Adorno & Horkheimer

Adorno and Horkheimer believe that the “culture industry” has demonstrated an “assembly line character” which can be seen in the artificial, intentional method of churning out its produce. Their “culture industry” term comes from the belief that the way in which cultural items were manufactured was akin to how other industries produce immense quantities of consumer goods. Adorno and Horkheimer link this idea of “culture industry” to an ideal of “mass culture” to which cultural production has become a standardized routine. The operation is so repetitive and homogenous that it produces unchallenging cultural merchandises which in turn result in a type of consumption that was also homogenous, passive and distracted.