This video reminded me of Feed the entire time I was watching it. While reading the book I could not imagine being bombarded by so many advertisements within my own head and wherever I went. After watching The Merchant of Cool I realized that I am confronted with more advertising than I could ever realize. I'm looking around my room right now and seeing that I am trapped in a world of merchandizing. It's an incredibly sad thought to me that almost everything I watch or read is full of advertising and commercializing.
I also found it interesting that once a company exploits what is "cool" it immediately kills it. This search for cool is a never ending cycle that to me seems a huge waste of time, since I have no interest in the workings of the corporate world. It's just sad that a company has to go through so much and try so hard to appeal to us just to sell their products. Yet, we buy into it. And, honestly, it seems to be irreversible.
Is anyone else saddened by this fact?
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I agree with you completely. When I read Feed I thought that would suck just to seem ads after ads after ads of things to buy all the time, but then I realized after the video merchants of cool that we do see ads after ads after ads of things to buy, but that we are so used to it that it no longer affects us anymore. It makes me scared to what our future is going to be like actually if things keep becoming worse. I am definitely saddened by this fact.
ReplyDeleteI would tend to agree that it is a little sad how everyone buys into consumerism, but at the same time I think we would be pretty miserable without it. Life seems to be a struggle to improve your situation, but it is that process of reaching toward something better than the actual fulfillment that drives us forward. We have drastically improved our living conditions through science, government, and business, but companies and organizations have no inherent motivation to improve our situations for us if we do not reciprocate monetarily. We need each other at this point; Merchants even calls attention to this symbiosis. What I'm driving at, though, is that none of this is inherently good or bad—it just IS—and we are, as humans, perpetually tempted to apply emotions to facts. The market is wonderful when it gives us a product we want, but terrible when it offends our good senses or bombards us with products we never needed. The sun is good when it lights the day, but bad when it burns our skin. Really, though, the sun just is. The market just is.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with the connection you made to Feed. When I read the book I too could not imagine always having constant advertisements taking place inside my head. I then realized that I am always surrounded by advertisements, whether I am conscious of it or not. It also connected to Feed because they really try and create profiles of their customers and set trends that just become uncool and die. In feed they advertised to Violet and Titus what they thought they would be interested in. The same goes for the executives of these huge companies. They research the youth to make an advertising profile of them and target the Young adult age group in their campaigns. When the young adults resist, like Violet did, they just rearrange their advertising until they can create a different profile. The trends that were discussed in Feed also related to how trends are killed by the mainstream in our culture today. I think in Feed everyone was carring a fake bird around for awhile because it was seen as cool. Once everyone was doing this it was uncool anymore. The same goes for real life. Once everyone is wearing something its coolness starts to dwindle and a new trend is picked up. This is what always seems to happen with fashion trends. So Feed in many ways is just describing (in an exaggerated way) what is already taking place in our world.
ReplyDeleteEmily - It is sad, but I am clinging to the hope that the corporations will forever be behind on what is "cool". The minute they catch on, the subconscious minds of the teenage America are already bored with it and moving on. Hold on to the happy thought that mainstream America will never really get a hold on what's cool, because what is cool is what hasn't happened yet!
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