Culture industry
The culture industry, as developed in the writing of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944), suggests that mass-produced cultural products—films, music, magazines—help produce passive audiences and further dominant ideologies. He proposed his theory at a time when radio was new and Hollywood was still in its infancy, but its relevance in the age of digital media that is more commercialized, standardised and algorithmically controlled than ever before is striking.
The core of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim is that cultural products are made like industrial goods: predictable, formulaic, easy to consume. These items don’t promote critical thinking. Instead, they provide a sort of entertainment that keeps people distracted and compliant. And when we consider contemporary media — repetitive TikTok trends, formulaic Netflix programs, algorithmically curated Spotify playlists — their critique seems almost prescient. Culture now is mass-produced and also hyper-personalised, a veritable hall of mirrors in which we are tricked into thinking we’re unique at the same time as our tastes are affronts to the mainstream.
The element of the culture industry’s standardisation. In digital culture, that is expressed through viral forms and algorithmically supported styles. TikTok dances, “day in my life” vlogs and Marvel-style blockbuster plots all adhere to the same formulas because they’ve been proved to work — that’s how they get those clicks. Platforms then incentivize such content, and so creators end up repeating themselves. The result is a cultural ecology that original work cannot survive.
Another would be pseudo-individualisation — the notion that cultural products pretend to be unique and special, while actually being almost identical. Streaming services exemplify this perfectly. Netflix’s tailored recommendations create the illusion that the system ‘knows’ the user, but ultimately what it wants to do is direct viewers toward more of the like-surround-sound content (as opposed to other kinds) that will leave them watching for longer.Message from: WeChatInterest-Based Advertising and Personalised RecommendationsNetflix — Tailored recommendations We are told Netflix. The decision seems subjective, but it is dictated by the marketplace.
But the digital age complicates Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism. Audiences no longer simply consume, but they also create, remix and critique. Memes, fan edits and subcultural communities destabilize the one-way push of the old media system. Yet even participatory culture is subsumed under platform capitalism. User-generated content generates free labour that feeds data and engagement power back into the system. Resistance is folded into the business.
And to a large extent, the culture industry has not vanished; it has transformed. Platforms function like cultural factories—data- and algorithm-driven, with users as laborers. They don’t just generate entertainment; they form desires, values and identities. The concept of the culture industry also reveals that digital culture is not neutral. It is shaped by economic imperatives that determine what we watch, how we talk and what we believe.
The task, it seems to me, is to waft through such an environment critically — to try and revel in digital culture without being swallowed up by it.
⸻
References
• Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum.
• Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013). The Cultural Industries. London: SAGE.
• Fuchs, C. (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: SAGE.
