Theme 2 - Reflection

I'm having a hard time understanding the connection between some of the texts and this course. It always takes some time to grasp the core of a new course and since the first couple of classes were canceled it made it even more difficult to know what to expect from the course. I started of last week's theme thinking the themes had no connection to the course or to each other. In the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Adorno and Horkheimer I struggled to keep focused since I didn't see how enlightenment and last week’s theme critical media studies were connected. I was relieved when I started reading chapter four “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” as I thought, "Finally I see a clear connection". I think it’s much easier to stay focused and motivated when reading a text if you understand why your reading it and when you feel like you are learning something. I still have a hard time understanding what I was suppose to learn the first week and the only thing I took with was that I could think critical and not trust everything I see or hear. In comparison to the first week I learned a more last week. I found the part about the culture industry really interesting. Because what Adorno and Horkheimer were criticizing are things I grew up with like TV and movies etc. I’m so used to these medias and the way of consuming them that I don’t even reflect over it when I get home and start the TV. I feel like Adorno and Horkheimer treated the question about the new media a bit dramatically by being so negative. In my opinion movies and TV-shows can leave room for critical thinking and I would unlike Adorno and Horkheimer call it a kind of art. I feel like they were overreacting to the changes in the culture industry and the mass media.

It got me thinking about a topic we were discussing in another course here at KTH called Social Media Technology. We read an article by Nicolas Carr, Is Google making us stupid? (2008). This article is proposing that using the Internet makes us stupid and that it have serious effects on cognition. Will people who read this article in say 60 years feel like I did when I was reading Dialectic of Enlightenment? Or will this happen even sooner since the technology advances more and more rapidly?

Sources:
Carr, Nicolas. (2008). Is google making us stupid? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/