Television Audiences Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Television Audiences - Essay Example Since their time, the growth of the media has overwhelmed the world, the influences of film now specters of life creating needs within the public that are not truly relevant to the existence of life. Moreover, television has deteriorated in such a way that the boundaries between reality and fantasy are crossed injecting viewers with the belief that what they see is not a reflection through a medium of art, but the viewing of reality, the open door through which other lives can be lived vicariously. Reality television, a deception of the television media on the public, has now accomplished the fears that most plagued Adorno and his contemporaries - culture is fully infected with capitalism and the commoditized ideologies about life is not fully material. In a letter to Walter Benjamin on 3 March 1936, Theodor Adorno stated that both high art and the industrially produced consumer art are infused and burdened with the stigma of capitalism and as well are reflective of change. Adorno st ated â€Å"Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up† (Adorno and Bernstein 2). ... The goal of human philosophical framework has traditionally been for humanity to reach a state of enlightenment, free of the untruths which burden mankind from reaching a state of mastery over the world. Through disenchantment of the universe, mankind asserts authority and utilizes knowledge over myth as a means to navigate life. However, according to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Noerr, enlightenment has been a calamity. In the search to be freed from enchantment, man has become apathetic towards life. Bacon, who put forth the concepts of experimental philosophy, saw the search for knowledge as an active element towards the search for mastery. In conquering knowledge of the natural world, human beings are looking for a way to master nature and to master other human beings The violence of shattering myths has been caused by thought that is powerful enough to break apart cultures and to destroy belief systems.(2). What is left after the disenchantment of the universe is the master on his th rone, bored and waiting for something to make his blood boil with excitement once again. Gratification through consumerism has replaced the mythologies that once drove humans to seek answers. The culture industry creates false needs, replacing the true needs of the human spirit. Bougeois cultural production obliterates the possibility of art in either popular or autonomous creation (Thomson 79). The human mind has become so inundated with exterior stimulation that most people have become complacent, the space in between reality from which innovation and creativity emanates filled up with the insertions of the commodity fetishism from which the value of human interaction becomes seated within the