A vital feature of the culture industry is that instead of promoting a ‘healthy heterogeneity', it seeks to attain ‘uniformity'. It attempts to depict the capitalist social order as naturalized. Thus, culture ‘infects'— the analogy with disease is striking --everything with sameness, standardization, regulation and deception.

Our focus is on mass or popular culture – cultural forms consumed by the masses – which engenders sameness. This can be viewed as deception because when we consume or partake of various cultural goods, even intellectual ones, we may think of them as a unique process and experience. We may like to think that it would contribute to our identity formation and that we have made certain choices in consuming those cultural goods. But according to this school of thought the consumer has been ‘deceived' because underlying this belief is a degree of standardization. Our responses too are regulated by a culture industry, in the service of the capitalist ethos.