The TiVo sucked down Frontline’s The Merchants Of Cool a couple of days ago and only just now had a chance to watch it. The show surveys the current state of teen culture marketing and co-optation using the current suspects/demons of the moment (MTV, Britney, Fred Durst, etc.) with appropriate scenes of disapproval from culture critics.
Of course this is all nothing new, as folks who’ve read The Conquest Of Cool already know. The only thing that’s changed in the past forty years since is the number of zeros in the dollar amounts and the marketer’s desperation in keeping the modern hyper-conglomerate corporate beast fed.
Host Douglas Rushkoff‘s Utne Reader-level sanctimoniousness wears thin though. The show doesn’t address any race or class issues or consequences (the image/brand archetypes are all affluent and white) and doesn’t once consider that a teen culture could exist outside of corporate media. If I was a teenager, I guess I’d be pretty offended by the whole show, but then again I wasn’t cool (though I suppose anti-cool is now cool these days)
Anyway, the most interesting commentary can be found in the Frontline message boards for the show, and in case you missed it, you can watch the whole show online.