Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Sheep
This is what The Merchants of Cool prove. Teenagers are willing to follow whatever fad comes there way. It is a shame this is what our country has came too. Teenagers are shown following trends that are over marketed and give into peer pressure. Why blame the marketers. We are all marketers especially us that are going to become teachers. We our marketing our subjects, our lessons, our way of thought. We should not blame the marketers for doing there job they just caught on to the way teenagers think. Teenagers are followers and not leaders.
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I agree that "following" is a trait commonly attributed to teenagers, but I think we have to look at that assumption a little closer, especially with regards to the piece we watched. I may be misinterpreting your conclusion, but I feel that it is a little unfair to assume that all teenagers are followers and not leaders when the coolhunters were clearly seeking them out for their opinions—it is, then, the marketers themselves who are following. Of course, a number of teenagers are, in turn, following the marketers, but this is where the whole idea of the feedback loop comes from. Who leads when each party holds the leash tethered to the neck of the other? Who follows? I suppose there isn't a really satisfying conclusion to these kinds of questions, or to any other matter involving the recursive or fractal patterns that manifest in existence. The whole thing kind of reminds me of Ouroboros, which depicts a serpent devouring its own tail. Who is the consumer? Who is the consumed?
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to discuss this train of thought. Couldn't it also be argued that the true sheep is the media? Marketing and media agencies seek out people that do, indeed, think originally. They said at one point, that they seek out these people, take their ideas, and overmarket them until they become mainstream. The market we know today really does not originate any of their own ideas, they take things they see as becoming potential "hot" items and throw them in the faces of the consumer. It's not as though teenagers just hop on the bandwagon at first opportunity; they are having these things shoved down their throats. Everything teenagers seem to be "followers" towards are things that marketers have deemed as something teens would like.
ReplyDeleteLike Steve said, that's the entire concept of the feedback loop. Teenagers may be the "sheep", but they are also the initiators of the ideas of those they follow, if that makes sense.