Kayla Salyer -- Horkheimer and Adorno

Despite our attempt at obtaining originality and uniqueness, we seam to be slipping more and more into a lack of individuality. Today, attempting to be different, makes you the same as everyone else. Why is this so easy to fall into? Why is conformity so easy? Our culture is all grouped together under the same umbrella. Everything ties into each other, leaving no room for air to breathe. Uniformity is overcoming every action under the all and mighty word: Consumerism. Everything has turned itself into an industry. "Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce" (Horkheimer and Adorno 53). Everything in culture, just like all movies, has the same 'skeleton', and because we conform to the consumer culture, taking whatever comes through this filter, we become blind to the mass production. We become a product of the culture that is "infecting everything with sameness" (Horkheimer and Adorno 53).

Sameness is is infected through culture and the media that pertains to it. We are so used to the plots of movies, songs, television shows all being the same."The average choice of words in a short story must not be tampered with" (Horkheimer and Adorno 55). I see this, everyone sees this, yet we seem to do nothing about it. When I think of a trend in movies, or a similar plot line that pertains to all movies, I like to think that that is just that way because it is the plot that most people like. I like to think it is the product of all the fails and successes. Is this true? Are we merely thinking that we have used all the ideas that are out there, and that there is nothing else to see? Is this because we are all aimed, by culture, to one particular stand point in which we will be better, easier consumers?