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Customisation as the Antidote to Mass Deception.
By Adam Montandon December 2002
Customisation as the Antidote to Mass Deception.
The recent popularity of digital technologies in the western world is having previously unforeseen effects on the consumption of mass culture. Digital technologies accelerate the pace at which the masses can now both consume and produce culture, becoming a catalyst for what Adorno and Horkheimer call "mass deception", in their 1944 paper The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. However Digital technologies bring about new personalised control that was not previously possible with traditional media such as film, photography or print, and it is these personalised controls that allow the masses to subvert mass deception. The main purpose of this essay, therefore, is to investigate the uses of customisation through digital technology to counter the effects of mass deception.
The world in which Adorno and Horkheimer outlined in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception is far removed from the context we experience today in western developed society. Culture was being produced with almost Ford-like mass production techniques, audiences were assaulted with a barrage of sameness and repetitively produced culture. The masses were taught how to consume this formulaic, standardised culture, feeding the industry and embracing its circular nature of “manipulation and retroactive need” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of the media was bleak. Organised systems were in place to reinforce the masses view of culture, “It turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). There was no diversity, only formulaic mass production of mass culture. Culture was created with production line efficiency, as it moved from art to “just business”. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
Alvin Toffler, an American, who believed in a future of diversity and choice warned:
"Most writers predict ... a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer-creatures, surrounded by standardised goods, educated in standardised schools, fed a diet of standardised mass culture and forced to adopt standardised styles of life" (Toffler, 1974:263).
He claimed that those with views similar to Adorno and Horkheimer “spawned a generation of future-haters and technophobes” (Toffler, 1974:263) who believed that man would become acted upon rather than active in response to the culture industry’s mass deception of the public.
However, developments in the use of digital technologies, especially in the areas of customisation and personalisation, form a position that counters Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of mass deception. In this essay I will outline how the digital customisation of personal data and the digital customisation of our experience of the culture industry break down the traditional concepts of mass deception. I will also discuss how the shift of power of the culture industry away from the top down organisations that Adorno and Horkheimer describe, and into the hands of the digitally empowered individual.
In this digital age, humans are increasingly becoming more diverse and segmented in their market tastes, to a degree never seen before. Adorno and Horkheimer first perceived that "once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) however they could not have foreseen the extreme number of deviations from the norm we have in society today. In the face of mass culture, humans move to micro-culture; moving away from classic stereotypes to true individuals. “There is no longer a single, uniform, mass consumer market, but an aggregation of transient mini-markets.” (Ridderstrale and Nordstrom, 2001:168)
Digital technologies have brought about paradigm shifts that have drastically affected the world of business, and therefore have also drastically changed the business of the culture industry. One key reason for the changes is how consumers are understood in the digital age.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of creating mass produced goods for targeted mass consumption is subject to great changes through digital technology.
“The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule for complete quantification. Everybody must behave ( as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green and blue areas.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
However, now we see digital technologies helping to increase the variety of statistics on research charts. Digital technology allows us to be clearly defined to such an extent that we may become individuals, instead of masses. In 1944 it was possible to group people by large groups, such as gender, income level, race, age, or geography, wide groups of colours on the research chart. Now, with digital data collection technologies we can specify so much more about us. White people that live as black [Figure 1], black people that live as white [Figure 2], males that live as females, and old that live as young. Digital preferences, options and customisations widen the degree to which we develop our own trajectory along lines of abstraction from anything resembling a mass market. We become increasingly fragmented as digital technologies break down concepts such as geography, gender, identity or group. As a result industries are discovering wide variations in consumer wants and are adapting their production lines to accommodate them. Instead of Adorno and Horkheimer’s homogenised view of the industry, we are now seeing overchoice, a different product for everyone.
If there is no mass consumer there can be no mass production.
The view presented by Alvin Toffler emphasises this: "We are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art, education and mass culture as well." (Toffler, 1974:270). This is represented in the overchoice of products and culture we consume. In Norway, with a population of 4.5 million, you can choose from 200 different newspapers, 100 weekly magazines and 20 TV channels (Geelmuyden & Kiese Internal research material, 1997). The popular children’s toy and cultural icon ‘Barbie’ now comes with 15,000 combinations (The Times, 1998).
The reason for this overchoice is clear; due to digital technologies diversity costs no more than uniformity. "Anything you can digitise you can customise" says Joseph Pine, author of Mass Customization (Fortune, 1998).
The world in which "No independent thinking must be expected from the audience"(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) is long gone. In the face of so much variety, consumers find refuge in building their own personality profiles, becoming their own unique dot on the research statistics graph to make sure they receive only the products they desire. By far the most advanced example of this is the current trend in customisable websites. ‘My Yahoo’ [Figure 3] allows each user to choose the colour, layout and content of a website to meet the user’s needs. Features include unique calendars, e-mail, news from subjects the user is interested in, the user’s favourite comic strip, personal horoscope, sports news about their favourite team. All of a sudden we are receiving OUR media, not mass media. We have created our own newspaper, our own world view.
Some of the most popular uses for digital technologies are those that transform traditional ‘push’ techniques (a ‘push’ technique is used to force or push a message towards the audience, rather like a loudspeaker, so that none can easily avoid its message) that Adorno and Horkheimer describe as "Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye." (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) into ‘pull’ techniques (a ‘pull’ technique is used to describe a message that a user requests, such as searching for data on the web). Instead of having culture forced upon us, we now ask for our own culture. We demand what we want, when we want it, and nothing of what we don’t want. "We are moving towards increasingly perfected markets. The result is total competition. In the surplus society the customer is more than a king: the customer is the mother of all dictators."(Ridderstrale and Nordstrom, 2001:81). In the customisable digital world the consumer calls the shots. Digital technologies have removed mass consumption from the equation.
One of the most striking examples of this is the website www.Hotmail.com [Figure 4]. Hotmail is a unique customised newspaper, masquerading as a web based e-mail client. Users of hotmail are given a unique address to which other people can send information. Logging on to hotmail then presents us with a unique newspaper where the reports are not written by journalists, but by our friends and family, our business associates, and by people we trust. No two hotmail experiences are the same. Everybody receives their own unique news from their own unique sources, and also has the opportunity to reply to their news by e-mailing others, in turn, building up other users personal news pages.
Recently, the hotmail phenomenon has been injured by attempts to re-introduce mass culture and mass markets to its users. Through ‘spam’ (unwanted and unsolicited e-mail news that is often distributed to millions of people simultaneously) users are re-introduced to the experience of being treated as a mass audience, rather than an individual. The reaction to this is to create ‘invite only’ systems to the individuals hotmail account, so that only those who the individual approves may have their news placed on their site. Here we see the stark contrast between Adorno and Horkheimer’s view that "The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). Now, the culture industry must pass through our own filters. Due to the flexibility of digital filtering technology we can quickly change our minds about what we want or do not want. We can become black one day and white the next; seamlessly moving through an infinite number of diverse groups and sub-groups; making our own choices and sub-choices about the things we consume.
In Adorno’s The Culture Industry Reconsidered, Adorno outlines his concern for minimal change within the culture industry: "Eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little." (Adorno, 1991). Digital technologies are increasingly giving us the power to entirely re-build the skeleton framework behind our own personal culture industry. Recently, web based technologies such as Blogger (www.Blogger.com) a free, easy to use web publishing service, allows any person from any internet enabled device (not just computers, but mobile phones, PDAs and other devices) to instantly publish their thoughts, ideas or news [Figure 5]. A recent example of this was web-logs like Blogger empowering women in Iran to speak publicly about social and political issues that may have been considered taboo in their country (Hermida, 2002). By creating their own unique media these women are challenging the authority of traditional culture and media views of them. This represents an important change in Iranian society’s culture industry; by subverting the stranglehold of mass culture and mass deception, these women have used digital technologies to work towards gaining recognition for themselves as unique individuals despite the power of Islamic mass culture.
This goes strongly against the view that:
"The culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan.“ (Adorno, 1991).
Instead of succumbing to mass production, we each have the ability to create unique culture by ourselves, targeted at ourselves. In fact, one of the key uses of Blogger is creating diaries. Diaries are traditionally intrapersonal communication, communication with the self, often deeply personal and intended never to be read by anyone other than the author. Published on the web for the entire world to consume at their own will, the web-log diary may be viewed by hundreds of other visitors (if they so chose), or perhaps only by the author. We can now see a community of individuals that create individual media and cultural experiences for themselves, rather than Adorno and Horkheimer’s perceptions:
"One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
Digital technology really has shifted the one-to-many distribution technique and fragmented it into a series of one-to-one communications.
Adorno and Horkheimer do raise an important point that becomes even more relevant in the digital society that "consumption may serve to express a deep awareness of the damage that capitalism is inflicting upon consumers" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). So in response to this, many consumers are developing strategies to turn the system on its head, editing in real-time their experience of culture consumption by the customised preferences we make. A current leading digital technology that is allowing individuals to control their experience is what is knows as “ad-blocking” software, such as AdFree. This software automatically and transparently removes parts of information from web pages that the individual pre-defines through customisation of the software. The most common use for this is the removal of any kind of advertising that may appear on a website, giving an entirely different experience compared to the commercial version the website designers may have planned. Now the individual takes it on themselves to decide what they shall or shall not see, what they shall or shall not do, and what sophisticated strategies they should take to further customise their experience. This software has become so popular that it has spread to other mass media such as television. The use of a computerised hard-disk based digital video recorder allows the user to create (again via customised preferences) their own experience of television, rather than the experience provided by the broadcasters. One such system is called Tivo (www.tivo.com). One key feature of Tivo is the option to remove all adverts from the experience, so an hour long television program with adverts (as intended by the broadcasters) becomes a 45 minute program without adverts (as intended by the individual). Because of the digital nature of this new experience, the individual can even set their own unique schedule, watching the programs when they choose, rather than when the broadcaster dictates. This allows individuals to encounter traditional mass communication in an unconventional way, and it illustrates a power shift away from the broadcaster towards the user’s unique experience.
Digital technology has even helped us customise the Hollywood film experience that Adorno and Horkheimer hold as strong examples of mass deception that “Leaves no room for imagination or reflection.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). Recent advances in digital video technology, namely DVD players, allow individuals to customise the mass media of film digitally in their own home. Now the individual can choose from a variety of languages, subtitles and soundtracks, can change the camera angle of any scene, can choose alternate plot points, and can even edit in real-time their movie viewing experience. This moves the power away from the traditional Hollywood producer “There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) and into the hands of the individual. We now see technology empowering the audience who was previously “unable to respond within the structure of the film.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
As technology improves in areas of media production, most notably film, the ‘trickle down’ rate of new technology from Hollywood studio to the home has increased at an alarming rate. Apple Computers have recently championed the fact that for a little over £2000 it is possible to use a digital computer and a digital video camera to film, create and edit your own film productions and create unique DVDs with the same digital precision as a Hollywood studio (www.apple.com/imovie). Now digital technologies give us the opportunity to enact on our own dissatisfaction with the culture industry and begin creating our own productions, free from the formulaic entrapment of the culture industry. No longer can it be said that “The machine rotates on the same spot." (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) as variation and diversity bring about a new species of prosumers consumers who consume their own productions.
To conclude, it is highly evident in western society that digital technologies are empowering the masses with the choice of customisation, thus displacing them from the status of a "resistant public" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) to become interactive participants. They can, if they so wish, mediate their own experiences, building on their personal beliefs and preferences, rather than succumbing to a mass deception. Although Adorno and Horkheimer recognise the culture industry’s classification of sub-groups of the public, they could not have anticipated the vast number of ways in which an individual can classify himself, thus shifting the culture industry’s concept of mass audiences towards audiences of one. We now receive our personalised and unique individual view of enlightenment, and whilst we still may be prone to deception it is on a micro-level, and is reduced to a tiny ripple in an ocean of mass perception.
Illustrations:
[Figure 1]
Picture from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1949098.stm
[Figure 2]
Picture from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2481467.stm
[Figure 3]
Example of a fully customised news page on http://my.yahoo.com (Screenshot taken on 11 December 2002)
[Figure 4]
Example of a unique page available to an exclusive user on www.hotmail.com (Screenshot taken on 11 December 2002)
[Figure 5]
An example of a web log from www.blogger.com showing personal customised web pages edited by the user. (Screenshot taken on 10 December 2002)
References and Bibliography
Books:
Toffler, A. (1974) Future Shock. New York: Random House.
Ridderstrale, J., Nordstrom K. (2001) Funky Business London: Bookhouse.
Publications:
Geelmuyden & Kiese Internal research material. (1997) [no publication details given]
The Times, 11 November 1998
Fortune, 28 September 1998.
Websites:
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception from Dialectic of Enlightenment.
[on-line] (1944), http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno.htm
Date accessed: 11. December 2002.
My Yahoo. [on-line] http://my.yahoo.com/ Date accessed: 11 December 2002.
Adorno, T. Culture Industry Reconsidered. [on-line] (1991), http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~cmnF93/culture_reconsidered.txt Date accessed: 11 October 2002.
Hotmail. [on-line] http://www.hotmail.com Date accessed: 11 December 2002.
Blogger. [on-line] http://www.blogger.com Date accessed: 11 December 2002
Hermida, A. Web gives a voice to Iranian women. [on-line] (2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2044802.stm date accessed: 11 December 2002
Foley, M. AdFree3.1. [on-line] (2002), http://lucille.dhs.org/adfree.html Date accessed: 18 November 2002.
Tivo. [On-line] (2002), http://www.tivo.com Date Accessed: 18 November 2002
Apple Computer Inc, iMovie2 [on-line] (2002), http://www.apple.com/imovie/ Date accessed: 18 November 2002.
Other reading:
Friesen, N. Computers and the Self: a Dialectic of Enlightenment? [on-line] (1999), http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/articles/disted/adornotech.cfm Date accessed: 13 October 2002
Meulen, S.Adorno’ legacy [on-line] (1998), http://www.thing.net/eyebeam/msg00408.html Date accessed: 13 October 2002
Information on Adorno & Horkheimer [on-line]
http://fac-staff.seattleu.edu/lotzc/teaching/seattle/classes/adorno_horkheimer.html Date accessed: 13 October 2002
Adorno, T. Negative Dialectics [on-line] (1966), http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno1.htm Date accessed: 25 November 2002
Notes on Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. [on-line] http://www.arasite.org/adhkdofe.htm Date accessed: 25 November 2002
By Adam Montandon December 2002
Customisation as the Antidote to Mass Deception.
The recent popularity of digital technologies in the western world is having previously unforeseen effects on the consumption of mass culture. Digital technologies accelerate the pace at which the masses can now both consume and produce culture, becoming a catalyst for what Adorno and Horkheimer call "mass deception", in their 1944 paper The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. However Digital technologies bring about new personalised control that was not previously possible with traditional media such as film, photography or print, and it is these personalised controls that allow the masses to subvert mass deception. The main purpose of this essay, therefore, is to investigate the uses of customisation through digital technology to counter the effects of mass deception.
The world in which Adorno and Horkheimer outlined in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception is far removed from the context we experience today in western developed society. Culture was being produced with almost Ford-like mass production techniques, audiences were assaulted with a barrage of sameness and repetitively produced culture. The masses were taught how to consume this formulaic, standardised culture, feeding the industry and embracing its circular nature of “manipulation and retroactive need” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of the media was bleak. Organised systems were in place to reinforce the masses view of culture, “It turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). There was no diversity, only formulaic mass production of mass culture. Culture was created with production line efficiency, as it moved from art to “just business”. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
Alvin Toffler, an American, who believed in a future of diversity and choice warned:
"Most writers predict ... a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer-creatures, surrounded by standardised goods, educated in standardised schools, fed a diet of standardised mass culture and forced to adopt standardised styles of life" (Toffler, 1974:263).
He claimed that those with views similar to Adorno and Horkheimer “spawned a generation of future-haters and technophobes” (Toffler, 1974:263) who believed that man would become acted upon rather than active in response to the culture industry’s mass deception of the public.
However, developments in the use of digital technologies, especially in the areas of customisation and personalisation, form a position that counters Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of mass deception. In this essay I will outline how the digital customisation of personal data and the digital customisation of our experience of the culture industry break down the traditional concepts of mass deception. I will also discuss how the shift of power of the culture industry away from the top down organisations that Adorno and Horkheimer describe, and into the hands of the digitally empowered individual.
In this digital age, humans are increasingly becoming more diverse and segmented in their market tastes, to a degree never seen before. Adorno and Horkheimer first perceived that "once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) however they could not have foreseen the extreme number of deviations from the norm we have in society today. In the face of mass culture, humans move to micro-culture; moving away from classic stereotypes to true individuals. “There is no longer a single, uniform, mass consumer market, but an aggregation of transient mini-markets.” (Ridderstrale and Nordstrom, 2001:168)
Digital technologies have brought about paradigm shifts that have drastically affected the world of business, and therefore have also drastically changed the business of the culture industry. One key reason for the changes is how consumers are understood in the digital age.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of creating mass produced goods for targeted mass consumption is subject to great changes through digital technology.
“The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule for complete quantification. Everybody must behave ( as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green and blue areas.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
However, now we see digital technologies helping to increase the variety of statistics on research charts. Digital technology allows us to be clearly defined to such an extent that we may become individuals, instead of masses. In 1944 it was possible to group people by large groups, such as gender, income level, race, age, or geography, wide groups of colours on the research chart. Now, with digital data collection technologies we can specify so much more about us. White people that live as black [Figure 1], black people that live as white [Figure 2], males that live as females, and old that live as young. Digital preferences, options and customisations widen the degree to which we develop our own trajectory along lines of abstraction from anything resembling a mass market. We become increasingly fragmented as digital technologies break down concepts such as geography, gender, identity or group. As a result industries are discovering wide variations in consumer wants and are adapting their production lines to accommodate them. Instead of Adorno and Horkheimer’s homogenised view of the industry, we are now seeing overchoice, a different product for everyone.
If there is no mass consumer there can be no mass production.
The view presented by Alvin Toffler emphasises this: "We are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art, education and mass culture as well." (Toffler, 1974:270). This is represented in the overchoice of products and culture we consume. In Norway, with a population of 4.5 million, you can choose from 200 different newspapers, 100 weekly magazines and 20 TV channels (Geelmuyden & Kiese Internal research material, 1997). The popular children’s toy and cultural icon ‘Barbie’ now comes with 15,000 combinations (The Times, 1998).
The reason for this overchoice is clear; due to digital technologies diversity costs no more than uniformity. "Anything you can digitise you can customise" says Joseph Pine, author of Mass Customization (Fortune, 1998).
The world in which "No independent thinking must be expected from the audience"(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) is long gone. In the face of so much variety, consumers find refuge in building their own personality profiles, becoming their own unique dot on the research statistics graph to make sure they receive only the products they desire. By far the most advanced example of this is the current trend in customisable websites. ‘My Yahoo’ [Figure 3] allows each user to choose the colour, layout and content of a website to meet the user’s needs. Features include unique calendars, e-mail, news from subjects the user is interested in, the user’s favourite comic strip, personal horoscope, sports news about their favourite team. All of a sudden we are receiving OUR media, not mass media. We have created our own newspaper, our own world view.
Some of the most popular uses for digital technologies are those that transform traditional ‘push’ techniques (a ‘push’ technique is used to force or push a message towards the audience, rather like a loudspeaker, so that none can easily avoid its message) that Adorno and Horkheimer describe as "Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye." (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) into ‘pull’ techniques (a ‘pull’ technique is used to describe a message that a user requests, such as searching for data on the web). Instead of having culture forced upon us, we now ask for our own culture. We demand what we want, when we want it, and nothing of what we don’t want. "We are moving towards increasingly perfected markets. The result is total competition. In the surplus society the customer is more than a king: the customer is the mother of all dictators."(Ridderstrale and Nordstrom, 2001:81). In the customisable digital world the consumer calls the shots. Digital technologies have removed mass consumption from the equation.
One of the most striking examples of this is the website www.Hotmail.com [Figure 4]. Hotmail is a unique customised newspaper, masquerading as a web based e-mail client. Users of hotmail are given a unique address to which other people can send information. Logging on to hotmail then presents us with a unique newspaper where the reports are not written by journalists, but by our friends and family, our business associates, and by people we trust. No two hotmail experiences are the same. Everybody receives their own unique news from their own unique sources, and also has the opportunity to reply to their news by e-mailing others, in turn, building up other users personal news pages.
Recently, the hotmail phenomenon has been injured by attempts to re-introduce mass culture and mass markets to its users. Through ‘spam’ (unwanted and unsolicited e-mail news that is often distributed to millions of people simultaneously) users are re-introduced to the experience of being treated as a mass audience, rather than an individual. The reaction to this is to create ‘invite only’ systems to the individuals hotmail account, so that only those who the individual approves may have their news placed on their site. Here we see the stark contrast between Adorno and Horkheimer’s view that "The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). Now, the culture industry must pass through our own filters. Due to the flexibility of digital filtering technology we can quickly change our minds about what we want or do not want. We can become black one day and white the next; seamlessly moving through an infinite number of diverse groups and sub-groups; making our own choices and sub-choices about the things we consume.
In Adorno’s The Culture Industry Reconsidered, Adorno outlines his concern for minimal change within the culture industry: "Eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little." (Adorno, 1991). Digital technologies are increasingly giving us the power to entirely re-build the skeleton framework behind our own personal culture industry. Recently, web based technologies such as Blogger (www.Blogger.com) a free, easy to use web publishing service, allows any person from any internet enabled device (not just computers, but mobile phones, PDAs and other devices) to instantly publish their thoughts, ideas or news [Figure 5]. A recent example of this was web-logs like Blogger empowering women in Iran to speak publicly about social and political issues that may have been considered taboo in their country (Hermida, 2002). By creating their own unique media these women are challenging the authority of traditional culture and media views of them. This represents an important change in Iranian society’s culture industry; by subverting the stranglehold of mass culture and mass deception, these women have used digital technologies to work towards gaining recognition for themselves as unique individuals despite the power of Islamic mass culture.
This goes strongly against the view that:
"The culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan.“ (Adorno, 1991).
Instead of succumbing to mass production, we each have the ability to create unique culture by ourselves, targeted at ourselves. In fact, one of the key uses of Blogger is creating diaries. Diaries are traditionally intrapersonal communication, communication with the self, often deeply personal and intended never to be read by anyone other than the author. Published on the web for the entire world to consume at their own will, the web-log diary may be viewed by hundreds of other visitors (if they so chose), or perhaps only by the author. We can now see a community of individuals that create individual media and cultural experiences for themselves, rather than Adorno and Horkheimer’s perceptions:
"One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
Digital technology really has shifted the one-to-many distribution technique and fragmented it into a series of one-to-one communications.
Adorno and Horkheimer do raise an important point that becomes even more relevant in the digital society that "consumption may serve to express a deep awareness of the damage that capitalism is inflicting upon consumers" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). So in response to this, many consumers are developing strategies to turn the system on its head, editing in real-time their experience of culture consumption by the customised preferences we make. A current leading digital technology that is allowing individuals to control their experience is what is knows as “ad-blocking” software, such as AdFree. This software automatically and transparently removes parts of information from web pages that the individual pre-defines through customisation of the software. The most common use for this is the removal of any kind of advertising that may appear on a website, giving an entirely different experience compared to the commercial version the website designers may have planned. Now the individual takes it on themselves to decide what they shall or shall not see, what they shall or shall not do, and what sophisticated strategies they should take to further customise their experience. This software has become so popular that it has spread to other mass media such as television. The use of a computerised hard-disk based digital video recorder allows the user to create (again via customised preferences) their own experience of television, rather than the experience provided by the broadcasters. One such system is called Tivo (www.tivo.com). One key feature of Tivo is the option to remove all adverts from the experience, so an hour long television program with adverts (as intended by the broadcasters) becomes a 45 minute program without adverts (as intended by the individual). Because of the digital nature of this new experience, the individual can even set their own unique schedule, watching the programs when they choose, rather than when the broadcaster dictates. This allows individuals to encounter traditional mass communication in an unconventional way, and it illustrates a power shift away from the broadcaster towards the user’s unique experience.
Digital technology has even helped us customise the Hollywood film experience that Adorno and Horkheimer hold as strong examples of mass deception that “Leaves no room for imagination or reflection.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). Recent advances in digital video technology, namely DVD players, allow individuals to customise the mass media of film digitally in their own home. Now the individual can choose from a variety of languages, subtitles and soundtracks, can change the camera angle of any scene, can choose alternate plot points, and can even edit in real-time their movie viewing experience. This moves the power away from the traditional Hollywood producer “There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) and into the hands of the individual. We now see technology empowering the audience who was previously “unable to respond within the structure of the film.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).
As technology improves in areas of media production, most notably film, the ‘trickle down’ rate of new technology from Hollywood studio to the home has increased at an alarming rate. Apple Computers have recently championed the fact that for a little over £2000 it is possible to use a digital computer and a digital video camera to film, create and edit your own film productions and create unique DVDs with the same digital precision as a Hollywood studio (www.apple.com/imovie). Now digital technologies give us the opportunity to enact on our own dissatisfaction with the culture industry and begin creating our own productions, free from the formulaic entrapment of the culture industry. No longer can it be said that “The machine rotates on the same spot." (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) as variation and diversity bring about a new species of prosumers consumers who consume their own productions.
To conclude, it is highly evident in western society that digital technologies are empowering the masses with the choice of customisation, thus displacing them from the status of a "resistant public" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) to become interactive participants. They can, if they so wish, mediate their own experiences, building on their personal beliefs and preferences, rather than succumbing to a mass deception. Although Adorno and Horkheimer recognise the culture industry’s classification of sub-groups of the public, they could not have anticipated the vast number of ways in which an individual can classify himself, thus shifting the culture industry’s concept of mass audiences towards audiences of one. We now receive our personalised and unique individual view of enlightenment, and whilst we still may be prone to deception it is on a micro-level, and is reduced to a tiny ripple in an ocean of mass perception.
Illustrations:
[Figure 1]
Picture from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1949098.stm
[Figure 2]
Picture from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2481467.stm
[Figure 3]
Example of a fully customised news page on http://my.yahoo.com (Screenshot taken on 11 December 2002)
[Figure 4]
Example of a unique page available to an exclusive user on www.hotmail.com (Screenshot taken on 11 December 2002)
[Figure 5]
An example of a web log from www.blogger.com showing personal customised web pages edited by the user. (Screenshot taken on 10 December 2002)
References and Bibliography
Books:
Toffler, A. (1974) Future Shock. New York: Random House.
Ridderstrale, J., Nordstrom K. (2001) Funky Business London: Bookhouse.
Publications:
Geelmuyden & Kiese Internal research material. (1997) [no publication details given]
The Times, 11 November 1998
Fortune, 28 September 1998.
Websites:
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception from Dialectic of Enlightenment.
[on-line] (1944), http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno.htm
Date accessed: 11. December 2002.
My Yahoo. [on-line] http://my.yahoo.com/ Date accessed: 11 December 2002.
Adorno, T. Culture Industry Reconsidered. [on-line] (1991), http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~cmnF93/culture_reconsidered.txt Date accessed: 11 October 2002.
Hotmail. [on-line] http://www.hotmail.com Date accessed: 11 December 2002.
Blogger. [on-line] http://www.blogger.com Date accessed: 11 December 2002
Hermida, A. Web gives a voice to Iranian women. [on-line] (2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2044802.stm date accessed: 11 December 2002
Foley, M. AdFree3.1. [on-line] (2002), http://lucille.dhs.org/adfree.html Date accessed: 18 November 2002.
Tivo. [On-line] (2002), http://www.tivo.com Date Accessed: 18 November 2002
Apple Computer Inc, iMovie2 [on-line] (2002), http://www.apple.com/imovie/ Date accessed: 18 November 2002.
Other reading:
Friesen, N. Computers and the Self: a Dialectic of Enlightenment? [on-line] (1999), http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/articles/disted/adornotech.cfm Date accessed: 13 October 2002
Meulen, S.
Information on Adorno & Horkheimer [on-line]
http://fac-staff.seattleu.edu/lotzc/teaching/seattle/classes/adorno_horkheimer.html Date accessed: 13 October 2002
Adorno, T. Negative Dialectics [on-line] (1966), http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno1.htm Date accessed: 25 November 2002
Notes on Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. [on-line] http://www.arasite.org/adhkdofe.htm Date accessed: 25 November 2002
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