I'll be honest. I can't hardly watch things like this anymore. It's so discouraging to think of how much we are controlled by the "market." We're taught what and how to think in so many ways. I can hear Tyler Durden from the movie Fight Club screaming in my head: "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off" (imdb.com - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes). But as much as there is a part of me that is like, that's it, I'll just fall off the grid and not be influenced by anything a la Tyler Durden, I know that is simply not realistic. I'm going to be a teacher. I'll be fingerprinted for my job. That's about as on the grid as you can get.
So with that course of action firmly off the table, from an educator perspective I think that this is exactly the sort of thing that we should expose our future students to. They should be conscious that the world they live in is a world that markets to them; what they should wear, eat, drive, and simply consume in general. Messages (tv, print ads, newspapers, internet, etc.) should all be looked at from a critical lens: who is paying for this, what do they want me to think, what is the author's intent, what are the unintended messages that we can expose, what is the purpose, the point? I think critical theory does an excellent job of posing these sorts of questions. I would definitely show this in a classroom someday, and I think it fits in very well with the Marxist critical theory and the book "Feed," which discusses similar ideas of who is in charge of how we think in society. I can see a book like "The Giver" working really well in such a unit as well, especially for a middle school audience.
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I agree, kids need to realize that everything they're exposed to through the media has an ulterior motive. Then they can consciously decide whether or not they want to accept that, or how much of it they want to accept, so they're not just another unwitting cog in a much larger wheel.
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ReplyDeleteAs I was reading Feed, I was struck by the same first feeling -- that I'd heard this all before, especially in Fight Club (a favorite of mine as a YA). The use of bulky ad-like phrasing (especially in the final pages, where Titus describes his relationship with Violet as a dust jacket would), as well as the constant descriptions of average objects in marketing jargon, was common in Fight Club (for example, an apartment as a living Ikea catalogue), used for sarcasm and for depicting the ridiculous nature of the Narrator's struggle to get rich/get ahead. Violet's "calls to action" against capitalist entities sound like Tyler's calls to throw away your cars and your clothes, to blow up buildings and "destroy something beautitful."
ReplyDeleteIn this sense, because I found Fight Club so striking when I first saw it (when I was 13 or 14, and utterly in awe of the crazy, new outlook it gave me on the world), Feed becomes all the more important in an educational sense. Kids are searching, desperately, for some meaning in their experiences (often capitalist), and a novel like this gives a more relatable (less mid-life crisis-based) form in which to understand Marxist thinking. The sooner I knew about the detriments of capitalism, the sooner I was able to build up a healthy skepticism for any one way of seeing the world. Feed would give YAs in a classroom a new, valuable lens through which to view and size up their lives.
I also agree that this knowledge should be imparted to a younger audience, say 10-14 year olds. I remember when I was 11 or 12 years old the drug Extacy became extremely popular in my community. My older brother was 17 and my parents were afraid that he would try it and then cast his influence upon me. I remember them forcing us to sit down one night and watch a 1 hour documentary on Dateline NBC about it's detrimental effects; how it creates deadspots, or "holes", in your brain after sustained use. It definitely left a lasting effect. That shit still scares me.
ReplyDeleteIt’s our jobs as educators to help children understand that there is a purpose and place for everything… the quote from Fight Club is beautifully written, but its negative attitudes like that that perpetuate the feeling of life’s insignificance when people should learn to find beauty in what is everlasting.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we need to think about what might replace the materialism and materialistic identities that we're creating? This might not be right on track, but it I keep thinking about how girls who play sports, for example, don't suffer the same identity crises around appearance that lots of females experience as teens.
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