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Summary Of C. Wright Mills's 'The Daily You'

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In 1959, C. Wright Mills described the idea of the cultural apparatus. He argued that it is impossible to live outside of mass culture and that the world people see is given to them second hand through the lens of mass culture. In one of his essays he notes, “the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they interpret and report what they see…our standards of credibility, our definitions of reality, our modes of sensibility—as well as our immediate opinions and images—are determined much less by any pristine experience than by our exposure to the output of the cultural apparatus.” This essentially means that the individual does not create their own reality, it is created for them by government agencies, …show more content…
Wright Mills and his theory of the cultural apparatus first appeared in a time before the internet. His theories were based largely off of advertising companies painting what consumers want through polls and surveys. This was a way of shaping the views of the masses through large trends. Now that nearly every person utilizes the internet, the cultural apparatus is tailored to the individual. This is largely possible through the use of cookies. A cookie is information about online preferences stored on a personal hard drive. This information can then be accessed by other websites so that they can tailor ads and settings to fit the exact preferences specified on other websites. This is described in the novel, The Daily You by Joseph Turow. “One of Larry and Rhonda’s sons, who is fifteen years old, is happy to find to find a text message on his phone that invited him to use a discount at an ice cream chain not too far from his house. One of their daughters, by contrast, is mortified when she receives texts inviting her to a diet program and an ad on her Facebook page inviting her to a clothing store for hip, oversized women.” (2) This information about the two children is discovered through cookies. After they searched for things related to plus sized clothing or ice cream on their computers, other sites were able to deduce that they might be interested in these things. These websites then used this information to either create ads on public domains, or send the ads to

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