In his book Captains of Consciousness, Stuart Ewan discusses the social history of "industrial culture in the twentieth century" (3). Ewan speaks at length of the social changes that occurred with the integration of industrialization. Ewan identifies industrialization as the catalyst for the shift from the skilled artisan worker, who held the knowledge and tradition to make and build the necessities of life, to the unskilled worker who only completes a small fragment of a complete task of industrial manufacture (140-1). Ewan emphasizes the significance of the shift from creating and constructing for survival to the buying and selling of consumer goods as the beginning of the "industrial system reify[ing] separations" (117). These separations are important in terms of the social, spatial and sexual division of labour, the further reification of both private and public spheres of living, the increasing need to earn a wage to participate in consumerism, and the differentiation between expectations of girls and boys within the system. Stuart Ewan specifically addresses advertising as playing a crucial part in youth conceiving of themselves as consumers of commodity goods, rather than producers of subsistence goods (139). In the chapter titled Youth as an Industrial Ideal, Ewan discusses the "symbolic role of youth" as signifying a fresh innocence with very favorable prospects for the future (139). This view comes within the context of the development of industrialization. Ewan explores the influence of industrialization of the position of the family in society. He discusses the effects of leisure time and surplus wages on social culture, focusing in some parts on the situation of youth. With industrialization and the increase of hard factory work, youth quickly became privileged as an ideal to sustain and uphold. Work in the domestic or private sphere, deemed women's work, quickly became devalued as the necessity to earn a wage outside of the home in the public sphere increased (Ewan 119). Youth, and the ability to work the necessary long hours with maintained endurance became a "central qualification for employment" (Ewan 141). Young men were able to find jobs relatively easily because of their stamina and strength. As a result, young men commenced their participation in consumerism. Advertising played a large role in perpetuating consumption and the realization of consumer goods through the production of false needs (Ewan 139). Ewan argues that the skill shift from artisan to labourer directly reflects a shift in authority from the patriarchal family to the corporation or the advertiser (140). This shift is especially momentous in the development of consumerism. Advertising, consumer culture, and realization encouraged people to buy mass produced commodity goods, which could easily be and historically were produced within the home. With independently earned wages, young people previously expected to help with the family's daily chores and tasks necessary for survival, began to be increasingly encouraged by business to see themselves as consumers of material goods rather than as producers of such goods (Ewan 139). These social and cultural changes associated with industrialization would set the stage for future embodiments of consumer culture, particularly for young people. Barak Goodman and Rachel Dretzin in their Frontline program Merchants Of Cool, discuss contemporary youth culture today as a very powerful, evasive market unto themselves, demanding and being subjected to a large amount of unique advertising that attempts ever-changing approaches to specifically target and tailor market to youth. In their documentary, Goodman and Dretzin explore the complex relationship teenagers and young people have with the media they consume, and very similarly the elaborate fixation the media have with teenagers and youth. Both as the target market, as well as the signifier of youth, youth-culture is pursued aggressively. Goodman and Dretzin's thesis poses that the media's power and influence utilize commodity fetishism to establish and maintain ideological notions of desire and performance, both for and of young people in order to standardize, commodify and commercialize youth culture, or the "culture of cool". Goodman and Dretzin offer the notion that the media and advertisers achieve this control by infiltrating, observing, studying and appropriating the culture of youth as it is, and then attempt to change it into what ever will sell the most commodity goods to mass market young people.

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