flitting on fiction

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

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Source: most of one chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998;
proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.

Just finished reading that article … required for class tomorrow…I’m thinking there might be another article as well; shall check that shortly …

Anyway … it was, if nothing else, very interesting reading: a Marxist approach to the culture industry - and one which - at least to me, reading in 2008, seems just a ~tad~ negative.

The authors suggest that “culture now impresses the same stamp on everything” …and everything mass media is all basically pointless on its own: it is all part of one system, one whole.

I wonder what they would have thought of the Internet!

I picked up a couple of letters of reference yesterday. They’re great… but reading them did rather make me think of this blog and its topic.

Not that any of it is not true… really… I guess… well, mostly ….but they make me sound a whole lot smarter and more capable than I really am.

Same prof spoke in similar ways about me - by name - during a television interview, once…I can’t even watch it; it mortifies me with embarassment.

And yet, if you look at the facts that he is speaking about, they are there - he doesn’t lie … he just is really, really good at building relatively minor facts up until they look like something more.

The TV show embarassed me a lot more than the letters do though …I suppose because it is public … potentially anyone could see it. The letters just go to committees making decisions about who should get (a lot of) money … and no place else.

And I would very much like the money.

I suppose I could seek out someone less skilled at writing to write letters of reference for me… but that would seem an awful lot like shooting oneself in the foot, don’t you think?

So - I (sort of) watched the documentary The Day That Panicked America today.

Sort of, because I only had an hour or so before my meeting and the move was a good hour and a half…so I watched it on 2x fast forward. And with people hanging around waiting for their meeting to start, and coming in and out and… it wasn’t a great movie to begin with …. doublespeed and with many interuptions was likely the best way to watch it, actually

Got enough of it to be able to participate in Monday’s discussion, anyway… we’re also going to be looking at several other events in which people were misled (intentionally or not) including Y27 and the Boston bomb scare.

It could be a very interesting class, I think!

Emerging adults are those between 18 & 25 years old, according to Dr. Jeffrey Arnett - it is a period of transition between adolescents and adulthood. Not that they are not adults - but that - for the majority - they do not yet feel quite there yet.

My major research project is to consider ways that publishers can best reach that specific market - i.e. how to identify books that fit this market, and effective strategies for marketing to them.

One of the interesting things about the topic is that several of the people in my research class are IN the emerging adults age group… and at least one of them “does not appreciate” the term, or the research focus.

Which will, I suspect, make for a rather more interesting research class, if nothing else

I listened to the radio broadcast last night - in preparation for next week’s class in fiction/nonfiction… and read several accountings of the public’s response to it.

It is an interesting case study - now - in people’s responses to fiction presented - well…as fiction, actually - Welles did in fact state - more than once - that it was a dramatization! - but somehow that was missed by many.

Could we - in today’s society - be duped into believing that something fictional was actually happening? Something sensational, even?

Well duh!

Media is such a huge part of our every day lives - and all sorts of ~stuff~ that is more fiction than fact gets put out through it ….

One example that comes to mind is the fiction that crime is out of control, the bad guys are everywhere, etc etc … The statistics, especially here in Canada, don’t bear examination …but why let a little thing like facts interfere? Not as dramatic or as terrorizing, perhaps, as War of the Worlds was for those who heard it - and yet….

So many DO feel the fear…and change their behaviour based on the ~facts~ that are fiction.

When I was a kid, we played outside until the street lights came on. No supervision required. Who allows their children that kind of freedom any more?