HW 29: Response to "Merchants of Cool"

It's nearly impossible to escape advertising, with all the places ads are put corporations hold the majority of people's time. With this large amount of space they occupy in people's minds they can sell to anyone. The majority of these ads are directed at teenagers, who spend 150 billion dollars a year. This presents an incredible opportunity to corporations, an incredibly rich and gullible demographic to make money on, obviously they'll advertise more to teens. To do this they focus on what's "cool", the documentary showed many ways that these corporations gained their information and they all involved taking a trend going on among teens and turning that into something they can sell. What this does is refine the natural "cool" that people invent out of creativity self expression and turn it into somethings that's accessible and profitable. Naturally they can't do this with everything, if it was really cool to tear off a company logo off of a shirt then the company couldn't do it without losing their name. This way of marketing limits the way this kind of expression is shown and turns any interesting "anti-marketing" trends into something that isn't cool.

On the other hand any "anti-marketing" trend that does get recognized and sold loses it's meaning. For instance, thrift store clothing may be cool since its cheap and says "I'm not a corporate puppet". The corporations would pick up on this trend and make thrift store shirts with company logos on them, people will spend money on these for their message, but in buying that kind of shirt they'll be defeating the purpose of it. This system of "selling cool" has confused teens. I myself am confused about what's cool anymore, most teens don't really care who says what's cool as they feel good about themselves, but the other group of teens mainly agrees that what corporations try to market as cool is un-cool. But the problem is that we don't know what comes from corporations and what we make ourselves, in a way everything influences each other so nobody can invent cool without building off of something else.

In the end this situation makes the line between genuine and fake blurred which makes cool and un-cool harder to identify and in this social chaos the corporations make money either way because people will do whatever they can to feel cool and they'll buy clothes and other products to feel cool. The problem with this situation is that people try to buy cool instead of make it, cool is traditionally something creative and new, but people who are insecure just buy cool things to be cool. To be genuinely cool these people could make friends or develop skills and interests that make them interesting people, but to be interesting and different there needs to be sense of security, that whatever happens someone will love and value you. The problem is that the people who buy into corporate cool don't have that sense of security can can't make their own cool.

Corporations end up making buying cool easier than making it. Naturally people will go for the easy solution but the more people buy into corporate cool, the more money they make and the less people will be different and interesting. There isn't much of a solution to this because this problem stems from a subconscious (or conscious) need to feel valued (Matt's Lecture) which will never go away unless someone feels valued, which only happens when they're cool, hence the desire to buy cool products. The only way to avoid this is for people to know that they're valued, and even if they really aren't for some reason then they should strive to be valued in an interesting way that will make people genuinely admire them.