To Consume or Not?

    As Dr. Kevin Stein describes in this week's lecture on theories of pop culture, we come to find that the two schools of thought that contributed to the earliest foundation of this practice were the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of thought. Frankfurt focused on thinking of media consumption through a critical lens that reveals how media creates social and political inequalities through mass influence. Frankfurt is the foundation of Cultural, Pop Culture, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Frankfurts like Adorno and Horkheimer believed that mass communication had a negative impact on society through reproductions of the negative impacts of the culture industry. On the other hand Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams at the Birmingham School believed consumers could resist mass consumerism and that as audiences could have the power to reach collective consciousness and diminish the message originally intended to be displayed as mass resistance to the bourgeois. The elite class.  

    Stuart Hall’s work on Deconstructing the Popular takes a Marxist approach on understanding how transformation can lead to moralization of the wild to the tame. That the elite constantly reproduce material items that can lead to our daily transformations. Most importantly, Stuart Hall positions this study of culture in a simple “alternative pole” binary, where popular culture oscillates in two extremes that it could lead to individual and societal containment or individual to societal resistance and change.   

    Speaking in a consumerist approach these theories make sense to me but I believe that they take a binary and close loop approach that limits the understanding of the intricacies of thought, manifestation, creation, and materialization of consumer goods. Beyond the self, consumer goods become tangible goods in a synchronous symbiotic relationship of our subconscious imaginations to the universe. 

    Extending to their approach and working around their theories, I believe that class consciousness is part of each cycle of civilization or cycle of humanity. Beyond a consumerist approach, class consciousness becomes more of group thought based on geographical or mental proximities of attraction. In those clumps or new forming or transforming mass, each person and species is able to either be together or alone in this journey of becoming and experiencing life. There is however some sort of energy field that directs us to the process of awakening, feeling, and becoming a human experience for the greater experience of creation, stabilization, destruction, and transformation. 

    What school of thought do you agree or disagree with according to this summary? Do you take a binary approach to understanding new knowledge, retaining it, and redirecting it or are you able to take a more complex approach to forming new links of these theorists? Is my approach too profound… lol 

    Credits to Wonder AI on App Store for generating this nice visual of how I interpret the identity of self through modern day consumer goods. I prompted: "clear transparent yogi man figure meditating with universe exploding from inside out with all the logos and brands in the world with mostly white background and deep universe tones beautiful trippy" and it generated me this. I am thankful for ever evolving media tools that allows us to enjoy waking dreaming and spiritual life in tandem with each other and these mystical lands! 🙏