Revisitando la Escuela de Frankfurt: aportes a la crítica de la mercantilización de los medios

Abstract

This paper analyzes the critical thinking on mass communication and culture industries, getting an epistemological perspective on the media as creators of and formative influences on social realities in favor of commercial exploitation and a model of man as a consumer. Contributions made by major members of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas) were examined, as well as discussions there were between them and their contemporary thinkers. The School’s ontological and epistemological approaches were theoretically compared to Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Leo Lowenthal, Oskar Negt, Axel Honneth and Siegfried Kracauer’s views on culture industries, in the light of today’s communications ecosystem. The results show a similar critical thinking which suggests that, although technologies cause the mass media to lose their monopoly of social discourse, there is still an ecosystem dominated by markets and consumption, and new types of vices and dangers of social control and media manipulation emerge.