Communication and Media

[Name of the institute]

Communication and Media

Critical Review

The critical review is based on the reading of “Critical Theory and Techno Culture: Habermas and Baudrillard,” by Mark Poster and selected chapter from A First Look at Communication Theory, by Em Griffin.

Critical Theory and Techno Culture: Habermas and Baudrillard, by Mark Poster

According to the author, in case of Habermas, the shift towards the language theory began in the 1968 in which the Marxist notion of work came under attack. Habermas extended the line of thought initiated by Max and Adorno in the dialectic of Enlightenment (Poster, 1994). The political aim of the critical theory was in danger because it covered a connection between culture and technology. Technology had become the source of ideology and the success of the production system transfused it into its own justification transmuting matter into ideas. This got reversed by Habermas who located Weber's theory of action which as the basis for separating culture and technology (Martín, 1993). However, according to the author, the problem, with Habermas double theory of action is that it is not grounded in critical theory. The category is implying added in to the old with no theoretical elaboration, no deduction. Mark Poster emphasize that Habermas treats the question of language theory as an aspect of critical social theory. The first work to postmodernism in art came from France in the late 1970s and built on the former French cultural and social theories. First thoughts get found in the studies by Roland Barthes on mythology and popular culture, in the rediscovery of Ferdinand de Saussure and the intensive study of language in the 1960s and 1970s.

Baudrillard describes that we were still dominated assuming a natural value of this stage used to represent nature or customary law. Baudrillard presents his theory when he makes between language, genetics and social organization analogies. Just as the language codes or models that got structured the way we communicate, there are of codes and models of social organization and control, the structure living environment and human. That was the triumph of cybernetics (Martín, 1993).

The political result of the author's analysis seems to be that everything that is subject to this cybernetic control system and that which seems in opposition to be maladjusted or threaten the system is, in fact, a functional part of society of the simulation. In the shadow of the silent majorities which appeared in 1978, Baudrillard presents current theories of social classes and in question and argues that these distinctions had disappeared into the society of the simulations. Instead, the masses involved in an age of hyper-conformity only with spectacles: messages they get, they just want some sign that they adore the game of the characters and stereotypes that they idolize any content until it dissolves itself into a grand series of scenes. The most important force that is transforming the masses into an apathetic silent majority seems the proliferation of information and media to be (Marmot, 2005).

Baudrillard describes in his essay "Modernity" as radical destruction ...