Digital Echoes of Conformity: Navigating Elderly Fandom and Intergenerational ‘Creativity’ on Douyin within the Shadow of the Culture Industry

This article examines how elderly audiences engage with internet celebrities on Douyin (TikTok's Chinese equivalent) through the lens of the Frankfurt school – with Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, and Habermas’s critical theories towards the cultural industry. According to them, the culture industry's mass-produced cultural goods promote conformity, suppress critical thought, and encourage passive consumption to benefit capitalism. This study focuses on the digital presence of Chinese internet celebrities Xiucai and Yixiaoqingcheng, demonstrating how Chinese digital platforms continue the culture industry's trends of commodification, standardization, and passive consumption. It uncovers a paradox: digital media seemingly provides the elderly with a sense of participatory culture and community, yet it traps them in a commodifying system that exploits for profit. The interactions between young users and these celebrities, through parody, highlight a generational dialogue that perpetuates the culture industry's cycle of replacing genuine cultural and creative values with exchange values, thus sidelining critical social issues like the financial exploitation of the elderly. This research underscores the ongoing significance of the Frankfurt school and its critique of technology in understanding the current digital media landscape in China and calls for a deeper cultural engagement beyond the superficial participatory culture promoted by digital platforms.