College Life and the Culture Industry

        When I came to college, I knew that I would be studying a lot and doing a ton of homework, as that is what I came here to do, but I didn't realize how mundane finals week would be. This is my third finals week of my college career, and I must say that it is tiresome and monotonous. This is different from how I pictured college, with the endless partying, yet somehow still getting my work done rather than sitting in Olin for eleven hours at a time writing papers left and right. In "Modernity - An Incomplete Project," Habermas states that "culture in its modern form stirs up hatred against the conventions and virtues of everyday life," meaning that we perceive our real lives as so bland as compared to what we see in the culture industry (Habermas). What we see in movies and on television about college is not how it really is; the constant partying and lack of homework are extremely unrealistic. Films cut out the "boring" parts of college life, such as studying, eating food in the campus center, and actually going to class, making college seem like one big party when that is not really the case at all. The culture industry makes everything seem so fast and new, which makes our everyday lives seem so mundane in comparison. Habermas argues that postmodernity faces an existential crisis with history, as it seems to have lost its historical reference. In the case of popular culture portraying college in an unrealistic light, we seem to have lost the referent, which in this case is even in the present. This makes us think that our lives are somehow wrong and unfulfilling, when they are really just messy. Our everyday lives may not be as exciting as those of the people in movies, but that is a distortion of reality, and should not be taken as seriously as it is. What is aggravating is that the only representations of college life that rising students get is what is shown in movies, and what these films show is blown completely out of proportion. So, when a college freshman moves in and starts school, they have unrealistic expectations, which are also an idea of Horkheimer and Adorno, who state that the culture industry filters everything in our world before it reproduces it for entertainment. The original is photoshopped and distorted, just as college life is distorted by movies in which the characters simply drink and party with no consequence. One film that stood out to me regarding college life was 22 Jump Street; the film doesn't portray absolutely outrageous college life for the most part, but its depiction of Spring Break is highly unrealistic. There is a chase/shooting scene during Spring Break in Miami, where thousands of scantily clad college students are drinking, dancing, and partying. I'm sure that some people experience Spring Break like this, but I know that I definitely have not. The culture industry, as Horkheimer and Adorno state, filters out what it doesn't find to be interesting, keeping in the "glamorous" parts of college life and, as Habermas observes, making us resent our daily lives because of it.