 Hello there, it's Thursday at noon. I know it is Do you remember our arrangement Thursdays at noon on CFUV Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first-person plural You make it sound excessively attractive That's what I have in mind You don't have kids You've been in a store where you've heard this loud cry of desperation from an eight-year-old Exclaiming that their short life will soon come to an end if mom does not purchase a toy or game immediately Parents are often so tired of fighting and so grateful that their kid is normal in a world with so many possibilities or abnormality That they acquiesce to the demand rather than examine the implications of the purchase Other parents say no but feel a great deal of guilt and fear for their children Are they creating a world of loneliness for their child? Sociologist Robert Merton Suggested some 50 years ago that social entities are often organized for a specific purpose But then end up serving other ends Speaking in the language of functionalism Merton said social institutions have manifest functions and latent functions Advertising has the manifest function of selling products to consumers But many would assert advertising also has the latent function of reinforcing cultural messages Telling us how to be regarded as part of society through the consumption and display of certain symbols Educational institutions have the manifest function of teaching the next generation those tools needed to critically assess the world And become a productive and contributing person among other people With less and less financial support for educational institutions Selling advertising in school spaces has become a method of raising money While the manifest function of such an approach may seem worthwhile Many are beginning to question the invasion of advertising and its latent function of reinforcing cultural messages about consumption and social belonging Dan Cook Assistant professor Department of Advertising at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studies advertising in kids He is currently working on a book about the children's clothing industry with the working title The commodification of childhood Personhood the children's wear industry and the mold mentions of consumption And he added to the volume called symbolic childhood Among as many publications in both academic journals and more accessible to rest is an insightful article in the online magazine called lunchbox hedge money We talked with Dan in recent phone conversation about hegemony consumption Advertising and the commodification of childhood As we look this week and capitalist kids You're listening to first-person plural on CFUV 101.9 FM Victoria You mentioned on your website that you neither seek to praise nor to condemn advertising I think I'd like to start there because I think that's an interesting thought a lot of people are very critical of advertising and its place in culture and it sounds like you're taking a slightly different Point of view about advertising and its place in culture Well, I mean in some ways I am and I'm sure in a lot of ways I am falling into the somewhat standard approaches When I wrote that I'm writing that you know for the benefit of students as well as anyone out there and my idea is I really take I try to take an investigative approach in that way I don't seek and to praise or condemn outright from the beginning. I want to look at instances I want to look at context of advertising and consumption how these things are used how people understand them themselves So that's sort of what that sentence means Oftentimes when I hear discussions about advertising and culture there is a kind of cause and effect discussion like does advertising create culture or does Culture create advertising, you know, which what drives what and I thought that in the article You kind of approach that and in terms of talking about children and the fact that they can utilize these symbols and in ways That were not necessarily intended By the advertiser, but you also said Imaginations can be colonized. I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit. Oh, well I guess it sort of goes exactly to what you're pointing to, you know when Academics particularly but but others speak about advertising You can have this sort of polarized to schools of thought you can have you know We all are sort of individualized consumers who are sort of a rational being can come at any particular ad and sort of decide Whether we like the product or not and we're smart enough to know that but those are idealized images And since we know that it won't affect us in a sense And then there's the other side of course which is has been known and by various terms Which is particularly the cultural dopes view of human beings and the criticism is that we're so stupid that we we sort of fall For all of these kinds of things the the critical view of that is is of course that that these are powerful Means of making images and symbols in our society and it's it's very difficult to look past them And I guess what what I was approaching it in that article in the way I approach it in in my work Has to do with that both happen both can happen that the people do make meanings not intended by advertisers not intended by Producers of goods and when you look at children they color outside the lines they put you know Chocolate over Barbie dolls and feed them to their dogs and you know all kinds of things that were not intended by the advertisers But that doesn't mean also that They are necessarily completely free of the meaning structures that come with the items to engage with the item and to transform it in some way Also means that you still engage with the item you still pick up on its meaning It's its physical form some of the stories that come with it You know Disney puts itself out at Gateway to the imagination for many people and there's always the picture You know there's often that that image of Mickey the wizard and come and let your imaginations run wild But when you deal with Disney products when you go to Disney World when you look at its stories There's a whole bunch of pre-narrative eyes Morals and morality plays going on. There's narrative structures good and bad There's gender and race and and other kinds of imagery and focal points in in these sorts of stories Sometimes Disney is creating the box and then telling you that if you think within its box, it's imagination I guess that's where I was getting about about imaginations can be colonized Do you think that children are more susceptible to this? I mean we were talking about the rational actor and able to kind of tell whether or not Something's reality and is not and there are arguments that children really can't tell what is real and what is imaginary Is that part of this process that you're talking about? Well, I think part of what we need to do when we're thinking about consumer culture as a whole and thinking about Advertising and branding and all of these other really important central mechanisms that are going on in everyone's lives is to look at it not only how Someone like you or I might feel like we're on top of things and we know that those images aren't us or will never cheese them or They're or they're constructed in various ways But to sort of look at it as someone who is emerging into the world and emerging into this set of signs and relationships and images Such that once, you know, we as people as human as like a human species, you know begin garner the language and the habit of thought to be able to reflect upon our own experience and To sort of look at the world and perhaps differentiate ourselves from you know Not only advertising but other kinds of things we have already been inundated part of our thought structures and understanding structures I've already been inundated or given boundaries by these media So in that way, yes children are more susceptible in the sense of While still being creative human beings in a sense, you know, you create with the materials that you have at hand My view is that you know consumer culture advertising and the like sort of gives us a lot of materials and create some of the parameters around which Imaginations and personal agency are made. I had a favorite paragraph in the lip article I'm going to read part of it to you right now and Tell you a little story that it sort of sparked a memory of mine He wrote that high-pitched whining. You'll hear coming from the cereal aisle is more than just the pleadings of a single kid Bent on getting a box of fruit loops into the shopping cart It is the sound of thousands of hours of market research and of an immense Coordination of people ideas and resources of decades of social and economic change all rolled into a single mommy, please And I love that I thought that that was well picturesque And it reminded me a friend of mine has two kids They're about four years apart in age and she lives in a town a population about 75,000 in Florida and she told me the story of one afternoon going from there were three McDonald's in the town and They're this was during the beanie babies All right, and you know they gave a new beanie baby out every week Right you had to go to McDonald's at least once a week and collect the beanie beanie. Yes And you had to you had to do them in order or you'd miss one, you know And she got there right on the cusp. She got there just as they ran out of week fives beanie babies and So she got one happy meal with One beanie baby and then the next happy meal had the new week and this doesn't work with two kids They want the exact same beanie babies. She ended up buying Three sets of happy meals trying to get the right combination of beanie babies for her kids And the funny part was is that when she was waiting in line at these three different McDonald's She ran into the same women the same mothers doing the same thing that she was doing and they started trading Recipes on what to do with McDonald's hamburgers after you freeze them And I thought the god, you know, here is she she's a single mother and she's spending after working all day long and having to Do all of this stuff when she gets home as a single mother She spent a good hour and a half of her life trying to make the beanie babies come out, right? So many people who are getting those beanie babies weren't getting them for their children, but we're getting them for themselves Oh, yeah, those were getting them for themselves for collectible reasons and trading reasons And the happy meal rule is you have to have a child with you adults just can't go and buy them And there are actually stories of of adults Virtually I wouldn't say renting kids but getting Neighbors kids to come with them so that they could get you know four and five happy meals at a time It's an interesting take on how that the two forces kind of interact with each other because the beanie babies Campaign did get larger than just the kids and so there was some consumer choices going on with that I know that my friends kids certainly couldn't live without getting the next beanie babies I mean it was that kind of level of desperation About having to have the same collection as everybody else in town And that was a sort of mid the late 90s Phenomenon and that really speaks to a what was a you know an emergent Strategy in the kids market in general which actually sort of could see other kinds of Just just toward this in other decades and even in the 80s But but it sort of came the fruition in the 90s about sort of creating scarcity through collectibles And beanie babies did it by retiring You know old ones and coming out with new ones all the time and having these kinds of promotions You know, it's a real care to the stink and the stink Freudian slip Care to the stick that you know, you have to sort of in a land of abundance You know, you find other ways to create scarcity other than actual material scarcity. You do it stylistically the Power Rangers were also a big deal that way. There were seven of them or it's sort of a specialized planned obsolescence Exactly. Yeah planned scarcity. Yep interesting concept You've talked about how the changes we see in the way that Marketing works for kids is sort of reflective of a whole different view of childhood And I wanted to get into that how has childhood changed over the 20th century as a concept as a social concept Oh my goodness How's that for a big general question? Yeah, it's just large and we sort of confine ourselves to sort of The the european nation the european heritage nation Well at the beginning of the century of last century in in the u.s. You know many children except for You know upper-class children in some middle-class children many children were working and were Were considered that they should work with whether being factories or around the home Universal education was just getting started and over the course of the first third of of the century or so You know many children began to become liberated from direct production In that way through you know the idea of universal schooling Through the idea that they were actually taking jobs from others As immigrants came into the u.s. In canada and other end places and as the industrial mechanism sort of Ratchet it up and so children sort of were pulled out of the productive sphere and put into school and had you know more time to themselves as Many incomes began to rise and there started to be something that we recognize now as the middle class It was called they were called the midland classes that seemed to be several and i'm sure there's several now But we just call it the middle class at that point It's there was the rise of what? um sociologist viviana zealoser caused the rise of the Priceless child the child that that was economically essentially worthless didn't do very much didn't produce much for the home People were off the farm increasingly being urbanized. So you're not working on the farm and but at the same time Emotionally priceless. Yeah And sort of this sort of sacredness allows the the child to become the focal point of the home You know with you know mother-in-charge And the breadwinner away and we know that these things have somewhat changed with with women working more And so and and so on but but an essential part of that dynamic and that structure Remains as i'm sure you know and others know with women often performing a double shift of being mother and worker And so in a sense with with incomes rising and the child is the focal point of the home Children almost become a sort of leisure class in that sense on a large scale their job is to go to school and Having their own social world age-graded social world within that school divided by gender and within their particular communities having all kinds of arenas where Social presentation and social display matter the things that you have the clothes that you have And you sort of layer that on top of the increasing amounts and kinds of goods that become available And i'm thinking 20s through the 40s and into the 50s several cohorts of children moving through there All of a sudden you wind up with almost a fully concatenated age graded system of goods That pull children through the different years whether it be collectibles whether it be things for infants and then toddlers And then collectibles for the 8 to 10 year olds and on the girls side it has to do with different sorts of dress And what's appropriate and inappropriate so in effect the goods almost reflect our views of what childhood development is With the gradation and the idea that this is what a 10 year old does. This is what a Five-year-old does and yes in lots of ways. Yes, but it's dynamic It's not as standard as sort of child development theory, which has stayed the same Essentially for quite a long time. It has only been challenged in the last, you know 10 or 15 years But throughout a good part of the century Maybe some of those theories have sort of slightly changed and nuanced what has happened with the range of goods has been Sort of increasingly differentiated markets and increasingly differentiated age Ranges smaller and smaller age ranges which are nuanced by the various kinds of Sounds of sociological so gaseous The police state is using its fallow-centric organ the corporate media to control Ordinary people like you And me So now what you have is a set of parents Who have been brought up on this Exactly who were little consumers and had department stores divided out for them At each age and learn how to shop at each age And now they're adults and they're raising kids Does that I don't want to say exacerbate because it's sort of a judgment word But does this sort of start snowballing for me? That was one of my aha moments when I was doing my research on the children's clothing industry and how it changed over the Century and looking at various kinds of goods because if you sort of think of it as a wheels within wheels And if you think of different gradations of childhood age grades of childhood as they sort of change over a decade or two Also filtering into as you say sort of the adult Structure thinking about you know, what is proper for children? What is it that I had that I can give them we have more money? There's no reason to there's less reason to deny children given that that I you know had my own On you here adults say that a lot and to me this is really the key reproductive mechanism of consumer capitalism as we have it And it's cumulative and I and I do think it you know There is an exacerbation of it so that when people turn around and sort of say hey What happened to our kid? You know there was a big uproar in the late 80s about kids being a little too bratty and spoiled and and then there was another kind of uproar in the 90s about children and material kids and people sort of turn around and It's hard for people on an everyday level to understand how that Fits into an historical pattern of which their part whether they Intended to be or not What might be a key point here is that a lot of times the way culture works and the way Inculturation works is that things feel natural So this is not a conscious process on the part of parents. It's they were raised with this This is the way you raise kids. No I always struggle at this point because when you use words like unconscious or not conscious It's not it's not that they're not aware. It's that it's almost becoming habitual in a way Well, that's where we get that hegemony in some ways You might even understand That you don't feel comfortable with the whole arrangements around you But even with the images on the tv or how you want to restrict your children's consumption up to a point But you feel powerless against it even though you understand it I think the other aspect is that there was definitely a certain kind of c change with the 1960s generation and Baby boomers and perhaps those just before them in terms of the attempt to level power interpersonal power relationships Of course, this has all kinds of ramifications in terms of race and class and gender and a number of other things in Our society but alongside of that had been a discourse on childhood and what children should be and were children sort of being You know oppressed and held into certain kinds of ideals not really Be burdened with with problems of the world or or things of the world and sort of have a childhood One way that that sort of expressed itself was By parents in some ways being permissive by granting children's wishes Increasingly with this kind of wheels and with within wheels and the increasing nuances of goods What happens is that for an adult even a young adult to sort of understand The meaning world of an eight or nine or ten year old all the images all the characters all of the The things that are going on in that child's world would take an incredible amount of time You basically have to go native as a nine year old To understand it so at a certain point when a child a nine year old tells the parents look at everybody's doing this I need this and you and you as a parent sort of look at it and say well That looks relatively benign pokemon looks relatively benign sure and it might be i'm not saying it isn't but you don't you might not know all of the The aspects of it, you know, it's like sure you say you need it How who am I to sort of keep you from being you know keeping you to be an outcast in your social world? Right, so there's there's a lot of things going on simultaneously Yeah, thank god that they're not into something worse too. I think for some parents It's like i'm not a parent myself, but I do have Close friends and a couple of close friends who are single parents I see them sometimes acquiescing to this in part out of guilt of being a single parent and in part out of Just gratitude that the kinds of images that they see on television of children getting into all kinds of trouble Is not happening to their kids And so they're like oh boy the worst thing that's going to happen is I have to you know have the pokemon fight Of what i'm going to buy this week That's so much better than fill in the blank all of these fears that they have I think that I think that's that's a key point also I mean there's multiple images of childhood out there. There's multiple A potential destiny that seems like for people Um, so yeah compared to a lot of the the negative images and compared to getting pregnant and all of these other sorts of things You know the given on the small fight is one thing and and clearly for single parents or Homes where both parents are working. There's certain fights that one has to pick And sometimes there's there is a reward structure that goes on and sometimes there is also just the decision You know well look i'm not going to make the morning breakfast fight eat what you want this morning Make sure you know here's some lunch make sure you eat the healthy lunch or something And we have to get dressed and go so with that in mind Why would it be important to do the work that you're doing in terms of looking at the relationship between Advertising and hegemony. Is this something that parents should be as concerned about? I'm playing a little bit of the devil's advocate here with you. Yeah sure. Well, I think part of it is What people have felt for quite some time But but increasingly is that there is the inside and outside the idea of having a private space in the public space You know it's become pretty close to obliterated in lots of ways and one of the ways has been Electronic communication having the internet having the tv coming having video games and all of those sorts of things that the children can get into And so much of this goes under the parental radar of being able to veto it and part of the concern I think and the importance of it is that And this is where you know politics and social criticism Extranged bedfellows because you'll hear joseph Lieberman say this you also hear bill Bennett Conservative politicians say it. You also hear Ralph Nader say these sorts of things But corporations or businesses that have interests essentially in making profit essentially in selling goods and pushing goods and Developing part of this obsolescent structure creating desire and then filling it and then creating new desire and filling it in one way or another Seem to be the ones that have the eyes and the ears of many people including children And they have a different take and a different interest in One's child then one's parent does completely filtering them out is impossible Essentially impossible. I guess there's a few parents who completely keep their children away from media But once they go and have peers then the peers wonder why don't they know about a barbie? And why don't they know about teletubbies whatever and you essentially become social outcasts if you don't have that kind of Knowledge so instead of completely filtering this thing out So much burden is put on the parents to somehow find a way to be the arbiter of their children's consumption to get back to the Hegemony point and to sort of tie it into what we've been saying before You know part of the important way that a parent can do that is Essentially being reflective about one's own consumption. It's very difficult in the somewhat more leveled power relationships between parents and children For parents to be hypocritical and to then to purchase all kinds of things Would appear to be larger items for themselves But then tell their children they can't have the lollipop in the candy checkout at the store So it tied into in a sense part media criticism and part self reflexivity One of the things that I was thinking when I was looking at your article on some of your work You talk about finding ways to affirm Children's personal agency and their membership in community and society And of course, you know, some of the people that you named talk about it in terms of essentially censoring or Restricting the availability of advertising to children, you know, like watching what goes on during children's programming that kind of thing But I think one of the things when you're suggesting about self reflexivity, I wonder if part of this process shouldn't be Giving critical thinking skills. I mean parents can mimic this to their children by being critical about their own choices But I wonder how much goes on in educating children to be critical of advertising I nannied for a while while I was in grad school And one of the things I used to do was discuss commercials with the nine-year-old I was nannying specifically things that were aimed at body image was of concern to me because she was a ballerina And she picked up on these kinds of restricted ideas about body images And so I just essentially critique commercials with it. I would go What do you think of that? Are they lying to you or not? You know, what are they trying to sell you that kind of thing? I wonder if that isn't part of this process that it isn't so much That we need more censorship as we need better critical thinkers I think that's a wonderful approach and I think that's essential I don't know how much in and of itself it can happen You need parents who are critical also and this is where the again the generational turn Keep speeding on itself if you grow up on critical of consumption and you don't think much of it You might look at your child and sort of say kind we never had all that isn't that a little bit much But you haven't developed the skills to be critical of it. You just know that certain things bother you I know that for the us the pbs.org actually has a site That allows kids to click on and look at different kinds of foods And they tell them how advertisers go about the process of making a picture of a hamburger look so good And it has to do with putting glue on it and all these other kinds of things And since you're trying to get them to pull down the veil of the actual production of the advertisements Sort of demystifying the process Demystifying the process yes And there's some other helpful guides the Center for the New American Dream has tips for parenting in a consumer culture Which is a quite interesting little book for parents who are thinking about these things But we have to remember too that when we're thinking about education are in the u.s. and canada Sure, you know schools are inundated with ads now. There's licenses for food There's billboards on the school buses. There's sponsored textbooks There's a number of these kinds of things that are going on at all time and when with communities strapped for cash Many of them of course are taking these kinds of advertising dollars So there's less and less around separated from an advertising anymore For kids and for adult But it seems like the school board is one of the places where in some ways it's still locally controlled And there still can make a pretty good argument to try to keep advertising out of there But the fight also has to become an educational fight, you know, if it happened in a local school community It's good to talk to kids and try to tell them You know, why is it that you as a parent and other parents don't want these things coming into the school channel one The the two minutes of advertising a day along with eight minutes of supposed News programming that's shown to tens of millions of american children a day It's very difficult to argue that those two minutes in that they see the ads in the classroom Are any different than the hours of ads they see during the week? Sure Well, I feel like we've just barely tapped into it, but we're probably going to have to wrap it up. Okay This is quite an interesting topic and I appreciate your time today Uh, you want to make any kind of final word? No, I think we've we've covered a lot of things. I think it's a difficult process and I think Unfortunately parents have been put at the sort of gate to fend off a whole bunch of different groups Agendas. Yes. Well, thank you, Dan. Thank you. Thank you Well, I for one am not going to blame the kids for what's happening I'm going to blame the adults or as I prefer to call them old people Well, I think that that's uh Probably a fair assessment. Do you think that's sociologically valid? Well, yeah I don't know of very many kids who are ad execs And uh, there are very few kids who control content on television and in their schools Chrissy ad execs think that they're meeting needs And uh, I always find it interesting that They believe that they are in fact Filling a niche somehow with children, you know, that there's this demand for pokemon and Tickle me elbows and beanie babies and so forth and that this demand Sort of springs from the child I think children should be noted as the class that consumes but does not produce This isn't true in the absolute their children who work and their children who get paid for their work But for the most part they're characterized by having well, some of them have in any case disposable income without having Any work Or any need to of any need to bring in that revenue other than to hang around the house. Maybe do some chores I point this out because Henry Ford's Idea to pay his workers enough to afford his cars Has gone missing in the last few years And I've often wondered about that I've wondered how would the producers of the world those who wholesale retail Get around that and the answer is create a class that consumes but does not produce And that's what children are to a great extent Someone is out there buying CDs of boy bands of whom I've never heard and about whom I do not care Oh, come on. You went to a Backstreet boys concert. That's right folks. I've been to a backstreet boys concert Should we tell you? Yes, I suppose so It was at a theme park in florida. It was a new year's eve celebration. It is perfectly warm enough In the part of florida Where the theme park was to be outside on new year's eve You might have to wear a jacket and this was the year before they made it big So they were a local band at the time and a very obvious knockoff of every other boy band in existence Oh, yeah, they were in sync in florida Our then 10 or 11 year old niece made us watch them for 45 minutes before we rebelled And went to do something more mature like riding the roller coaster upside down Exactly We looked at them and said, okay, this is a theme park created band Not a real boy band and fools that we were a year later They became emotionally popular with the under force that And sold their first trillion cds. Okay, this is a slight distortion of what happened, but you get the idea Nonetheless There were a lot of teenage girls at the park that night who already knew who they were who probably had already Purchased their cds and who certainly had the 35 dollars or whatever it was To show up at the park and go and watch them and scream loudly And I doubt very seriously of any of these little prepubescent and early pubescent Young women was not pubescent Pubescent in process I think I'm becoming a woman We're in fact Working anywhere and obtaining funds to do what they did And and this is a good point because this was a good place For these kids to go on new year's eve and a lot of the parents brought their kids to the park So that they could stay there till after midnight Have some fun in a structured Place a secure place And mom and dad didn't have to worry about whether or not they were going to be at a party where alcohol was served Mom and dad had some control over when they got there and when they left And and that and yet the kid could feel independent because a lot of them were dropped off So they traded off any possibility of controlling their children's consumption in exchange for fulfillment of the bourgeois values Or am I being I think you're being a little simplistic there because What do you want them to do scream at the backstreet boys or go out and get stoned on new year's eve, you know, it's it's Neither that's an obvious. Yeah, I know it's it's the answer would be neither But if you don't have the neither choice, what do you do? Well, you opt for the lesser of the two evils So the question is is the lesser of the two evils consumption Now that is not what you do what you do is try to strike a balance You try to avoid to use the statistical terminology type one and type two arrows Or at least you would optimally You can air too far in the other direction as well and that's exactly what created this mess in the first place People who wouldn't let their kids out of the house sat them in front of the electronic babysitter for hours at a time And then we're surprised that tv was telling their children what to do What a shock I am so shocked I could just die from overload of shock So I think though you got to back up one step because I'm not ready to just blame the parents on this Okay in order to create this Consumption I mean you mentioned Henry Ford about people being paid enough to buy the cars You have now a phenomenon where you need two incomes to keep a family going It went from in the 70s where women were choosing to work to the 90s where women had to work Now I come from a working class background working class neighborhoods and This kind of choice never was a choice for the women in my neighborhood Most of the women in my neighborhood did some sort of work And I'm talking the 50s and 60s not just You know after women were liberated And my grandmother did work and so forth Because The family did need that kind of thing But it wasn't because the father had a full-time job That couldn't cover, you know, that paid well and still couldn't cover the family expenses. It was because Men had jobs that didn't pay well or weren't consistently Available to them, you know, my grandfather was a sharecropper and my other grandfather was A coal miner and so when things were tight you couldn't work The women of the family made up the difference to a certain extent But now you have this middle-class phenomenon in which two people have Really good incomes. I mean To me and my estimation coming from where I came from and yet it isn't enough To cover the needs of the family The child consumption thing is a reflection of adult consumption As well. Yes to show you that I've read a sociology book The term conspicuous consumption comes back to haunt us here One of the ways that old people you say parents and I want to say old people because you're a society in the social world I really want to identify them by age One of the ways that old people consume conspicuously is by buying expensive things for their kids And then do this to impress each other. Yes, there's a symbology going on here You don't want your buddies in the country club see and your kid tooling around in a 75 car Because that will make them think you are the poor And then they will not invite you to join their golf forces anymore Right or come to the bridge club or to the dinner party, etc Do you remember the term? I haven't heard this in a long time, but keeping up with the jones's I've heard of it not recently. Yes, that was a term that came up during the 1960s and it referred to the phenomenon of living in the suburbs and taking a look around At the other things that people in the suburbs owned and making sure that you Owned it as well and we look on this as being stupid and it is but it is in at least one sense quite rational In the context of social Darwinism in which the suburbs are rose It is inescapable the richest guy gets to be in charge And if you are second place you are the first user see I disagree with that analysis I think it's a different thing phenomenon going on. I don't think it was Darwinistic at all I think it was you went from living in Multifamily housing usually somewhere near your relatives so that you know your cousins lived in the same building with you You know whether it was out on the farm where everybody lived in the big farmhouse Or if it was in the city where multiple families lived on one block In a big building you nonetheless were connected to people and knew what people You know you knew each other's business to a certain extent and got to see each other and talk to one looking for us community community exactly And you move to the suburbs to little boxes that are separated by bigger yards And you suddenly feel isolated. So what's one way to feel connected with everybody around you? You feel connected by the things you own If you own the same kind of car as your neighbors if you own the same kind of If you own the same kind of lawn mower and have the same pretty lawn that your neighbor has And your house is painted similarly and et cetera, et cetera Then you somehow replace this feeling of community with a sense that you're part of the group These become symbols that say I belong here. And in fact, it's really interesting There's a book called the clustering of america Which is based upon looking at zip codes and how marketers use zip codes to determine what kinds of marketing to send to you And the thing that people have in common with each other and the reason that it came out to be like instead of Sociologists tend to talk in terms of socioeconomic level and when they talk about this they they say Here's um, you know a lower class Here's lower middle class middle middle class, et cetera And it's based upon income and resources available to the family But what marketers know is that we really divide ourselves up on the basis of the things that we consume And what you have in common with your neighbor is not your income What you have in common with your neighbor is the things that you will buy So that there are zones where everybody goes to a coffee shop and they all Watch pbs and then you have another zone where everybody buys malt liquor beer Has parties on friday night and will play, you know illegal poker games sometime during the week or whatever The point of the matter is is that the things you do and the things you buy What you spend your money on is what you have in common with your neighbors That that's where the clustering is is around your purchasing power Doesn't it make sense that kids would do this too? And I think that's what marketers have tapped into is you want to look like all the other kids at your school at in your neighborhood So if everybody has nike tennis shoes on then we all feel like we belong Or if you don't fit into that primary group, then you want to rebel in acceptable ways You want to be the rebel who's identifiable as such you don't want to be someone who rejects Both the norm and the accepted deviation from the norm. Yeah, like bafflers Consolidated deviance incorporated. You actually have a cue from the ccc book. Yes, you actually have standardized ways To mark that you are in fact rebelling Against the standardized ways in which you can look like you're part of the group to win if you are a badass You must show up in leather. Yes, if you showed up in a kilt everybody would try to kick your butt This is not consistent with the a priori bad attitude However, if you really were a badass you'd want people to pick fights with you so that you could have these used to kick their butt Therefore you would wear a kilt even if you weren't scottish Or did not know whether you were is that why the scott's wear kilts to work so that other people will pick fights with them I doubt very seriously. That's exactly how it started. They're tough guys, man It's uh, you think along the heart about it before you mess with them Spoken like somebody who's descended from scott's men. I may be they're not sure The problem is that the old people made consumption into the central principle of economics and now it's come back to haunt them They gave up on the do you think that they're haunted? See, I don't think I I think that people like damn think about you think this is what they wanted You think they complain about their kids doing this and their kids doing that and buying all this stuff But then they go back to work the next day and they work to make it even worse Because I think it might be a smokescreen. I've considered that possibility. I think that the whole thing may just be complaining For the sake of complaining. I think dan got it right. I think they don't have A critical mind about it, but they do have this gut feeling that something's wrong That it isn't quite right, but they don't know they don't take the time to think about why it wouldn't be right And they're not so uncomfortable with it because it is comfortable, especially now that the parents Grew up in the fifties and sixties when this kind of consumerism was emerging So you now have a bunch of people who are parents who were raised exactly like this as I said in the interview it exacerbates it and I think that it also makes an An extra layer that you have to get through critically if you're going to Break this little cycle that's going on and I think most parents don't take the time This is how I think capitalism works with advertising very neatly and why Advertising has emerged in the 20th century as being such a vital part of capitalism Because you had a kind of alienation that occurred In capitalism as people got further and further away from the products of their labor And now you have this thing that that has the golden promise of filling that gap And yet it never quite does because you know if you ever if If a product actually really did satisfy you you'd stop buying it Getting breaking that cycle requires you to see that Requires you to see that there's something that your feeling is missing and that when the television tells you You can fill that hole with a product They design it so that you really can't quite fill the hole with it because they want you to come back and try to fill the hole again And I don't think that That people think about that much and on top of it on now we work so much Two parent households always on the run both of them working 40 hours a week The time that it takes to actually sit down and think about this and critique it is gone So it's a nice neat little self-perpetuating system You you go to work you feel alienated you come home You don't have time to think about that alienation because you got to worry about getting up and going to work tomorrow You got this nice little promise in front of you sitting there That you all you have to do is just sit and watch and it tells you you know Well, we know you feel bad and you're like yeah, I feel bad and then well here You know try this and you'll feel better So you go out you try it and you may even feel better at first But then it wears off and you start the little cycle all over again And if anybody comes in and says hey stop stop time out. Let's think about this You go, I don't have time to I don't have time to I got to go to work next week I don't have time to think about this. This is the household that we're raising our kids in So they see this and you know, they may have time to think about it But they're too busy playing with their pokemon To think about it too besides mom and dad seem happy when you're playing with the pokemon Because you're not out doing drugs getting pregnant etc etc. It's a hard thing to crack I guess I'd be a mess if I didn't mention the media oligopoly at least once during this discussion Carl's favorite topic and it applies here. Yes the old people sold radio and tv and quite a few other venues to The oligopoly and well, I say sold they gave it to the oligopoly because the oligopoly told them to And they didn't have the strength of motor consider that it might not be the best thing to do And now look at the result. Yes, and they're still rolling it back so far from having realized their mistake They're still giving the oligopoly everything they asked for And this this phenomenon is not confined to the united states canada trashed community television in 1997 They still have something that the cable companies call community television But it consists of that cable company putting on what it considers community television Not the community putting on what it considers community television, right? So it becomes even more centralized and even more under the control of What is essentially the only cable company in western canada? I would like to say that there is some good news here though, and I want to kind of cross this because I always believe that there are Divergent and convergent Horses going on and I think that you're right about the oligopoly and I think you're right about how You know, there wasn't vigilance in a couple of generations back about keeping the airwaves more public and more in the public domain Having said all of that we now have 97 channels with nothing on so to speak or was it 57 channels with nothing on? I think that what we're seeing emerging right now is A desire for new kinds of programming and that gives people who are vigilant And who are upset with and who have taken the time to critically think about what is going on in the media a chance to Present alternatives to programming. I think the key here though is The oligopoly has gotten into the schools and now Activists have to get into the schools and start fighting this and sort of turn the schools back on to this kind of alternative programming And I think that's also true in the homes of people that point that Dan brought up was very salient Channel one. Yes, and the channel one is by it is far from being the only offender in this area Parents complain to complain to complain about their kids being turned into little consumers And then what do they do? They sold the schools to the private sector Yes, but I'm not sure that the parents did I think the parents were out working and missed the point where it happened My point exactly. Yeah, I mean And I don't accept the old people from doing that from saying I can worry about my job And let the rest of them won't go to heck in the handbasket, right? Maybe they exempt themselves But I think that what you see here though is also the emergence of the anti globalization movement as it's called in the major media in the mainstream media And part of what they're complaining about is things like this and part of the activism that doesn't get covered In the mainstream media is to go to school boards and say don't let this happen And there is a backlash going on about this and there are activists who are beginning to do it And so I don't want us to leave this picture Only half, you know only the negative. I mean, it's really bad in a lot of ways But the good news is that there are a lot of people who are getting fed up with it And they're beginning to find ways to make it stop and one of the best ways and I guess we'll end on this note That I think that parents who are concerned about this Could begin besides turning the tv off in their home Is to get involved in their schools and ask them not to let commercialization happen in the schools And they're going to have to put their tax dollars towards that too to make it happen because the reason that commercialization Is so appealing to the school is that schools don't have budgets We're spending money on bombs and we're not spending money on education That makes the oligopoly happy. I think there's another possibility. I think alternative educational venues could be developed Home schooling has a rotten reputation in certain parts of this continent, but not in canada In the states it's up and down. There's some places where it has an excellent reputation somewhere It doesn't it acquired a connotation of racism in the 1960s because of all the uh whites in the southeast Who lost their minds when integration came into being and said Who needs public school education? I learned my kids at home or words to that effect But I think the notion of a single unified centrist oligopolistic educational system has finally broken down Yes, and channel one and the programs like it are the proof By the way channel one is nothing compared to what happens at the university level. That's a topic for another time. Yes And I think that putting together some sort of alternatives to this centrist oligopolistic educational system by which I include university level education Maybe essential it may be The last best hope Sure to avoid the sort of conditioning the sort of acculturation You have been listening to first person plural because how people get along with each other still matters First person plural Is a show created for community radio by carl wilkerson and dr. Patty thomas to examine social and organizational issues Music for first person plural is performed composed and produced By carl wilkerson Except where noted For more information about first person plural dr. Patty thomas or carl wilkerson Visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com