DIGITAL CULTURAL INDUSTRY: ALGORITHMIC PERSONALIZATION, PERMANENT CONNECTIVITY, AND ATTENTION CAPTURE

Abstract

This article analyzes the developments of the culture industry within digital culture, seeking to understand how transformations in the forms of cultural production, circulation, and consumption reconfigure mechanisms identified by Adorno and Horkheimer (1985). This is a theoretical-philosophical study with a qualitative approach, based on bibliographic research and guided by the critical-dialectical perspective of Critical Theory. It begins with Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the culture industry, highlighting mechanisms of commodification, standardization, pseudo-individualization, and social integration. Subsequently, drawing on Debord (1997) and Türcke (2010), it examines the transformation of digital experience under the regime of spectacle, continuous excitation, and pre-pleasure. The study concludes that the culture industry undergoes transformations within digital culture, becoming more pervasive, personalized, continuous, and participatory. Finally, it argues for understanding this new configuration through the concept of the digital culture industry, understood as a form of cultural organization in which the mechanisms of integration and domination characteristic of the culture industry are reconfigured by algorithmic rationality, personalization, and the economic exploitation of individuals’ attention, behaviors, and data. This concept contributes to updating Critical Theory in light of the objective conditions of contemporary culture.