Educational Media Reviews Online

This studiously elliptical and opaquely allusive experimental work earned young German digital filmmaker Georg Borch his Diploma at the ZeLIG School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano, Italy. Motivated by the question of whether a Facebook group could foster serious communication about a complex topic, Borch invited members of the “Adorno Changed My Life” group to share by video their stories and impressions of how the celebrated German philosopher, Frankfurt School social theorist, and musicologist Theodor Adorno (1903-69) had influenced them. The half-dozen or so all-male participants featured in the production include an American digital media critic, an art historian, an Australian media and communications professor, and other enthusiasts from around the world, such as those located in Turkey and Germany.

Viewers expecting to learn much about Adorno or his thought will be sorely disappointed, and one can only wonder what Adorno himself would make of such a mélange of hero-worship and vague musings about digital commons, consumer capitalism, and the puzzling nature and destabilizing significance of online personal identity creation. However, as an experimental exercise in marshalling user-generated content, and in doing so raising awareness of how our rapidly-changing digital social environments stimulate perplexing questions of personal identity, Facebook’s “Adorno Changed My Life” is a successful, though rather negligible, effort.