http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2330629461681402395#
This episode talked about how big companies influenced teenagers into purchasing their products and keeping their ratings high by subtly using the term "cool' to describe their own merchandise. Nevertheless, this episode opened a whole different set of questions focusing mainly on the effect these different economic strategies affected the youth.
Often the narrator stated that teens were the ones running society's idealism and money. There a number of different reasons why this happens. One of them is called "Guilt money", when parents say to their children "Here take my credit card and buy anything you want because I cannot spend time with you." Teens today have spent millions of dollars on merchandise that would make them cool, "such as new clothes, a new ipod, a new phone, etc. And this is because they do not have a sense of responsibility therefore by never working for their own money they do not appreciate it as much, and simply buy what they do not need because of it. In my eyes this makes teens the perfect costumer. They do not have to worry about supporting someone else economically, so all their money is invested into improving themselves and satisfying their wants. Which is just as teens are expected to be at this point of their lives, but with a different purpose, to become better professionally, but we often misunderstand this intentions.
So what happens to adults, are they not cool?
Do you stop being cool when you grow up?
Does this mean that being cool is simply a sign of immaturity and stupidity?
All this time I have been living under the idea that as teenagers we have a lot to learn about the world of the adults, and that our life experiences are nothing compared to older generations therefore we cannot communicate any type of wise advice to other people. I would also say that for some people teenagers are considered to be at a stage of stupidity. This could be due to the hormones or simply because of feelings of confusion at that stage of their lives. As a teenager myself I also feel pretty stupid at times, however i do think there are different levels of stupidity. It is very easy to get influenced as a teenager, and i think that companies such as MTV or Disney take this to their advantage. In this episode workers of different companies were interviewed with the purpose of learning what their purpose was. It was stated that they only wanted to give the young audience what they wanted. And in order to do so they would have to "get involved on what their culture is, understand where they are coming from, and have to think like they think" And most importantly that these companies weren't "selling the product. They were selling the fact that they understood the culture" In other words they were selling a lifestyle.
I think that as honest these intention even may be, I do not think is possible as an adult to understand the world of a teenager. Although that adult has already experienced the teenage life it is not the same. There are many different factor involved that make this generation gap too far apart. One of them is the massive consumption that current teenagers live with, and that alone makes adults unable to relate to them to a point that they have to run many different human researches to have a sense of what is happening in the mind of the youth. Also I think that adults often forget what it was to be a teenager. Some people would say that it is because they realized what teenagers are unable to see at that stage of their lives, which is the importance of responsibility and values. But as the narrator says, "was it any different when we were young? That the thing we call youth culture wasn't something that was just being sold to us. It was something that came from us in act of expression not just of consumption. Is that boundary been completely erased?" In other words, perhaps we are the creators of our own consumption, and it is not actually not consumption but simply our self expression, which reflect who we naturally are under society and what we want from it. Have adults forgotten about their own feelings during their teenage life? I think that it is not that the "boundary was completely erased" but that when people grow up they consider that there are more important things to worry about than just being cool. This also reminds me of my interview with a stranger. He stated that adults who consider themselves as cool or uncool are adults who have not grow up yet. Although I cannot say I entirely agree with this statement It does make sense in a way. Specially when companies use such a stupid term as a method to sell.
These economic strategies, understanding what the costumer wants, is one of the most effective ways of making a profit. Although I do not think is possible to understand one another in such way, companies do make a profit after running "people research". They influence teens on what is cool to make them purchase their products. However, if a company simply provides all these different things without the knowledge of what the audience wants they will fail. This was seen with MTV when its ratings began to considerably decrease. "MTV Had the humilty to realize that cool was not their birth right. That it belongs to kids and kids keep changing. If they wanted to stay cool they had to change right along with them." Therefore they began doing this people research and based their programs more on what the audience wanted. However, ironically enough the research shown in the video was to interview a teenager boy who was a fan of MTV program. His life style and behavior were pretty common. I would say that most outstanding aspect is that he had different suits for church each Sunday. And based on this and many other interviews shows such as Jackass were added to MTV. This made no sense, because using the life of the teenager boy interviewed during the research as an example, he did not do anything as close as what a mook did. This leads me to think that "all that research is not understand him as a person but as a costumer". Maybe the term people research should be actually named market research.
Also, sex and violence are two great ways to drag teens attentions. Shows such as Dawson's Greek or movies such as I know what you did last summer are some of the examples that kids are interested on, and this is because of the "prohibited scenes or situations" that are shown in these. Everyone is attracted and interested to what they cannot have, not only children. Indeed teenagers may be really interested in sex but they do not used to show it until it was shown on TV first. It is as if these shows were the key to make the children live more wildly.
The main argument of this episode however is the following:
"Is it media really reflecting the world of kids, or is it all the way around? Sell back to media what they sold to them"- In other words behaving like the media suggested to behave to be cool.
"It is a giant feed back loop. The media watched kids and then sells them an image of themselves." Then kids watch those images and immediately relate to them.
I think is more complicated then that. Although there were many researches conducted on people behavior, the interviewers saw their world in a very specific way. For adult to teenager, not from teenager to teenager, so the interviewer could not even relate to him, so how could he possibly understand him? I think that these teens were and still are misunderstood. Companies claim to know what we want and where we come from but I can confidently say they have no idea what they are selling. And even thought they don't they still sell it because they think we would understand it, and we don't. We simple live with it thinking that this is the world we live in, this is what is happening, we had no control over it, because it was handed to us by the hands of the adults.
To conclude this episode one of the man who was interviewed said,"Often there is a kind of official and systematic rebelliousness that is reflected in media products...Is part of the official rock video world view. Is part of the official advertising world view, that you are parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable. Nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor. That huge authority has interestly enough merged as the sort of task of superhero of consumer culture. That's the coolest identity of all"
I somewhat disagree with this quote because what this man is doing is labeling everyone including the teenager's, the main audience, into many different categories, claiming that that is how teenagers see the world. As previously mentioned, How could he possibly know about it? He is a man that probably studied some psychology, but mostly merchandise and grew up in a very different generation. And i know this because the man is obviously over 35 years old. It is not fair to state that teenagers and what they want is understood and reflected as we want it to be. I cannot speak for everyone my age, but I say that personally I do not think I'm understood my media; at least not from this culture.
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