Week 13 new media: determining or determined? 1

1.5.5 the return of the Frankfurt school critique in the popularisation of new media & conclusion

Why the Frankfurt School?
- Produced first critical perspectives on mass media and popular
- Theories & methods - important aspect of the development of the study of popular culture

The ‘culture industry’, the end of democratic participation and critical distance the Frankfurt School?
- mass media & popular culture served to maintain existing social authority & manipulate mass audience into obedience trivialization, commercialization and centralization of culture and communications from For Frankfurt School point of view.
- Fascism and Stalinism which demonstrated the power of mass harnessed to totalitarianism.
trivializing the content of communication or political indoctrination which inculcate people with capitalism and standardize movie, music and so on, they were seen as threats to democracy and the informed critical participation of the masses in cultural and social life.

The Brechtian avant-garde and lost opportunities
-Bertolt Brecht
The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication
It is media for Brecht that not only the tools of technology but also the way of reconstruction which help understand social recognition.
-Walter Benjamin
Benjamin ideas mean much to modern society.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is his masterpiece in 1926.
Benjamin roots his argument in noticing some of the distinctive characteristics of these media and he had optimistic estimations of new media

I explain Walter Benjamin‘s aspect of mass media between Frankfurt school and Benjamin discover an important different. Frankfurt school assumed a critical attitude toward mass culture on the other hand, Benjamin recognized in the affirmative.
the disavowal of the history of new media thus appears as an ideological sleight of hand that recruits us to their essential value but fails to help us understand what is happening around us.