The theory of culture industry, developed by the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944), explains that popular culture is the result of a culture industry in the West that seeks to maintain control over the minds and hearts of the working class in order to prevent social uprising against the ruling elite. In effect, the culture industry is the tool of the ruling classes in that what is produced has an effect like that of an opiate: it removes the desire of the working class to strive for control of the means of production, which is what Marx and Engels (1848) called for in their Communist Manifesto. The Frankfurt School consisted of neo-Marxists who were disappointed to see that the workers’ revolution failed to transpire and that the class warfare that Marx had predicted never came to fruition. The Frankfurt School went on to explain that the failure of the uprising was due to the culture of the West, which suppressed the desire that Marx had saw being inflamed. The culture industry, which confects pop culture, was the reason for this failure—and it was deliberate on the part of the ruling elite: the elite wanted pop culture to spread weak, insubstantial ideas and create basically a zombie class of citizens that never questioned and never looked for anything more than endless amusements and saccharine entertainments.
Thus, according to the theory of culture industry, the determinants of popular culture are the ruling classes. Popular...
All major distributors of media and platforms are controlled by people from the ruling class, which can be seen by examining who sits on their boards of directors, which often overlap from one company to another. Popular culture, according to this theory, does not emerge from the people themselves as an autonomous expression of their interests and modes of experience but rather is imposed from above by those in positions of power as a type of social control. However, in responding to the culture, those in the audience add to the culture by creating their own modes of expression that align with the culture being placed on them—which is just fine with those in positions of power, as that is what they want: the people to be consumed with the pop culture modes and expressions given them and unconcerned with power and control, which is the sphere the ruling class cares about.
Commercialization and industrialization influence popular culture by making it for a mass audience. Pop art, music, film, and so on all can be disseminated far and wide thanks to both commercialization and industrialization. The Internet has thoroughly turned everyone into a consumer of pop culture, though it also represents a risk, what with so many alternative news sites—which is why the main big tech companies…
