Adorno And Horkheimer's The Culture Industry

According to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s article The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception capitalists control the masses through media outlets such as radio, movies, television. Through technology the elite gain power of people and economically dominate the subservient (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944, p.2). Adorno believed leisure time should have been used to enlighten and educate oneself and the culture industry was polluting these intentions. Adorno and Horkheimer expressed how the Culture Industry spoon-fed the subservient with ideas and material needs that would benefit the capitalists economically. Movies, in Adorno and Horkhimers view were not for entertainment they were produced to induce a kind of trance pushing the elitist ideas and wants onto the lower classes.
To Adorno, who was originally a composer and was raised to appreciate the arts, especially music, the use of Mozart’s music in movies was destructive. He believed it took away from the true meaning of the work. Technology was making people lazy and enslaved and at the same time creating great wealth for the bourgeoisie. Adornon and Horkheimer believed, due to the Culture Industry the division between the two classes would grow yet the subservient was being kept so content with material items and entertainment that they didn’t even realize they were enslaved. This realization was also noted by Ritzer and Stepnisky, (1944) when they talked about people’s homes being like cages, and how these cages were made so comfortable with mindless technology and items they were told they needed, that people have learned to love their cages (p.