A shame this issue doesn't get more attention, though given the insanely protective legal regime in the U.S. for so-called "commercial speech," it would be hard to combat this ugliness through the law (so turn off the Idiot Box!):
As the United States and the rest of the world enter into an economic free fall, the current crisis offers an opportunity not only to question the politics of free-market fundamentalism, the dominance of economics over politics, and the subordination of justice to the laws of finance and the accumulation of capital, but also the ways in which children's culture has been corrupted by rampant commercialization, commodification and consumption. There is more at stake in this crisis than stabilizing the banks, shoring up employment and solving the housing problem. There is also the issue of what kind of public spaces and values we want to make available, outside of those provided by the market, for children to learn the knowledge, skills and experiences they need to confront the myriad problems facing the twenty-first century....
While the "empire of consumption" has been around for a long time, American society in the last thirty years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children - one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification. This is culture that does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood; it also exhibits the bad faith of a society in which, for children, "there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets." Children now inhabit a cultural landscape in which they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market.
Subject to an advertising and marketing industry that spends over $17 billion a year on shaping children's identities and desires, American youth are commercially carpet-bombed through a never-ending proliferation of market strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives. Multibillion-dollar corporations, with the commanding role of commodity markets as well as the support of the highest reaches of government, now become the primary educational and cultural force in shaping, if not hijacking, how young people define their interests, values and relations to others....
What is distinctive about this period in history is that the United States has become the most "consumer-oriented society in the world." Kids and teens, because of their value as consumers and their ability to influence spending, are not only at "the epicenter of American consumer culture," but are also the major targets of those powerful marketing and financial forces that service big corporations and the corporate state....Gilded Age corporations, however devalued, and their army of marketers, psychologists and advertising executives now engage in what Susan Linn calls a "hostile takeover of childhood," poised to take advantage of the economic power wielded by kids and teens. With spending power increasing to match that of adults, the children's market has greatly expanded in the last few decades, in terms of both direct spending by kids and their influence on parental acquisitions. While figures on direct spending by kids differ, Benjamin Barber claims that "in 2000, there were 31 million American kids between twelve and nineteen already controlling 155 billion consumer dollars. Just four years later, there were 33.5 million kids controlling $169 billion, or roughly $91 per week per kid." Schor argues that "children age four to twelve made ... $30.0 billion" in purchases in 2002, while kids aged twelve to nineteen "accounted for $170 billion of personal spending"....
According to Lawrence Grossberg, children are introduced to the world of logos, advertising and the "mattering maps" of consumerism long before they can speak: "Capitalism targets kids as soon as they are old enough to watch commercials, even though they may not be old enough to distinguish programming from commercials or to recognize the effects of branding and product placement." In fact, American children from birth to adulthood are exposed to a consumer blitz of advertising, marketing, educating and entertaining that has no historical precedent. There is even a market for videos for toddlers as young as four months old. One such baby video called Baby Gourmet alleges to "provide a multi-sensory experience for children designed to introduce little ones to beautiful fruits and vegetables ... in a gentle and amusing way that stimulates both the left and right hemispheres." This would be humorous if Madison Avenue were not dead serious in its attempts to sell this type of hype - along with other baby videos such as Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby, Sesame Street Baby, and Disney's Winnie the Pooh Baby - to parents eager to provide their children with every conceivable advantage over the rest. Not surprisingly, this is part of a growing $4.8 billion market aimed at the youngest children. Schor captures perfectly the omnipotence of this machinery of consumerism as it envelops the lives of very young children:
At age one, she's watching Teletubbies and eating the food of its "promo partners" Burger King and McDonald's. Kids can recognize logos by eighteen months, and before reaching their second birthday, they're asking for products by brand name. By three or three and a half, experts say, children start to believe that brands communicate their personal qualities, for example, that they're cool, or strong, or smart. Even before starting school, the likelihood of having a television in their bedroom is 25 percent, and their viewing time is just over two hours a day. Upon arrival at the schoolhouse steps, the typical first grader can evoke 200 brands. And he or she has already accumulated an unprecedented number of possessions, beginning with an average of seventy new toys a year....
For the last few decades, critics such as Thomas Frank, Kevin Phillips, David Harvey and many others have warned us, and rightly so, that right-wing conservatives and free-market fundamentalists have been dismantling government by selling it off to the highest or "friendliest" bidder. But what they have not recognized adequately is that what has also been sold off are both our children and our collective future, and that the consequences of this catastrophe can only be understood within the larger framework of a politics and market philosophy that view children as commodities and democracy as the enemy....
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