Culture Industry and Selling Culture

After reading both The Culture Industry by Adorno and Horkeimer and Selling Culture by Ohman you can definitely see that there are similarities and differences. I think Ohman's article is more well put together since he does have evidence/facts from the past whereas Adorno and Horkeimer's article jumps around a lot and repeats itself many times.

One similarity that they both have is the triumph of advertising. Ohman states "Through the first 5 years, there were very few ads for food, and the only only products regularly advertised were starch and flavoring. By the middle yeas of the survey, there was a sharp increase in food advertising generally, and a shift away from ingredients." When Ohman states that there's a shift away from ingredients to me he's saying that instead of people baking things ingredient by ingredient they are instead buying the already made things in boxes and cans and especially in the 1900's women would bake things by scratch. Adorno and Horkeimer believe that "consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them."

The differences I found in the two articles is that Ohman's uses great examples how things have changed through advertising from all the magazines that were created. They show how pages of magazines grew. For example Atlantic Monthly went from 13 pages in November 1880 to 121 pages in December 1904. In Adorno and Horkeimer's text they don't have examples like that showing how much things changed, they just keep repeating themselves that were all "brainwashed" from television, radio, etc... but they have the facts like Ohman.