Pre Blog Post

For my pre-blog post, I decided to focus on the reading from Horkheimer & Adorno and their look into how media affects society and our perceptions. One quote that was interesting was "Culture today is infecting everything with sameness" (53). I thought this was interesting because when thinking about mainstream radio, clothes, brands, etc. We know that others buy into brands/music that are more popular, but it was interesting that the author used the word "infect." I think this word turns the entire quote into a negative connotation. Everyone is different, however, we are infected with sameness. In class, we discussed how people who want to explicitly show that they are "different" purchase things that are not mainstream and that popular media does not know about. For example, those who buy Hot Topic might think they are dressing different and wearing brands that make them stand out more than others. However, the more people that shop at Hot Topic, the more that turns into "sameness" and mainstream. It's interesting to think about how we all deeply rooted we want to be different, however, according to the author, we are infected with sameness.

Another quote that stood out to me was "mechanically differentiate products are ultimately the same" (53). This connects to the sameness aspect I mentioned above because in class we connected this quote to transportation, in the case of cars. We mentioned that all advertisements of cars make it aware that they are different from eachother. However, we connected the quote in the fact that a cars purpose is to get to point A and point B. All cars will provide that to you. We mentioned that the cult of the new is largely incorporated in this example because we all are socialized for the most part to want the next new thing because it is "better."