There is a highly intricate network of tools in place to gauge, observe, measure and survey youth culture, getting more complex all the time. In Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, Danesi quotes Stanley G. Hall as establishing adolescence as a unique segment to examine and study (3). In Captains of Consciousness, Ewan explains the introduction and establishment of the category "teenager" as being dependent on the evolution of consumerism. This development is the origin of the study of youth as a fragment - as a group unto themselves. Since then, as the documentary The Merchants of Cool explores, the study of youth as a group has become highly specialized undertaking, with the bottom line being profit. Today, youth are a huge market. They have a significant disposable income of their own, and they have parents buying them additional commodity goods. The corporate gaze, the position the corporation takes and its involvement with selling to the youth market, is highly prominent and becomes a more specialized organism all the time. "Cool hunting", the locating, documenting, and appropriating of underground popularity among teenagers and young people, is extremely big business as Goodman and Dretzin's film illustrates. It is beneficial for corporations and advertising agencies to know and understand the youth market, so that they will be able to target them as efficiently as possible to sell the most commodity goods. Goodman and Drezin show that corporations achieve this intent by utilizing their tools, a number of investigative methods including focus groups, surveys, and market research. As The Merchants of Cool features, on behalf of corporations, marketing firms such as Cornerstone recruit strong charactered and popular young people to be representatives for them to help convince their friends to participate in purchasing their respective commodity goods. These representatives are compensated either monetarily, or with commodity goods themselves. This process, deemed "under-the-radar marketing" (Goodman and Dretzin) is executed on behalf of the corporation to aid in building brand loyalty among young people. The representatives are hired, at least partially, based on their ability to convey word-of-mouth advertising to a significant group of young people. This practice is capitalizing on the hope that young people will trust and believe another young person rather than the media in the expectation that more commodity goods will be consumed (Goodman and Dretzin). The youth market, a highly prized target group is idealized as a number of young people unified by their knowledge and participation in subculture. Dick Hebdige introduces the meaning of subculture as a subversive refusal and rebellion against dominant culture, having conflict contained in ideology and signification (3). Hebdige describes the site of subculture as "a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life" (17). Objects, concepts, vernacular, et cetera are assigned to or take on meanings that both reflect and deny the meanings bestowed by dominant culture. For example, this process can be seen historically through the hand gesture containing two fingers held in a "V"; held one way the gesture is understood to mean "Victory in war", while turned around, this hand gesture is seen to signify "peace". As Hebdige describes, this appropriation of one kind of sign and its transformation into another - oppositional sign - works as a function of underground subculture (2). Similarly, and more recently, the words "cheddar", "cheddah", or "cheese" can be used to signify the traditional understanding as a dairy product, but also these words have been appropriated to refer to money. The rap artist Jay-Z uses this signification on Vol. 3 - The Life & Times of S. Carter, in his song Big Pimpin'. The lyrics, "Big pimpin', spendin' cheese", refer to the use of "cheese" as money. Hebdige offers the notion that this process of signification is utilized by subculture to communicate (18). In order to maintain ideology and sell commodity goods, corporations can also exercise this signification process to seek out signs apropos to young people and incorporate them in their marketing schemes and campaigns. This inclusion of signs is completed in the expectancy of attracting mass youth market. Corporations rely on the consumer's ability and desire to collapse the gap between the ideal of what they want - the corporation designed representation of the individual - and the reality of who they are. Media images are increasingly strict in their representations of ideals of beauty, of power, of health and of "cool". Judith Williamson, in her book Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, talks about the "mirror phase" in advertisements that works to show a representation of a created image and concept that the individual can both locate his or herself in, and extend that location by attempting to "become" through consumption, altering their appearance or identity in some fashion (60). The discontinuity between this manufactured ideal identity and the reality of day-to-day existence does exist, however difficult to identify and endure. Young people, as well as women (and more recently, men), are expected to participate within this highly regulated paradigm and position themselves with the created image, rather than with a more attainable reality.

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