The Merchants of Cool

Teens make up a very large part of today’s market. 32 million teens with plentiful disposable income provided for the most part by their parents creates a massive empire to the tune of $150 billion. Since this is such a huge part of the spending market, corporations find it vital to understand and recognize what is considered “cool” among today’s teens. In 2001, author and media critic Douglas Ruskoff explored how trends are tracked in the show, “The Merchants of Cool”.
Not only do teens spend a lot of money, but they also spend on lot of time taking in media content. In addition, teens are bombarded daily by thousands of discrete ads. Corporations find it very useful to market themselves to this huge teen audience. In order to do this best, they must find out what the teens would be most interested in. Companies, such as Look-Look search for a “personality” that would sell. They call this “cool hunting”. By finding out who the trendsetters are and what trends are rising up, the cool hunters can make projections are market their products in the best possible way.
Advertisers have found that teens can see straight through a campaign scheme, so instead, they have found it more effective to have their products become part of a culture. Companies, such as Sprite, have combined corporation and culture, creating a new identity without appearing to try too hard. Sprite was heavily promoted by hip-hop artists (who were paid to do so) and the soft-drink immediately entered the minds of teens via the culture, not a campaign.
Viacom, one of the big five of media corporations, make a billion dollars in profit off of their television channel MTV. MTV is comprised mostly of cheap, easy to create content. They follow what they call “the rule of cool”, by not letting their marketing show. They often do their market research by going to the homes of a typical viewer and studying them in nearly all aspects of life. They feel the more they know about their customer, the better the connection they can make with them. This ifnography study creates a portrait of their teen audience that they can then turn into content on their channel. The “Mook” and the “Midriff” represent the things that boys and girls associate with. The “Mook” can be found in programming like professional wrestling and shows like Jackass, while the “Midriff” is all about the female appearance. MTV promotes raunchy behavior, as seen on their Spring Break programming to the point where it becomes unclear who is imitating who. Is the media reflecting the real life actions of the audience or is the audience just imitating what they see in the media? This feedback loop has gotten to a point where finding an answer to this is impossible.
For me personally, this is my last year being defined as a teenager. I have pretty much grown up watching things like MTV and being the one marketed by corporations. I can defiantly see where the media has had an impact on teens. When the media portrays certain things as being “cool” they do indeed become cool. Sometimes I wonder how trends would form if it weren’t for the media, but I guess that is a world we will never get to see.

Self Portraits

This portrait represents a bunch of the products and brands that I consume.

This portrait is a little hard to see but I have three images representing media combined with a picture of me. I included a macbook (representing my use of the computer and internet), the buttons of a tv remote (representing the tv I watch), and a cell phone. Together, they make up most of the media I take in.

Happiness Machines, a part of a documentary series called “Century of Self”, describes how psychoanalysis has been used throughout the last century in efforts to make mass communication more effective. The documentary focused on the thoughts of two important people; Sigmund Freud and his nephew, Edward Bernays. Freud had developed a whole theory on psychoanalysis, but in his home of Vienna it was overlooked as useless. Bernays, who was working in America, however, found that he could put his uncle’s theory to good use. In fact, if Bernays had not provided money to Freud to get print copies of his works to America, they may have gone unrecognized for years more.
Bernays noted that the word “propaganda” was being received with negative connotations so he developed a new word: “public relations”. The groundwork for today’s media was laid in the early 20th century and its remnants can still be seen. He was one of the first to uncover the idea that the car could symbolize sexuality for men, a thought that still exists despite the changes to cars and who drives them over the years. Bernays’ use of psychoanalysis in public relations is best exemplified by how he was able to change the perception of female smokers.
Without the discoveries made in the early 20th century it is impossible to know what things would have been like in the mid 20th century when televisions entered the home. The media as we know it now might be complete different without the theories of psychoanalysis.

Synopsis of Ch 3

Chapter 3 of Understanding the Media by Eoin Devereux goes into an explanation of how the media is organized. There are many different ways that media-based companies are structured, and how it is organized has an effect on what comes out of it. In order to best understand the products of media companies, it is important to have a concept of how they are organized and run.
The types of owners of the company often determine what their content is like, mostly due to the differences in editorial freedom. Different types of ownership include private, public, and non-profit. Public ownership of media producers often try to please a very large audience, with a broad range of interests. These companies are often funded by commercial activities, but sometimes work with privately owned operators. In the past, when a company was privately owned, it was controlled by a small group of people. These days, however, they are controlled by conglomerates. Non-profit companies often cater to a very small, specialized audience on a much smaller scale.
As companies merge, fewer people become in charge of larger number of media sources, and not just on a national level, but a global one. As ownership becomes more concentrated and globalized, media content appears to become more and more “dumbed down”. In addition, if the owners of a conglomeration choose to go in a certain direction, all of their subunits follow suit, leading to a decline in diversity.
Another way to describe the organization of media ownership is vertical versus horizontal integration. When an owner controls both the production and distribution of a single product entirely, it is considered vertical integration. When a single company owns a variety of smaller units of media, it is called horizontal integration. These two types of organization also impact the outcome of the media. In horizontal integration, there is a higher chance of attaining greater profits, as certain areas of the ownership may excel. In vertical integration, however, all of the company’s efforts go into one product and become reliant on its success.
The chapter continues by discussing the concept of the public sphere. The public sphere, developed by Jürgen Habermas, emphasizes the importance of public discourse in order to maintain a civic and democratic society. Since mass media is such a large factor of how people think, it is important to implement the public sphere into it. However, this becomes difficult when trying to appease a number of different audiences and ideas. One media source that overcomes this challenge is the internet. The possibilities of the internet are nearly infinite, as a user can search for literally anything in the world. While this may sound great, many internet users often overlook the “important” things and instead go for entertainment over information. The internet has the potential to be a great public sphere, but not until it can be equally accessed by anyone.
Overall, media depends on two things, who produces it, and what the consumers do with it. The organization of ownership often determines the audience being sought and the message being sent. The audience, in turn, determines how the messages affect them.

Magazine Assignment

For my magazine assignment, I chose Time Magazine as my starting point. I created my own text for the cover, writing "The Newcomer" on each cover. For each cover, I put a different picture, a person, an object, and an idea. Barak Obama may be an obvious "newcomer", as he is newly president, but it was interesting to see the same text placed over a picture of a new technology (the iPhone), and a new idea movement (going green, represeneted by the lightbulb). It was interesting to see the feeling change from cover to cover. as each newcomer has a different kind of impact on our lives. Here are my three covers:

My Band

Band Name: Cosmosoma
Album Title: "where your thoughts take you"

Spectatorship and Power Relationships in Advertising

The man in this advertisement does not appear to be aware that he is the object in the photo. Because he is not making eye contact, he has not engaged in a connection of any kind. Since the man’s eyes are looking down on the bottle and the water pouring from it, the spectator’s attention is drawn there too. The man does appear to be smiling, indicating that he is enjoying pouring the water. In addition, we only see the upper half of his body, so an illusion is created because it looks like he is part of the ice structure he is building, like a metaphor for him becoming one with the water. So while he is not the direct object, he is used to help that object (the water) convey the message the advertiser is trying to get across.





Kool advertisements have always been known for making their audience feel a certain way. In this advertisement, we see two people, but only the face of one of them. We can only see the hand and arm of the man holding the pack of the cigarettes. The woman appears to be looking up to see the man in the reflection, and looking up is often an indicator that the person being looked up to is in power. By giving the man holding the cigarettes the power, the advertiser conveys the message that their cigarettes will make the viewer powerful too.

Midterm Synopsis

Whenever we look at something, it is not just the object that determines what we see. We not only look in a context of the sounds, smells, and feelings surrounding us, but in the context of how our individual brains interpret what our eyes deliver. Chapter three of Practices of Looking goes into detail about the concepts of spectatorship and the gaze, explaining their uses in understanding the psychology of looking. Spectatorship is defined as “the practice of looking” (p 102), while the gaze is “a field rather than an individual’s act of looking” (p 103). The concepts of spectatorship and gaze are used in all sorts of visual media throughout history: from classic masterpieces to current blockbuster movies.
In order to better explain this concept, Foucault used the Diego Velazquez painting “Las Meninas”, painted in 1656. In this painting, Velazquez carefully took the spectator into consideration. By placing a mirror in the scene, the viewer’s viewpoint is altered, and in effect, Velazquez also places the viewer into the scene. When the viewer becomes part of the object they are looking at, it brings the interpretation to a whole new level. While these this may have been a trick of the trade nearly 400 years ago, it is still in practice today.
The unconscious mind is very important when it comes to cinematic spectatorship. The gaze has been heavily looked at in the field of psychoanalysis, and helps to understand spectatorship and the unconscious aspects of looking. “Psychoanalysis was brought in to visual theory in order to explain more fully the idea that the subject is constituted at an unconscious, as well as a conscious level” (p 103). Christian Metz, a cinematic theorist wrote about how the minds of viewers react to watching a film. When in a dark movie theater, where the screen acts almost like a mirror, the viewers shed their own ego and identifies with the character on screen. Jacques Lacan another theorist believed “that the gaze is a property of the object and not the subject who looks. The gaze is a process in which the object functions to make the subject look making the subject appear to himself or herself as lacking” (p 122), which leads to the process of identification, and the study of how we respond to and associate with images.
The gaze has also been studied in terms of gender. Through most of history, the audiences of works of art have been men, so the artists have geared their works towards male eyes and brains. This resulted in the nude females always appearing as “objects of an active or ‘male’ gaze, and their returning looks are more often downcast, indirect or otherwise coded as passive” (p 123-124). Centuries later, this trend can still been seen in present-day advertisements.
Artists and advertisers have a knack for getting into the minds of their viewers. Through careful use of the gaze and spectatorship, they cannot only alter what we see, but how we see.