analysis of media culture.
Adorno’s culture industry explains the operational functioning of
the commodified and mechanically reproduced culture explored by
both Benjamin and Kracauer. The culture industry of now incorpo-
rates ‘active’ audience involvement into the inherent structures of its
culture industry products. This provides a powerful rejoinder to the
active audience/cultural populist emphasis upon interpretive activity
as a priori evidence of empowerment. Reality TV, for example,
provides ‘continuous interactive originals’ – which are in fact con-
stant repetitions of the same format merely with new faces. This is a
topical illustration of Adorno’s early analysis of the fake originality of
the culture industry’s products. Adorno’s work is particularly appli-
cable to the themes of Part 2 for the way it provides an early

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