Merchants of Cool

List 3 things you learned or that surprised you:

One of the things that I found surprising was that corporations went through all that trouble just to sell young people things. 

Things such as hiring people to study us as a culture and find out what we want, then marketing that want to make money.

 I found all of the videos interesting in the fact that it’s like the teens in society control the market and do not even realize it.  

"So you can give them what you want them to have" (MTV Machine, 9:40) Mark                        Crispin-Miller, Communications Professor @ NYU

                                                                                                                                              

 I think it means that the reason they do all the research is so that they can sell us the things we want and make lots of money.  It also tells you about what they want us to buy because it’s not everything that has to do with teen culture its one parts of it, the “cool” parts.

Makers of teen TV argue that they’re only reflecting the real world; media is just a mirror."  (The Giant Feedback Loop, 6:50)

 The makers of teen TV are claiming that the things that show on their programs are greatly exaggerated stories or unreal extremes of teen mind sets and daily life but simply documentaries of them. So what that means is the teens in America really act as absurdly in real life as we depicted on TV. I can not agree with that statement, I can not really believe that that is how a majority of teens conduct themselves on a daily basis.