Hello dear geeks,

I have a friend who is getting a laptop and he wanted so opinions about what to get. He thought about these ones: :sony vaio (AR series) vs toshiba Qosmio (something 35) vs Acer something vs latest Apple Mac pro (everything in 17").

Dies any one knows the pros and cons?

Takk Takk!!!!

I didn`t want to spam, so I thought my friends could give me a hand.

There is a sample in Slight (Signify n`breaks) that i love. It is sax solo right in the begining of the track.

Can anybody tell me where is it sample from?

Thank you so much!!!

Culture industry reconsidered
by Theodor Adorno on Friday 18 June 2004

from "The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture" London: Routledge, 1991

The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the
book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published
in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of 'mass culture'. We
replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to exclude
from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it
is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from
the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From
the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme.
The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In
all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by
masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that
consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The
individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each
other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. This
is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by
economic and administrative concentration. The culture industry
intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of
both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for
thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in
speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with
the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance
inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus,
although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious
and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the
masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of
calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the
culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.
The very word mass-media, specially honed for the culture industry,
already shifts the accent onto harmless terrain. Neither is it a
question of primary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of
communication as such, but of the spirit which sufllates them, their
master's voice. The culture industry misuses its con
cern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen
their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable. How this
mentality might be changed is excluded throughout. The masses are not
the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the
culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses.
The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht
and Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their
realization as value, and not by their own specific content and
harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry
transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since these
cultural forms first began to earn a living for their creators as
commodities in the market-place they had already possessed something
of this quality. But then they sought after profit only indirectly, over
and above their autonomous essence. New on the part of the culture
industry is the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and
thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical products. The autonomy
of works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely
pure form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is
tendentially eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the
conscious will of those in control. The latter include both those who
carry out directives as well as those who hold the power. In economic
terms they are or were in search of new opportunities for the
realization of capital in the most economically developed countries. The
old opportunities became increasingly more precarious as a result of
the same concentration process which alone makes the culture industry
possible as an omnipresent phenomenon. Culture, in the true
sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always
simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relations
under which they lived, thereby honoring them. In so far as culture
becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those petrified
relations, human beings are once more debased. Cultural entities typical
of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are
commodities through and through. This quantitative shift is so great that
it calls forth entirely new phenomena. Ultimately, the culture industry
no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests
from which it originated. These interests have become
objectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent of
the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities which
must be swallowed anyway. The culture industry turns into public
relations, the manufacturing of 'goodwill' per se, without regard for
particular firms or saleable objects. Brought to bear is a general
uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that
each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.

Nevertheless, those characteristics which originally stamped the
transformation of literature into a commodity are maintained in this
process. More than anything in the world, the culture industry has its
ontology, a scaffolding of rigidly conservative basic categories which
can be gleaned, for example, from the commercial English novels of
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What parades
as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers
up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the
changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the
profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance
over culture.
Thus, the expression 'industry' is not to be taken too literally. It
refers to the standardization of the thing itself - such as that of the
Western, familiar to every movie-goer - and to the rationalization of
distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process.
Although in film, the central sector of the culture industry, the
production process resembles technical modes of operation in the
extensive division of labor, the employment of machines and
the separation of the laborers from the means of production -
expressed in the perennial conflict between artists active in the
culture industry and those who control it - individual forms of
production are nevertheless maintained. Each product affects an
individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as
the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated
is a sanctuary from immediacy and life. Now, as ever, the culture
industry exists in the 'service' of third persons, maintaining its affinity
to the declining circulation process of capital, to the commerce from
which it came into being. Its ideology above all makes use of the star
system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial
exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content,
the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates
supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs. It is
industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of
industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured - as
in the rationalization of office work - rather than in the sense of
anything really and actually produced by technological rationality.
Accordingly, the misinvestments of the culture industry are
considerable, throwing those branches rendered obsolete by new techniques
into crises, which seldom lead to changes for the better.
The concept of technique in the culture industry is only in name
identical with technique in works of art. In the latter, technique is
concerned with the internal organization of the object itself, with its
inner logic. In contrast, the technique of the culture industry is, from
the beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and
therefore always remains external to its object. The culture industry
finds ideological support precisely in so far as it carefully shields it-
self from the full potential of the techniques contained in its pro-
ducts. It lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the
material production of goods, without regard for the obligation to
the internal artistic whole implied by its functionality (Sachlichkeit),
but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic
autonomy. The result for the physiognomy of the culture industry is
essentially a mixture of streamlining, photographic hardness and
precision on the one hand, and individualistic residues, sentimentality
and an already rationally disposed and adapted romanticism on
the other. Adopting Benjamin's designation of the traditional work
of art by the concept of aura, the presence of that which is not
present, the culture industry is defined by the fact that it does not strictly
counterpose another principle to that of aura, but rather by the fact
that it conserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist. By this means the
culture industry betrays its own ideological abuses.