Hodgepodge

It all started with this morning's link-hopping, which led me to the page on The Merchants of Cool, which is the name of a study conducted by Frontline. Some things I saw:

#1:

Brian: They were talking about the rebelliousness--but it's not rebelling at all. They're capitalizing on the fact that people want to be rebellious, and they're talking about how teachers are nerds and authority figures are laughable. I mean, they're basically saying, "Everybody sucks except for us."

. . . . They're basically telling us what to like and what we should like. They're trying to make money, obviously, and it's not about trying to make anybody happy. It's not a business in that it's trying to help people; it's a business in that it's making money.

Adia: Is pop culture trying to help people?

Laura: No. It's trying to make money. That's the problem, we're a money-making culture.

Tor: It at least pretends that it's trying to help people. Like it offers a solution if you just dumb yourself down enough to accept it. . . .

from the What Teens Think page

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#2:

I can give you a very dramatic example from the world of book publishing. Bantam Books was the second mass market paperback company to be formed in the United States just after World War II. And it was conceived deliberately with large masses of young readers in mind. Books like The Grapes of Wrath, Shakespeare's Greatest Comedies, Jane Eyre, sold for 25 cents with the aim of making sure that young people who weren't rich could get hold of really good books. And it did very well.

Well, by now Bantam Books is part of the Bertelsmann empire, which is the largest book publisher in the world, a commercial entity based in Germany that dominates the American publishing landscape. A couple of years ago, Bantam came out with the Barfarama series for young male readers 12 to 15 with titles like Dog-Doo Afternoon and The Great Puke-Off. These are all brainlessly scatological books that were packaged just to make a buck. Now some of the people who do them claim, "Oh, at least we're getting young people reading." That's a very disingenuous thing to say.

- Mark Crispin Miller, media critic & author of
"Boxed In: The Culture of TV"

from the The Coarsening of Culture page

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#3:

I think that we all sort of still crave the kind of quiet, non-commercial space in our lives. We treasure them and whether we're aware of it as adults or whether we just sort of do it spontaneously as kids, I think that there the still those distinctions made in everyone's life that this is all part of MTV and that this is not.

I think if you sort of think about the progress of MTV through the years, it's been to gradually push that boundary so that the quiet, sort of non-commercial space is shrunk more and more and now I think kids social life is made up of commercial culture to a very large degree, whether it's, "Oh, I see you're wearing Tommy Hilfiger," and "Why are you doing that and not wearing, you know, Polo?" Or, you know, "Did you see the Limp Bizkit ad video on MTV?"

I mean these are the reference points. It's no longer, you know, "Do you want to go down and see if we can see some turtles at the lake?" I think that those kinds of experiences are discouraged partly because they're not as exciting and fun and not as many people engage in them, and also because you don't seen them on MTV.

- John Seabrook, writer for The New Yorker & author of
"Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing -- The Marketing of Culture"

from the What's This Doing to Kids? page

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These I came across at the site containing THE MERCHANTS OF COOL: A report on the creators and marketers of popular culture for teenagers. There's lots to read, and I tried to trim it down with a hodgepodge of what the site contains by providing the samples above and the links leading to the pages. If you want to feed your mind (with good food), these are materials for you.