Journalism - The Culture and Civiliztion tradition and the Frankfurt Essay

Journalism - The Culture and Civiliztion tradition and the Frankfurt School agree that mass culture is bad for us but for different reasons. Discuss - Essay Example Both the Frankfurt School and the Culture and Civilization tradition put forward the same point that mass culture is not good for us but they presented different reasons to support their views. The Frankfurt school is not supportive of mass culture because it puts forward the opinion that mass culture gives way to capitalism. According to this thought mass culture only puts forward the opinion and the culture of the people who are politically dominant and imposes this upon the people who are less powerful and the minorities. It explains that mass culture is the culture that is the ways and the methods adopted by the people who are politically powerful or financially stronger. These ways are then enforced upon the working class that is the people who are weak so that the power of the already powerful remains intact (Nealon & IRR 2002). The Frankfurt school claims that mass culture depoliticizes the lower class. The Frankfurt school suggests that with new technologies men have been replaced with machinery and there is more leisure time and hence more exposure so there is greater spread of mass culture and hence there is greater oppression and suppression of the working class . according to this thought mass culture destroys individuality and diminishes the creativity and thoughts of an individual by enforcing upon everyone the thoughts of the popular masses (Storey 1998,2001). Adorno who is a prominent thinker of the Frankfurt school writes in his book Dialectic of Enlightment: â€Å"The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostatized itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes - with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of false universality† (Adorno, Horkheimer & Cumming 1979, p 120-167). Although the culture and civilization tradition is also against mass culture but it puts forward different