Validation.
Belonging.
These are abstract ideas which are innately human. The constant need to make a connection is in our DNA—from our forefathers, with their leather loincloth and freshly sharpened spears hunting in packs, to our children, scantily clad and making cute poses in TikTok. We want to experience the feeling of being a part of something bigger than ourselves, than the four corners of our house, than our small town communities, and if the mighty social media allows, than our world. The two documentaries, “The Merchants of Cool”1 and “Generation Like”2, depict how the commodification of culture can abuse the weaknesses of our humanity to the hilt. It is painful to watch and yet, it is an exercise that absolutely must be done. For in the bubbles of our existence, we are unable to see the lights and the shadows for what they plainly are. In Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered”3, he brilliantly exposes the truth which is constantly veiled by the masters in the machinery of popular culture.
“…although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.”
We are unequivocally its mere objects and it is, no less than our king.
Like everyone else, I was once a teenager too. I took the visions of Britney Spears in a short skirt and pigtails anxiously waiting for the bell to ring with full,undivided attention. When the shrill sound signifying the end of classes reverberates the school halls, she is released from her stupor and I, a 15 year old girl in front of the TV, was released with her. Pre-social media was the era wherein the media giants took what is intrinsically teenager, its rebellious and carefree spirit, and sold it backto us. And as “The Merchant of Cool” puts it, we were sold—literally.
Not only did the cultural overlords trick us into believing every utterance and, in essence, every endorsement our music idols make, they have also successfully monetized the frailty of our youth.
It could be bias that causes me to say this but our kids nowadays may be, unfortunately, having it worse. For now there is the delusion of empowerment being peddled on the youth. With every tweet, like, and share, they are expecting acknowledgement and validation for their existence—fortheirpower. It is alarming how the youth as the consumer is also effectively made to a marketerfor themselves. They consume, process, expel, andregurgitate. Social media and the cluelessness of the previous generation, our generation, has inadvertently aided the same monsters we warned our children about. Under the guise of power, popularity, and sense of self, the youth nowadays are being spun into a web of complex lies. There may be some good in Generation Like, you say?At least that is what they would like us to think. Adorno warned us about this when he said, “Even its defenders, however, would hardly contradict Plato openly who maintained that what is objectively and intrinsically untrue cannot also be subjectively good and true for human beings. The concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests. The consensus which it propagates strengthens blind, opaque authority.”
One of the interviewed families was a mother and her daughter. As the older woman beams with pride while she unabashedlytells the camera that she guidedher daughter on what to wear and how to pose for her social media accounts, the younger woman who is still very much a minor, slinks back in her chair looking rather confused and, for a lack of a better term, empty. And like the wall in her bedroom which she has painstakingly decorated as a homage to her supportive fans, the girl is left wanting.
Serendipity by design is not merely a paradox. It is a Pandora’s box crafted by the youth who has mastered the understanding of his generation’s nuances. Empowerment is the smoke screen which impedes the youth along with the older generations from seeing how twisted is the abuse of social media and truly vicious are the moguls that purvey it. Before I end this, let me share anotherquote from Adorno which aptly summarizes my thoughts:
“In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.”
Will it be possible to have pop culture free of the trappings I mentioned above? Short and simple, no. In the beginning I said validation and belonging are inextricably human. Well, so is greed.
References
- “The Merchants of Cool.” PBS, 2001, www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-merchants-of-cool/.
- “Generation Like.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 2014, www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/generation-like/.
- Adorno, Theodor W., and Anson G. Rabinbach. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique, no. 6, 1975, p. 12., doi:10.2307/487650.MERCEDES OLAVIDES2