FRANKFURT SCHOOL

“Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else.” Max Horkheimer.

Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and social scientist; director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research from 1930 to1958; he was born on 1895 and died in 1973. He was a close associate of Theodore Adorno, who mixed Marxism with influences as diverse as Schopenhauer, Dilthey, Nietzsche and Freud.

Futher, Horkheimer co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment with Adorno while in the US during the 1940s, and his 1947 Critique of Instrumental Reason is also widely read. In 1949, Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt and re-established the Institute, and retired to Switzerland in 1958.
Horkheimer from his quote, you can tell that he was against the way the media like the radio, TV stations and magazines were making things look like what it wasn’t. They brained washed people into believing in things that were not really true and he was against it. Today media makes people do a lot of things that are not right because they copy blinded. This is due to the attractiveness of the way their advertisements are.

In some parts of Africa a lot of commercials are done on TV for certain products, and at the end of the commercial they tell you it’s harmful to the body. But because of how people smoke it so attractively in the Adds, people watch them and get so interested in trying it. The question now is, if you know is harmful to the body why advertise it then? This is one of the things that make the mass media a good “servant and a bad master” at the same.

 

When we come to our political world today, the mass media is used as an agent to deliver false information to the people. They talk about things that are not done but say it is done and also use it as a means to present to people about things that they plan to do and never happen. That is why Horkheimer was displeased about the situation and said in his quote “The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else.” Their attitude does not change it is all the same everywhere.

I strongly agree with his views about the media, more especially on the impacts it has on people of today’s generation. media has a strong influence especially the youth, and this leads them to do the things that they copied blindly on the media.