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As Goodman and Dretzin's film suggests, commodifying goods is often done with a cross-platform in mind to sell even more commodity goods and maintain a strong level of authority. For instance, many television shows produced by the WB television network exemplify Goodman and Dretzin's point. Shows such as Felicity or Dawson's Creek take advantage of their youth based audience with both subtle and overt product placements accented by youth dominated images and performances during the program. The commercials broadcast in the show often compliment the commodity goods featured in the program. At the end of the show, before the credits roll, there is a cleverly situated advertisement for all of the artists' music appearing in that specific episode. Also, the soundtrack advertisement informs the viewer that all CD's may be purchased at the WB.com website. Advertising like in this campaign is multi-tasking; it is selling more than one thing at a time, touching on more than one potential sense of lack at a time. The division of age, specifically childhood, into unique and different identifying segments is a relatively new and highly effective practice. In our recent social history, it is only within the past century that businesses have placed emphasis on fragments of young life giving youth status as a separate category with names like toddler, child, tween, adolescent, teenager or young adult. Marcel Danesi, in his book, Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence cites Stanley G. Hall as emphasizing adolescence as a location of study in 1904 (3), and the 1950's as the decade the "term teenager gained general currency within mainstream culture" (4). The term tween is a very new concept referring to pre-teenagers. It plays on the semantics of the word between1. The tween, to advertisers, behaves unequivocally like the teen. The corporation views both the tween and the teen as sites of differentiation in terms of marketing and potentially appropriate commodity goods. Danesi explains that before the 1950's, the "teenager" didn't exist as a category unto itself. This variation in segmentation of age group can at least partially be attributed to industrialization and the influence and effect of division of time, of work, and of living into separate exclusive periods designated by the clock (Glickman 100). 1It is interesting to consider that the term tween can also refer to the function of many computer software programs such as Macromedia Flash that automatically fill in the movement or path of an object from one place to another. Stuart Ewan argues that the development and social construction of the category teenager is paralleled by a shift from familial authority to business authority and that the development of consumption is performed by segmenting life into highly specialized fragments that privilege youth and maintain spatial and social differences (140). The teenager and tween, as Goodman and Dretzin offer, occupy these same spaces, maintaining them with even more concrete rooting and even more segmentation and specialization of social, spatial, and sexual difference than when the social influence of industrialization was first encountered. By seeking new and different ways of creating target market groups to capitalize on, the corporation seeks to further fragment groups of consumers to sell to on every angle imaginable. This means that populations such as "youth" will be segmented into groups such as the teenager and the tween. It means that individuals will be segmented into groups such as music fan, and fashionista. Fashionista, another new addition to post-modern vocabulary, refers to an individual, usually a girl or woman who is devoted to all things fashion related. Fragmentation increases the number of people in an audience and the number of times an audience can be re-appropriated. The segmentation ensures that every individual is being sold to in more than one market, and as more than one kind of consumer. The tween is an excellent example of this, as it identifies a new market segment to create commodity goods specifically for, and to advertise to. The corporation creates these highly specialized fragmentations so that every possible avenue of commodification and commercialization are explored and exploited to sell commodity goods and to create an ideology of a "good consumer". Further on Theador Adorno approaches a similar concept in music, an ideology of the "ideal listener". |