HW 29- Merchants of Cool

The way the media works and the way the media sells kids a product is not for the kid's best interest, its for theirs. To be truthful, everyone is very impressionable. Everyone is influencable. No matter what they say they are affected by what they see and the thing is; influence is power. It isn't used wisely in our culture. It is used carelessly to promote whatever product they can, usually in a way that is socially degrading and makes caricatures out of everyone. But what they do is effective. It's popular and its attention grabbing. People will still want to see it.

I think what the way the WB did these shows, was done in a more thought out way because it wasn't done in a way that degraded sex or sexuality instead what they did was acknowledge that this was a topic that was relevant for teens and they took it and said this is what happens, these are the consequences, good and bad. what MTV does is it shows sex as this one big party fest with no reprecussions and no strings attached. In a way all these ads have desensitized teens to seeing this.

Sex sells, and marketers will do whatever sells the fastest and attracts the most people. So what we have now is an oversexualized culture. Britney Spears type media, her audience was actually mainly preteen girls. The ones who are most impressionable and hardhit by this is this age group. "They are taught to flaunt their sexuality even though they don't even understand it yet". Should it have been done? No because it spreads the message that this is how kids/girls should be if they want attention. But coporations would have done it anyways despite the consquences because that is how marketing work. They find a point of interest and exploit it as best as they can to promote what they want.

I don't think kids are stupid though. They have just been shown one option of being and they attempt to reanact it at times but eventually they have to decide for themselves if that is really what they want to do and be. Sooner or later they get wise to all of this or they risk staying in this art mimicking life mimicking art loop.