1. Horkheimer and Adorno poetically lambast the culture industry in their essay. Among other critiques, they write that the culture industry "perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises" and is where "imitation finally becomes absolute." They hold that one key promise of the culture industry is that of nurturing individuality and originality, yet the industry instead mass produces imitation. Although the editor of the volume notes the important historical context of this piece, and the differing distribution mechanisms for art today, I do see similar critiques espoused by current directors and actors about movies. I also hear that critique about mass architecture. Even though I also hear older individuals remark that "everything sounds the same nowadays," I rarely hear fine arts critics lamenting a lack of originality. With the growth of forms and formats for consuming art, are certain subsets more vulnerable to being part of the culture industry? If so, why?
2. In Hall's piece on encoding and decoding, decoding has "three hypothetical positions from which decodings of a televisual discourse may be constructed." However, encoding doesn't seem to be given as much room for variance in positioning. Even without "content creators" on social media, wouldn't each type and/or format of encoded media offer various potential positions for encoding?
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