This playlist explore the ways in which the mass media are used to spread the message of consumerism. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. Films in This Playlist Include Sexy Inc. Our Children Under Influence TV Sale The Bronswick Affair This is a Recorded Message All the Right Stuff The Truth Merchants
This playlist explore the ways in which the mass media are used to spread the message of consumerism. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Films in This Playlist Include
Sexy Inc. Our Children Under Influence
TV Sale
The Bronswick Affair
This is a Recorded Message
All the Right Stuff
The Truth Merchants
Are children being pushed prematurely into adulthood? Sophie Bissonnette’s
documentary Sexy inc. Our
Children Under Influence
–
Youth Version
analyzes the hypersexualization of our environment and its noxious
effects on young people. Psychologists, teachers and school nurses criticize
the unhealthy culture surrounding our children, where marketing and
advertising are targeting younger and younger audiences and bombarding them
with sexual and sexist images. These stereotypes treat girls of all ages as
sexual objects, and exercise a damaging the effect on their identities.
Because they see degrading images of sexuality on the Internet, some children
confuse sexual relations with pornography. Sexy inc. suggests
various ways of countering hypersexualization and the eroticization of
childhood and invites us to rally against this worrying phenomenon.
This animated short is an entertaining and incisive satire on some of the material that is disgorged via the "boob tube." The opening pitch of the television salesman establishes the tone of this pithy film: a solid-state model guarantees high-quality entertainment, and programs are always designed around products, not spectators.
This funny yet serious short film demonstrates the effectiveness of advertising and the marketing machine. Its comic appeal lies in the characters and the absurd situations they find themselves in, but it also shines a harsh light on our tendency towards needless consumerism prompted by a steady flow of commercials.
This experimental animated short takes a critical look at consumerism in a material world. Thousands of cut-out ads are presented in increasingly fragmented, rapid succession. The film's disorienting and hectic pace seeks to interrogate the extent to which seductive advertising is a shockingly strong force in shaping our desires, needs, and lives in contemporary capitalism.
"I always have a good time. Lots of teenagers hang out at the mall. It's like walking around in a big TV set." Brendan, 13.
All the Right Stuff is about kids, malls, media and money. This video puts the role of youth in today's corporate economy into perspective.
Join Brendan on a tour through the local mall. With two hundred dollars of birthday money in his pocket, he's ready to do some serious spending on music, clothes, and video games.
Teenagers represent a huge and lucrative market for advertisers. They may work in low-paying service sector jobs, but as Brendan says "I pay no rent. My income is one hundred percent disposable."
Intercut with Brendan's shopping trip are interviews with shopkeepers, young people who talk about the pressure on them to consume and to sport all the right logos, and members of the bands Thrush Hermit and Hip Club Groove on how the music and clothing industries target young people.
With poor job prospects and little access to the political process, teens come to see themselves primarily as consumers. It's a self-image marketers are only too happy to encourage and exploit.