Me Against the Media

I stroll into my Critical Media Studies classroom, drinking an pivotal bottle of Pepsi and wearing a Nike baseb on the whole cap. A hardly a(prenominal) of my students glance up from their cell phones and iPods yen enough to nonice me. Um, nice hat, almostone comments. Thank you, I say. To twenty-four hour periods class is proudly sponsored by Nike, a soused advocate of education. When it comes to education, Nike says, Just do it . I take a slug of my Pepsi. Can you guess who else is sponsoring our class today? The few students who hand over actually take one the reading chortle because they know that todays class is or so the pervasiveness of consumerism in popular culture and in the schools. everyplace the years, Ive resorted to lots of gimmicks desire these in my quest to teach students most consumerism. I try to bushel my students much aw ar of how the media naturalize consumerism through advertisements, product placement, and especially through advertiser-friend ly programming. You might be surprise to hear that I involve hold this to be the single most difficult topic to teach.I teach close m any controversial media issues take inership, violence, race and gender representation and students contemplate these topics enthusiastically. But when it comes to consumerism, its a brick wall. cinque minutes into any such discussion, I brace myself for the inevitable chorus of, Oh, come on. Its only when a bunch of ads. Corporations and advertising executives should rejoice, as this reticence of young tidy sum to think critically about the role of consumerism is money in their pockets.Advertisers crap al dashs coveted the 18-34 year old groupthe legions of the supposed Age of Acquisition who deliver few established brand loyalties and lots of pocket change. Todays genesis Y youth, born roughly between 1977 and 1997, are especially desirable because they are the children of handle Boomers, and therefore represent a population explosio n. Run the term contemporaries Y through a search engine, and youll find dozens of sites with information about how companies can take advantage of this marketing fortunate mine.Multinational corporations are deeply invested in the collective consumer choices of my students. When my students fail to show concern, these corporations become all the more powerful. So why is it that Generation Y is so uncritical of consumerism? I offer you this report from the trenches, from my college classroom in Fort Collins, Colorado, with my insight into how students view consumerism and why lack concern. I also discuss how I retain addressed these attitudes. My hope is that media activists of all stripes can draw upon my experience.To demonstrate to my students how media content itself naturalizes consumerism, I apply to show my students a clip from the movie Father of the Bride. In this clip, the tiro is horrified that his daughter wants him to overleap about $130,000 on her wedding. He wou ld prefer to cede a simple wedding reception at the local Steak Pit, alone the whole family rejects this idea. Even the adolescent son understands this is unacceptable he comments, I dont think you want the word pit on a wedding invitation. When he complains that his outset car cost less than the wedding cake, the wedding coordinators bursts into laughter and says, Welcome to the 90s. After the daughter agrees to downsize the wedding, her father discovers her, asleep, reading a magazine article with tips on how to throw a budget wedding. Suddenly sheepish of himself, he agrees to fund the extravagant wedding. Dad learns his lesson, so to speak. Consumerism-fueled expectations may be outrageous, however they are necessary, and tribulation to adhere to these expectations is silly, miserly, and downright unloving.I quit showing this clip. It didnt work. Oh, they got the point, that media content often promotes the agenda of advertisers. Unfortunately, the clip would of necessity lead to a version of the following discussion. A female student kindles her hand shyly and says, I understand why this is bad, but I want a big wedding. A dozen ponytailed heads nod in harmony. I mean, not as big as the one in the movie, someone responds, but you know, the flowers, the cake, the dress, the ring, all that stuff. Ive daydreamed about my wedding since I was a little girl. Me too, the first student says, and frowns. Does that begin me a bad person? Therein lies the trouble. The dreams, the memories, the rites of passage of Generation Y all of these are intertwined intricately with consumerism. By placing wedding consumption under scrutiny, this student haves like she is being attacked personally, because her sentimental dream of a wedding is linked so closely to products. To this Generation Y student, the suggestion there is something wrong with consumerism is similar to the suggestion that there is something wrong with her.While all of us in the post-war Weste rn world have giving up with the association between happiness and consumption, this association is all the more powerful with Generation Y. They have grown up with unlimited advertising and limited models of social consciousness or activism. Lets look at the experiences of my students, a fairly typical U. S. American sample of Generation Y. Their happiest childhood memories are thoroughly linked to consumption. They were born in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, when two important trends in childrens television occurred.Reagan, ever the media deregulator, relaxed requirements for educational programming at the same time as he relaxed restrictions on adverting to children. This helped bring forth a new marketing strategywhich Tom Engelhardt has called the Shortcake Strategy in which childrens television shows were created for the exclusive purpose of marketing large collections of childrens toys. The prized childhood memories of Generation Y are filled with these shows an d toys Strawberry Shortcake, He-Man, the Care Bears.Discussing the politics of this kind of marketing with students is even harder than discussing wedding excess. A student once wrote in my teacher evaluation, Great class, but please dont go hating on Strawberry Shortcake. And then there was high school. This is the first generation that came of age in the era of uncontrolled advertising in the schools, as healthful as Channel One, the news program piped into schools complete with advertisements. As a Generation Xer who graduated from high school in 1988, I recall very few ads in school. A relatively short time later, the hallways, lunchrooms, and sports facilities f cash-strapped schools frequently are sponsored by corporations. When I consume students if this happened in their schools, they supply never-ending examples stadiums dotted by Nike swooshes, lunchrooms filled with Pizza Hut and impudent Fil-A, a back-to-school deducty sponsored by Outback Steakhouse, even book cov ers sponsored by corporations. Then, of course, theres the prom. Eschewed by some of my Gen X counterparts, the prom is back and bigger than ever, teaching future brides and grooms important lessons about gowns, limos, and flowers.Oh, and ask a Generation Y member which mall he or she grew up in, and you may well get an answer. In addition, many an early(a)(prenominal) young people dont take consumerism seriously because they feel that as several(prenominal)s, it does not affect them. As media activists like Jean Kilbourne have argued, this illusion that advertising affects everybody else but me is nothing new, but I think this is even more the case with Generation Y. I find that young people have a hard time understanding media effects in any way other than their own experience.Students claim violence in the media doesnt point because they grew up vie Doom and they didnt turn out violent. Or they claim that unrealistic images of women in the media do matter because they know a lot of girls with eating disorders. Young people dont seem to have a language for understanding that the media doesnt just affect us on an individual train the media impact society politically, economically, and ideologically. A student might dismiss ads in his high school by saying they did not affect him.But nonetheless, the proliferation of ads in high schools have affected U. S. American culture as a whole and thats what young people do not seem to understand. Again, this individualistic way of looking at media effects isnt entirely new, especially in an individualistic culture like the United States, where social scientists for years have been obsessed with trying to draw links between individual behavior and the media. But Generation Y is a particularly individualistic cohort. The Me Generation is back.Just like in the 1970s, young people are frightened and disgusted with current events and have retreated away from politics, with their iPods, Playstations, and all the other isolating technology the consumer market can offer. But the 1970s were different because the 1960s didnt die overnight. Me Generation or not, the language of activism was still spoken in the 1970s, and in fact many young people were involved in movements such as Womens Liberation. To what activist language has Generation Y been exposed? Its three years into their own Vietnam, and Generation Y isnt on the nose flooding the streets with protestors.Often students tell me that they find politics to be boring and irrelevant to their own experiences. In other words, its pretty hard to engage a group of young people in a discussion of the political implications of consumerism when they are not engaged in politics much at all. Consumerism is a personal choice, and most of my students cannot see beyond that. They shop at Wal-Mart because its cheap, and debauch coffee at Starbucks because they like the mochas. Sweatshops? Globalization? Its not so much that young people dont care about the se things (though many dont).Rather, they harbourt been taught to think of consumerism as something that extends beyond their own enjoyable trip to the mall, or that their personal consumer decisions are political. To me, perhaps the most frustrating argument students line about consumerism is that it shouldnt be a societal concern because its the parents responsibility. Parents are responsible for refusing to buy their kids $200 basketball shoes, for making sure they eat a healthy lunch in the cafeteria, and for contribute values that, according to my students, will somehow make their children immune to the effects of advertisements.This argument disturbs me in part because very few of my students are parents, and in part because they seem to show no compassion for kids who have parents unwilling or unable to be this active in their kids development. But most of all, this disturbs me because it places corporations off the haulage for the effects they have on society. It doesnt matter how or to whom a company markets their products it only matters how parents raise their children. Once again, consumerism becomes the business of individual families, not society. So, what can media activists do?I think the first timber is to find ways to appeal to members of this generation on the level of the individual. Young people might not care about plight of a Nike worker in Vietnam or a Wal-Mart worker in Houston. They may, however, be concerned with how credit card companies lure in college students, or how college bookstores jack up prices needlessly, or how car insurance companies charge young people exorbitant amounts. When I ask students to give examples of how corporations have screwed them over personally, the room fills up with raised hands.This is a good way to show young people that although consumerism has brought them happiness in their lives, it has also brought them problems. A second activist strategy of reaching Generation Y is to find examples of p opular culture that promote consumption. Generation Y is all about popular culture. Ive found that my students are amenable to discussions about how advertisers and media producers consciously create media content that trains young people to be consumers. Young people need to know that corporations see them as a market to manipulate, and often will respond to this argument, because who wants to be manipulated?The trick is to find popular culture texts they relate to that have a strong pro-consumerism bent. No, dont show them Father of the Bride, but one thing I have shown with more success to my students is the pottery Barn episode of Friends. In this episode, Rachel lies to her roommate Phoebe and tells her their new furniture is antique. Actually, it came from pottery Barn, but Phoebe hates commercial furniture. Rachel is caught in her lie at when the two walk by Pottery Barn and see most of the furniture in the display window.But then Phoebe sees a lamp in the window and decides she must buy it. Phoebe learns her lesson. Commercial furniture is good. Another good source of pro-consumerism media is verity television, a favorite of students and chock filled with product placement. A third strategy is simply to get young people to talk to their parents about their experiences growing up and how people back in the day felt about corporate power and consumerism. These are the children of Baby Boomers, after all, so even if they havent been around activism, their parents have.One of my favorite assignments is one in which I have students interview older family members about popular culture and their past experiences. Students love this assignment. So, theres hope. When I wear my Nike hat to class, some of the students get it, and inevitably, a student stops by my office at the end of the semester and announces she has stopped divergence to Starbucks. But this is no easy task, and activists would be well advised to work on the issue of Generation Y and consumeri sm. The advertisers are certainly paying attention to Generation Y, and so should we.