SUBMITTED BY : NEERAJA P NAIR

ROLL NO: 21/37

INSTITUION: LADY SHRIRAM COLLEGE FOR WOMEN .
SUBMITTED TO :PROF. RAVINDRA KARNENA
ASSIGNMENT : 1 (PART : 02)
1. CRITICAL SUMMARY : UNDERSTANDING MEDIA : THE EXTENSION
OF MAN

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) by media theorist and public
intellectual Marshall McLuhan was a major work that helped inaugurate the field of New
Media, which seeks to create ways of linking visual, aural, and functional design with
other arts and sciences to reshape theory and public life. Much of McLuhan’s book is
centered on his most famous assertion that “the medium is the message”; that is, the
structure of the delivery system transmitting any given content is more important than the
content itself. He exhorts other design theorists and public thinkers to focus on these
transmission modes rather than what people might use them to say since the medium
delimits a priori what it is possible to say
McLuhan splits the book into two main sections. The first explicates a distinction
between what he calls “hot media” and “cold media.” Hot media represent extensions of
our physical capacities, refining or enriching them with a high density of information. In
this category, he includes images and text, since they are dense with visual data processed
by the eyes. Moreover, they are relatively unambiguous from an objective point of view,
since the totality of information they present does not mutate.

In contrast, cold media extend physical capacities but do so by reducing the density of
information. They require their audience’s active interpretation in order to be legible as
intended. For example, the cartoon and television program are both cold media because
the totality of the information they present is entangled in a time-lapse made up of
countless frames (which were almost always in lower definition than professional
photography at McLuhan’s time of writing). Curiously, despite presenting denser
information, hot media are harder to learn from since they invite less participation, which
produces recursive feedback. Cold media are easier to learn from because they consist of
this more social, participatory, function.
Next, McLuhan provides the light bulb as an extreme example of a device that can be
interpreted as a medium with absolutely no semantic content. The light bulb is itself a
glass enclosure with a filament that reacts to electricity that flows from an outlet. It emits
light waves; however, the light waves in themselves carry no information or message
until they reach another medium, such as a solid surface. In this way, McLuhan argues, a
light emitting device “creates an environment by its mere presence.” He goes even
further, arguing that the content of television (as in the show it aired) does not really
matter. Rather, television as a medium contains the totality of its effect on society. This
argument is most often construed as, “the medium is the message.”

McLuhan spends the second section of the book analyzing different media in his present
context, 1960s America, which he believes are important in form rather than content.
Among these are the literary genres of oral and written communication, newspaper
routes, roads and the physical traffic they contain, clothes, abstract quantities, vehicles
such as the plane and bike, the institution of the press, weapons, and automated
technological enterprises. He breaks down each of these media into what constitutes its
form, isolating form from whatever content it might transmit. In effect, he shows that
most of what we think of today as media, we have confused function and structure with
the multitude of messages with which people inject them
McLuhan ends by exhorting his audience to open their minds about the possibilities of
invented media. Messages are not in themselves invented and, therefore, are not valuable
without the structural aid of their transmission media. He emphasizes that the world is
more capacious than we often assume, and hopes that a proliferation of new media will
make his argument self-evident.
Understanding Media: Extensions of Man is a critical analysis of media studies which
offers a new approach. McLuhan argues that for too long media studies has been
distracted by the content of media rather than how it is brought to viewers. He believes,
controversially, that content is not nearly as important as the mediums through which
media is conveyed. Many of his contemporaries were arguing that content was central. A
major focus has been on whether or not violence in media is impacting children or how
subliminal messaging about drugs and alcohol is brought to teenagers. However,
McLuhan takes a new approach and considers the mediums of technology themselves and
the varying effects they have on the viewer.

McLuhan believes technology to be extensions of humans. The first technology he

considers is human speech. He writes that this is the original form of media and that it is
what all other forms of technology are built off of. He generally writes positively of
physical forms of technology. For example, he seems to believe that technology, such as
bicycles and light bulbs have revolutionized media. While these mediums have no
content, they have changed the ways we are able to consume content. For example,
bicycles revolutionized newspaper routes, and light bulbs created a sense of space at
night that was night quite as possible before.

However, McLuhan writes generally negatively about electronic technologies that are
used to expand consciousness. Understanding Media is most well known for its
distinctions between “hot” and “cool” mediums. McLuhan makes clear that these are not
definitive categories and depend greatly on the culture and context of where they are
introduced. Hot mediums have limited viewer participation. For example, a movie theater
is quiet and dark. There is little to distract you than the movie itself. Cool mediums have
increased viewer participation. McLuhan gives the telephone as an example of this
medium, because the telephone is a two way conversation that requires participation.

2. CRITICAL SUMMARY : ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, In The

Culture Industry: Selected Essays in Mass Culture.

Adorno and his co-author, Max Horkheimer, argue that the philosophy of the
Enlightenment has been mechanized into rational scientism that lacks critical reflection.
Rationalism and science has become an administrative methodology which simply carries out the
(irrational) needs of global capital.

In this post, Jonathan looks at Adorno’s essay, The Culture Industry. ‘Culture industry’, a term
coined by Adorno & Horkheim, refers to popular culture being akin to factories that produce
standardized cultural goods (e.g., films, radio, magazines) used to manipulate mass society in
various ways. In his essay, Adorno examines the art and culture of industrialized society,
particularly the United States which he lived in during the mid-twentieth century. He writes:

“The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the
false identity of the general and the particular.”

This is the same language with which he critiques philosophy, where the process of synthetic
logic, of unifying the whole with the particular, is divorced from overarching goals or morality
and thus becomes a kind of automated process. In the case of culture this is a “false identity” so,
according to Adorno, “Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial
framework begin to show through” (Dialectic 120-121). While one can clearly recognize
Adorno’s critique of enlightenment here, there is another key influence in his analysis of culture:
Marx and his analysis of commodity.

Marx & Commodity Fetishism

Marx’s idea of “commodity fetishism” was deeply influential for twentieth century theory and
contemporary philosophy. Marx argued that the used value of a commodity – for example the
ability to generate heat from wood or coal – is not the real value of a commodity. The real value
(as it is perceived by people) of a commodity is its exchange value – its ability to be traded for
other commoditie

Marx’s commodity fetishism became a focus for many of Adorno’s predecessors and
contemporaries, particularly György Lukács via his analysis of reification and subsequent claim
that commodity fetish had become the dominant feature of post-industrial society, even
determining what was perceived as objective reality. Whereas Marx applies this idea to
commodities themselves, Lukács argues that the commodity fetish has become the foundation
for all of society, including people and their relationships which have become commodified and
their real determining factors mystified.

Adorno takes Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism and applies it to art. What was his purpose
for doing so? To investigate how culture has become a top-down industry where all cultural
products are first and foremost products, i.e., items intended for exchange. This need to be easily
exchanged is not an incidental feature but the true content of all cultural products.l

The idea that Hollywood blockbusters and pop music can be bad art full of clichés is not exactly
a groundbreaking revelation. But Adorno’s analysis is deeper than this and diverges from a
simple distaste for mass media.

Many argue that some artists lack technical skill or authorial intent. This may (and is arguably)
true and true for a variety of reasons. But this is not Adorno’s philosophical beef. Adorno is
more concerned with the studios and record labels that represent such artists. They (the studios
and record labels) are not incompetent and stupid, he claims, but in fact are (and frighteningly
so) brutally and totally competent:

“Any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by
talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals”
(122).

What does he mean by this? Consider Peter Finch’s portrayal of the disillusioned and mentally
ill anchor, Howard Beale, in Network whose unhinged rants against society and his industry are
easily absorbed and commodified by the industry. Adorno’s point is not that studios are full of
simpletons incapable of producing art, but rather that studios are full of skilled professionals who
compartmentalize a work into innumerable constituent parts which are later assembled.

Adorno is not arguing that the German film industry somehow caused the holocaust, but that
capitalist society is a totalizing system where nothing escapes its reach and the “Culture
Industry” functions just like anything else.

This is where his critique coalesces: Enlightenment inspired rationality without critical reflection
simply serves the administrative needs of capital and becomes devoted to “efficiency” regardless
of ends. Similarly, the “Culture Industry” is a terribly efficient machine where art (Adorno’s
critique is not limited to “low” culture; nothing escapes) is made by an assembly line of experts
and professionals with exchangeable, marketable products being the end goal, which is to say an
industry entirely serving the interest of global capital.

The method is the content; everything else is incidental and interchangeable. The formal
demands of the system determine everything and even the audience is split into various
constituent demographics and market sections – we are consumers not readers or viewers

Adorno was a German Jew fleeing Germany during the outbreak of WWII and arrived in
America to find a facile, jingoistic society totally dominated by the forms of industrial
capitalism. He was not optimistic. However, after a disastrous twentieth century, if there is one
thing Adorno had some faith in, it was the liberating potential of art.

Adorno was himself an accomplished musician and most of his work was concerned with
aesthetic theory. While he remained pessimistic about the future he retained the belief that art
can be profound and emancipatory.

What is more, Adorno was not a fan of political polemics; he did not wish for artists to counter
capitalist ideology with The Communist Manifesto. Recall in Adorno’s critique that form
determines content, therefore a leftist polemic, regardless of whether it is a good or bad choice
aesthetically, is not really possible; the mechanisms of production overshadow any message.

Rather, the purpose of art is to simply free up space – mental space and ideological space.
Because capitalist society is such a totally controlled culture, the role of the artist is to introduce
negative space: to allow some room for new ideas, to remove a brick in the wall of culture
through which some light might be seen.

3.CRITICAL SUMMARY :

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky first published Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of the Mass Media in 1988; a revised edition issued in 2002 incorporated the fall of the
Soviet Union.

Manufacturing Consent outlines a systematic and structural function of the mass media that is
quite different from the general public perception. Herman and Chomsky call this function the
“propaganda model,” and it offers an explanation for how and why the news media—seemingly
independent and confrontational—actually serves the interests of the status quo. While the main
text of the book focuses on important foreign policy affairs of the 1960s-80s, the updated
introduction incorporates more recent events: coverage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement; protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International
Monetary Fund; and government regulation of the chemical industry. The authors argue that
media corporations have become increasingly centralized, with more outlets concentrated in
fewer hands. This lack of diversity creates a top-down system of control that suppresses dissent
and results in a stream of news that is neither critical nor adversarial.

The authors contend that this self-censorship works through a series of filters: concentrated
ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and an anticommunist ideology. When one or more of
these filters is at work, the result is a safe and sanitized product that fails to serve the public
interest. They trace the history of the mass media, once a cantankerous voice of the people that
gradually succumbed to the demands of capitalism as production costs soared. By the 1980s, the
few remaining, concentrated media companies were worth over $1 billion each.

Herman and Chomsky then train their critical eyes on what they consider to be the media’s most
glaring failures. They begin with the media’s strikingly different coverage of similar events
based on its perception of “worthy” or “unworthy” victims. For example, the murder of a Polish
priest in a communist country sparked outrage, while the similar murders of clergy in Latin
America received far less attention. The Polish priest was a “worthy” victim—that is, worthy of
media attention—because he was killed by an enemy state and therefore valuable as a political
martyr. Clergy in Latin America are unworthy victims because their killers are U.S. “client
states” and must be exonerated.

News coverage of Central American politics and elections merits a full chapter. The authors
detail the history of U.S. involvement in the region, its support of oppressive regimes, and its
suppression of popular, grassroots movements. Not only did the media turn a blind eye to
atrocities committed in client states Guatemala and El Salvador, but it focused its critical ire on
the communist government of Nicaragua—arguably the least violent and repressive of the three.
In the process, the media abdicated its independence, ignored crucial dissident opinions, and took
government sources at their word.

The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II is a case study in confirmation bias. Ignoring
reams of documentary evidence, the media clung to a false theory that the shooter was a puppet
of the Soviet Union trained in Bulgaria. The media’s anticommunist narrative of the U.S.S.R. as
an evil empire was too convenient to allow facts to get in the way.

Lastly, Herman and Chomsky focus on America’s wars in Indochina. Detailing news coverage
dating back to the 1950s, the authors argue that the media did little but reiterate the government’s
position without question. Interestingly, this was the period when the patriotic consensus
maintained the media was at its most confrontational, even blaming it for losing the war. This
idea, the authors argue, is all part of a subtle propaganda effort that does not comport with the
facts. As the Vietnam War expanded into Laos and Cambodia, the media ignored or downplayed
the true extent of the devastation. More importantly, the media refused to challenge the dominant
narrative of the U.S. as “savior” and the communists as the aggressors. Even years later,
retrospectives have sought to preserve America’s legacy by rewriting the historical record.

The authors conclude with some uncharacteristic optimism. The proliferation of diverse cable
channels and news outlets has given marginalized opinions more of a platform, although one
with shallower pockets. A truly independent press has always existed in the U.S., and its stories
have a way of seeping through the mainstream morass. If the public truly wants a news media
that serves its interests rather than those of the powerful, it must seek this out itself.