Because people are alienated in capitalist societies, they are susceptible to dominant ideology that controls their thinking and maintains their status as individual consumers. This is false consciousness.
The wealthy invest in maintaining this status quo because they benefit most from the social arrangements in a capitalist society. The ideas people have – those that are spread through society – are the ideas that the ruling class wants people to have, because the wealthy control the media. According to Marx, the ruling class propagates an ideology that justifies its own status and this makes it difficult for ordinary people to recognize that they are being exploited. The media and popular culture are central to the spread of false consciousness.
Mass media and popular culture form a crucial link between superstructures of society and individual consciousness by manipulating the exploited classes. But it may be outmoded to criticise the media. German media theorist, Hans Magnus Enzenberger argued that the notion of manipulation is grounded in a mere assumption that there is such a thing as ‘pure, unmanipulated truth’. Thus antagonism to mass media only benefits capitalism, since all media manipulate and provide momentary gratification, distracting the willingly alienated individual from his/her commodified misery.
Advertising stimulates desire and makes people work harder so that a vicious cycle results in what Marx saw as work in capitalist societies that alienates people. So the more people work, the more they become alienated. To escape the symptoms of alienation, they engage in consumption – which costs money. So they are forced to work increasingly hard to escape from the effects of their work.
Visual Culture 