The differences of "global culture industry" to previous form of "popular culture" and "culture industry" according to Lash and Lury

The primary difference between Lash and Lury’s description of the “global culture industry” compared to Adorno and Hockheimer’s culture industry is one of determinism versus indeterminism. Products produced as commodities in A & H’s criticisms were valued based upon their identifiable uses. The value of a phone is only based upon its functionality. Emphasis was placed on production and circulation.

In the global economy cultural products are so ubiquitous that they no longer merely represent ideology and a battleground of resistance, they are mediating the “things” of everyday life that make up our lifestyle.

In Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry, production was limited to distinct products that were purchased and accumulated to support capitalism. Lash and Lury describe the transformation of global culture from commodities to brands. Culture is no longer contained within a single product but is cross licensed and transformed into every imaginable object of our everyday existence. Disney is perhaps the best example of this. A animated film becomes a sweatshirt, a video, a icon on a plate or cup, and part of packaging at McDonalds. Consumers are so inundated with cultural symbols that they have to find the means of normalizing it and have done so by absorbing these products with less ideological debate, and more as self identity. In a continuation of the Birmingham school of thought, these brands are consumed and transformed by the consumer to suit their personal identity. “When media become things, we enter a world of operationality, a world not of interpretation but of navigation. We do not read them so much as ‘do’ them (‘Just Do It’), or do with them”

As manufacturing has moved overseas through outsourcing, the American economy is based more on product design and brand identity. While all cell phones perform roughly the same function, products are marketed based upon a brand identity that is clearly differentiated from one brand to the next. The iPhone is defined by its corporate brand that is distinct from that of the blackberry. In extreme cases you will see the same exact product marketed under two different brands such as the Isuzu Rodeo SUV and the Honda Pilot.

The global culture industry is one of convergence as cultural objects descend from the superstructure and others ascend from the base. As mechanical reproduction and the expansion of media led to popular culture clashing with classical culture, the growth of vertical integration in global culture has smudged the lines further. Lash and Lury expand on Foucalt’s theories of bio-power and further expand the arguments against determinism as expressed by Althusser and Horkheimer. Brands are organic and carry with them memory. Consumers of cultural products int the global sense are no longer subjected to the mechano-power that determines form and function, the consumer “self-organizes” and modifies the objects to suit their own uses and identities. A cultural object now comes with “windows” and “doors” that permit further networking and connections. Lash and Lury use the example of the movie ‘The Matrix’ to illustrate that reality is in the mind, not the object, hence the global cultural industry is in the brand and not the commodity.