Theme 2: Reflection [post 2]

After todays seminar I had more to think about than last week. Today we talked not so much about the text itself but about what the authors presenter and their ideas and if they could be implemented in todays society. Is “culture industry” as described by the authors the same today as it was 50 years ago. Most of us agreed that it was and that mass media has grown larger and now have a bigger audience. 

We talked about censorship and how today we can access a lot of information anywhere we want to with little censorship(not in all countries but some). We discussed how some censorship not always is a bad thing and that for example, censoring child pornography is a good thing whiles censoring information(like Google in china) might not be a good thing. So who should decide what things should be censored? This question was hard to answered and there was a long discussion about it and no one seemed to have an answer to it.

We continued to discuss media, censorship and commercials. How do commercials look like today compared to 50 years ago? We talked about how commercials are more easily controlled today and focused towards a specific target of users(consumers). We also talked about how commercials, whether on TV or on papers, is more extreme today than before. It’s like they want us to react like this: “wow this product can’t work that good, but let’s try it to prove a point”. It’s almost like they want us to disbelief the commercials so that we buy the product to try it out, which in the end may not make us buy more of it, but at least the company had made a profit of our reaction.

But what interested me the most about this seminar was the last discussion we had. It was about how the authors of the text we read never discussed which media devices we used but more concepts. And here we started to discuss how different people use media devices differently. I for example do not watch TV for the programs but use it as background noise and instead what series on Netflix etc. While another guy used the TV for things he wanted to watch and used his computer as background noise with music etc. And I thought it was interesting to see other peoples choice of using media devices and how they differ from my own.