Mix It Up

In this chapter in Mix It Up, Grazian explains in depth the foundations of the critical approach. I do agree with Adorno and Horkheimer when they observe that movies and radio are just a business that is “made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce.” I think this is true because when movies become popular it seems directors are only happy because of the money that is made, not because of anything else. An example of this happening now is the reopening of Avatar in theaters. The directors really didn’t need to do this because the movie is already out on DVD but in order to make more money they opened it out in theaters again.

I thought it was interesting reading about the power of the culture industries such as: Coca Cola, Microsoft, Nokia, Google and so on. I never knew about the seven parent companies that basically act as monopolies and produce and distribute most of the world’s mass-marketed items. I also read that there really isn’t new ideas because once someone establishes a popular marketed item there are many knock-offs from the original product. There aren’t many original ideas out there in food or media because most have been done or it can be that no one wants to try a new idea when there are already so many more popular and lucrative products out there.

I also thought it was interesting that back in 2000 women noticed the inequality between “scrubby girls” and “attractive girls”. I found this interesting because that’s a problem that’s happening now in society with women being fired for being too “hot”. So it’s apparent that this inequality is still occurring. Also, media does encourage social inequality by reinforcing negative stereotypes for minorities and women. I’m actually writing my Senior Seminar about the patterns of the lack of representation of minorities in the media. It’s also true that there are unwrittem rules such as: “last season’s fashions are so last season”, “shopping completes us” and so on....