"No Means No... Until It Means Yes"

The nag factor, which we were talking about in class, reminds me a lot of the "Merchants of Cool," all except for these marketers are aiming much lower... at children.

It is an easy market, but I think it is very twisted. These companies are targeting children, an age group that hardly understands the effects of the advertising companies. They aren't telling kids to buy their products, they are telling kids that they won't fit in unless they buy the products. It becomes much more manipulative in that sense.

Now their are sources available to parents to help them understand and deal with this sort of advertising. For example, "Commercial Alert" has come out with a webpage designed to help parents fight the nag factor. Here is the link:

http://www.commercialalert.org/news/archive/2008/03/kid-targeted-ad-deal-counts-on-nag-factor">

Merchants of Cool

“Merchants of Cool” was interesting… but not all that surprising. It discussed the concerns of the market industry targeting a specific age group: teens. Basically, the video expressed the extents to which corporations are willing to go to in order to understand teens and how they can market to them.

They start out in a focus group, where kids are paid to sit and discuss their likes and dislikes. Teens want money, and have information about what they think is cool and uncool, so companies trade their money in exchange for input from the youth. However, it’s hard to identify how effectual this method really is. The clips that they show exhibit teenagers who don’t even seem the least bit interested in the questions being asked… it appears that the marketers have already lost them.

The next segment discusses “cool hunting.” I think this is a slightly more effective tactic. This is where researchers go out and look for cultural leaders. They seek out people who are the trendsetters among their subculture. Once they identify what the forward thinkers are doing, they can sell it back to all of the individuals who seek the styles of the forward thinkers.

However, this brings up the issue of the “paradox of cool hunting.” As soon as a new, marketable trend is identified, and it starts to catch on, the individuals who were once setting a trend have to move on to something else. As soon as people pick up on something, the concept becomes uncool. This means the faster cool hunters find a trend, the faster they will force people to move on.

Some other interesting parts of the film included the section on MTV. It is amazing how much contact their industry has with America. The idea that five conglomerates control pretty much all of the media that teens come into contact with is disturbing. That means that the shows, the music, the news, the products, and the people are all connected. Everything is being sold… from the same owners.

One important aspect of the show is that these marketers are doing “market research,” not “human research.” They are not trying to understand teens in order to relate to them on a personal level. They simply want to understand what drives teens to buy specific products. They want to know what they need to do in order to influence people to buy their specific product.

It is strange that as a result, companies have to “hide” their advertising in order to actually reach the public. If the marketing comes through, the product doesn’t sell as well. This concept can be applied to the Dove videos. If people watch these videos, and they don’t feel as if a product is being pushed on them, the advertising has a higher modality. However, this makes it difficult, because now it is becoming more and more difficult to understand the motives behind many of the media sources we come into contact with everyday.

Memes

While looking through the "Know Your Meme" website, I found many different memes that are spreading through not only web videos, but also images with text. "Fail" was one of the memes, and "Your Doing It Wrong" was another.

Here are some of the images from one, and a video from the other...

Know Your Meme: FAIL from Rocketboom on Vimeo.

The Corporation

Though The Corporation expresses a biased position, the documentary, made some very essential, indisputable points that we need to consider. The most important point that the film makes is the negative effects that have stemmed from the abuse of the fourteenth amendment. Once corporations were able to take on the identity of an individual, our government lost any ability to control and direct the missions of the businesses. The assumed the rights of “a legal person,” and thus were able to buy, sell, trade and act in the same way you and I are able to.

I think another important part of the film addressed the confidence crisis America is facing with large businesses. Because corporations seem to have no limits and no controls, they are growing to into the most powerful facet of our nation. If their power remains unchecked, we will certainly have to face the end of our resources, as the current models are hardly sustainable.

A majority of the CEO’s featured in the film seemed to be very aware of the problems that this unchecked power can lead to. However, some of the business owners (Firestone) alluded to the idea that they have become so powerful that one individual cannot control the means of the business, even if he or she felt obliged to.

The CEO’s tend to convince the audience that their personal values are similar to the values of the average American. Many of them seem to stress the notion that the “morals” of the business are not consistent with their own “morals.” They put the blame on capitalism… it is the mode of free enterprise that drives these corporations to their current status. I would agree with this concept, but I would also argue that these business owners are not concerned with the detrimental results. Instead, they appreciate the fact that they have some other entity to place the blame with, rather than dealing with it themselves.

In this way, large corporations are able to justify the “externalities.” They are simply the third party, the collateral damage. Capitalism is the guilty one, and they maintain a free conscience. This allows them to relieve the burdens of a suffering economy, a dying environment, and a loss of natural resources. “It’s all in the name of business.”

Many of the issues discussed in the film remind me of the notions that Henry Thoreau brought up in “Resistance to Civil Government.” He states, “It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.” According to this statement, it seems that the causes of these monstrous corporations are directly related to the immoral business owners.

I think the film had a powerful message, but people must remain in constant check in order to observe the “privileged positions” the film represents. We must always be critical of the purposes and motives of any medium, and documentaries especially. However, that said, I think The Corporation offered a very important position that Americans must consider.

Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulations”

Let me start out by saying I found this reading to be very difficult to understand and respond to. After reading it over, a second time, I believe I got the gist of some of his main claims. I don’t think that I understand his message well enough to apply it to my own situations and experiences, but I will begin by hopefully attempting to summarize his main arguments.

In the introduction, Baudrillard claims that simulators have started to replace reality. Basically, he explains that there are three different levels: reality, imaginary, and simulation. He uses the analogy of illness to explicate his case. The first level, reality, is when someone actually has an illness. The second level, imaginary, is when someone is faking an illness, and the third level, simulation, is when someone is simulating an illness. When a person is simulating an illness, they begin to take on the actual characteristics of being sick, and this begins to smudge the line between imaginary and reality. The sickness is imagined; the symptoms are real. He states on the second page, “…simulation threatens the difference between “true” and “false”, between “real” and “imaginary”.

He argues that with the development of simulations comes the destruction of the ability to recognize the difference between reality and simulation models. “Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction’s charm” (1). He illustrates this point using the model of religions. He argues that the “reality” of God has slowly been replaced with the symbols of God. “It is rather a question of substituting sins of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (2). So according to Baudrillard, religions are creating a “short-circuit” between our conception of God and the symbols we use to represent God. God is no longer what people are worshipping… only the icons.

He finalizes this argument with the idea that the iconoclasts (the people who want to destroy the icons) are the ones who give power to the symbols. They want to destroy them because they believe that they will undermine the existence of God. The iconolaters, however, recognize that they are simply signs, and they are not a true substitution for the real God. But then his argument gets a little hazy. He believes that iconolaters are the “most modern and adventurous” thinkers, because they understand that “it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them” (2).

He supports this notion with his examples of Disneyland and Watergate. This is where his piece becomes difficult to put into context. For Disneyland, I believe that he is arguing that it starts out as a real place people can drive to (just as God starts out as a real creator). But what makes up Disneyland actually distorts reality (like icons distort religion). Once people begin to make connections that Disneyland not a true reflection of our reality, we begin to question what is real in life (in the same way people begin to question the reality of their religion). Eventually, he concludes that these images bear no relation to reality… they are there own simulacrum.

From here, the paper gets fairly hard to follow. I believe that he is making it difficult to follow on purpose. He talks in circles, making it very difficult to follow both his claims and his examples. The language he chooses is very complex, and unnecessarily “byzantine,” as he would put it. It seems as though there are intentional typos. For example, he often replaces the letter ‘m’ for the combination of ‘in’. He repeatedly spells artificial as art)ficial, and unjustified as unjust)fied. It reminds me of a paper that was written in one language, and then translated. Much of the meaning seems to be lost. I still am not even sure if I understand the main concept of his paper… there is a good chance that I misinterpreted everything that he discussed.

TV on the Radio

I think that the lyrics to this song discuss some of the concerns we talked about in class. It mentions the concept that only a very select number of people are responsible for the information that we recieve on the news and television. This song discusses the main motive for many of the elite "providers"... money.

FDA Approves First Drug Made From Genetically Altered Animals

Today, the FDA approved its first drug made using genetically manipulated animals. This is quite terrifying, considering all of the doors that this will open in the future in regards to genetically modified medications. I support scientific exploration if it is done in a humane manner, but I don't support the idea that major pharmaceutical companies are managing to push new medicines through our system with limited understanding of the actual side affects and complications that these drugs may cause years down the line. Currently, medication errors harm in the upwards of 1.5 million people every year! The medical costs of treating patients with drug-related injuries is over 3.5 billion dollars per year. We are living in an over-medicated, under-educated era, and we need to stop relying on short term answers. We need to find ways that we can change our lives in order to promote healthier citizens.