Media's Half-Formative Nature. Theodor W. Adorno's Empirical Research On TV

Abstract

We analyze in this paper the results of Theodor W. Adorno's empirical research on television. This research was part of a the studies on mass culture made during the time he lived in the United States. With the help of psychoanalytic concepts he discovered a number of structures in several products of the culture industry that fall under the general concept of half-formation. With this concept he wanted to remember the illusory nature of the satisfaction produced by cultural consumption and to show the mechanisms by which it was possible to create an illusion of reality. These mechanisms are different from those that allowed the formation in the early stages of capitalism and are possibly incompatible with training institutions created at that time.