Cultural Imperialism by Nick Romanos

THE JONAS BROTHERS Explore Consumerism and Cultural Dissemination in Society

Graphics and Text Courtesy of: Ryan Tevebaugh........................................ 5-8 Pete Green............................................. 11-14 Logan Sayles..........................................17-19 Jonathan Stephens...............................23-26 Will Calloway..........................................29-32 Nick Romanos.......................................35-38

GLOBALIZATION AND INDIVIDUALISM TODAY’S DESIGN CULTURE Ryan Tevebaugh

television

earthrise

cultural

When you open your computer, most likely a laptop, what is the first thing you do? Make sure you have a wireless internet connection, check your email, update your status on your Twitter account, reply to various comments on your various social networks such as Facebook, Brightkite, and Digg. You then will probably browse the multiple blogs that you read in order to keep up with news that pertain to you and read a selection of articles from the RSS reader that you keep as your homepage. Within the first couple minutes of accessing your computer you have already come in contact with over a dozen people and most of whom

you have only known over the internet and through these networks. All this is describing a transaction of information that happens instantly and over the internet. These exchanges of information occur in real time and if you don’t continually keep tabs on this plethora of information then you risk missing something and falling behind the curve. If your are a design student and apart of today’s design culture, then the previous paragraph could probably describe your daily routine pretty accurately. You have probably browsed different design blogs such as Dezeen, FFFFound, Boing Boing, Cool Hunter, we make money not art, Inhabi-

gps netscape

thomas friedman tat and design you trust. You do this in order to try to keep up with the break-neck pace of information exchange that is occurring in the 21st century age of globalization. Since the fall of the berlin wall countries, major corporations and companies began to take advantage of this information revolution by outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing like Wikipedia and various software such as workflow software. These technologies helped make the economies of the world a global economy and businesses to become global brands that maximized their profits by expanding and becoming more and more efficient, globally. This is creating more homogeneous content based environments around the world and it begins to diminish the variety that was able to occur when information wasn’t as easily exchanged and goods and resources were more limited to specific regions rather than the entire world. ‘The disappearance of distinct local cultures as a result of the global expansion of consumerism and its brand-names,

outsour

franchises, and the mass-marketing of lookalike products shows no signs of slowing down. Sooner or later, we might imagine, every human settlement will look more or less the same. Already, the newer urban centers where the population has grown recently and rapidly are difficult to distinguish architecturally, as the same building types, same technologies, and even the same globe-trotting architects, are defining their skylines.’ Now in the 21st century, that same information revolution is allowing for individual people to began to take that same advantage and use the internet to catapult themselves into the limelight all from the keyboards of their computers. These individuals are able to compete with major companies because of the effects of globalization, living in a world that is becoming increasingly more flat. Either as an attempt to combat this ever increasing global conformity from consumerism and its global brands or as a result of an increase

collapse of the berlin wall

ten flatteners

uploading

the steroids

triple conve

the world is flat

globalizatio 7

earthrise

cultural imperialism

on human rights, individuals today are projecting their individual voice to world as they feel they need (not want) to share their own opinion and that their own opinion has value. They feel this value holds as much weight (or even more) than the traditional media sources of information such as the major news networks, ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. ‘Parallel with this aesthetic and cultural development has been an increase in the value of human identity. Throughout the world, people are concerned with affirming their individual identities in a public way. The rapid emergence of internet sites where any person can post personal information available to everyone is a prominent example. This can be seen as a reaction to the homogenization created by consumerism, yet it is also part of a broad political change in the present society that emphasizes human rights to a historically unprecedented degree. Perhaps, as some have pointed out, it is consumerism itself, both in its marketing propaganda and the ubiquity of credit-card

gps

netscape

buying, that has fostered the demand for publicly asserted personal identity, but it is also the growing belief that each person has a right to have a say in forming and directing everything from the election of political leaders and the policies of government to public opinion about anything. The internet and news media are jammed with opinion polls and personal blogs of every description, and while their actual impact is unclear, it is certain this is a trend that shows no signs of slowing down.’ - LW These to movements, globalization and individualism, are creating a paradox that is becoming more and more apparent today and can be directly applied to today’s design culture. While globalization has allowed major corporations to create global brands and identities that have made the world less and less distinct and more monocultural, it has also allowed individuals to share their voice easily with the world and with that allowed individualism to become part of our daily lives through blogs, etc. This paradox

individua

thomas friedman

offshoring

outs

collapse of the berlin wall

horing outsourcing

n wall

ple convergence

is allowing for new paths to emerge towards new futures and in the design culture it is allowing for designers to create new methods to convey their messages to the public. Designers are able to assert themselves in new ways and they need to embrace this paradox in order to succeed in the design culture of today that is moving at an incredibly fast pace. ‘In such a time, designers, artists, and architects must rethink and redefine, in visual terms, the global field condition. They must learn to see, and enable, variations in the field--the aesthetically and socially complex field--and for that task what they most need is the capability to perceive, and conceptualize, the differences in similarities.’

s flat 9

in n m o r o erf quare p e Likmes S rs! a e i T ew Y N

REDESIGNING TIMES SQUARE Pete Green

Sensory bombardment. Dangerous distraction. Overstimulation. These are the perceptions of Times Square, NYC, permanently burned into my memory. Is there a place on the planet quite so fitting of these descriptions? Similar places may come to mind: Tokyo et all, but Times Square cannot be topped in terms of onslaught of media. When I think of all the reasons I moved from New York, Times Square becomes the index to the madness. It is too much for a sane human being to handle. It is not normal, perhaps not mentally safe. Is this the pinnacle of human evolution; mass production and the consequential advertising of crap? I hope not. I would like to push back.

I find much of this difficult to reconcile. Am I not being educated to do the same? To create imagery and media designed to sell product, to manipulate, and to distort reality? Did I not desire to be a part of this, consciously or otherwise? What alternate paths can I forge or follow? I find all media guilty of such, from the news on the radio I hear in the shower to the lyrics of the music I listen to to the traditional advertising sources we are conditioned to expect this from. I am developing a particular sensitivity and disdain for this, but I may be getting off topic. Therefore, I am interested in an approach that is ironic and transparent;

more self-deprecating and empowering to the user than traditionally manipulative. I aim to channel this as a focal point of empathy for the consumer of advertising in Times Square. The user in Times Square is varied, but often related to tourism and/or city functionality such as transportation employees. This is not a place a local goes for lunch, for example. This is the realm of gigantic television screens and MTV shows and stock tickers taller than your house. It has evolved into an entertainment destination in and of itself: one does not say “I went to New York City and hung out on 42nd St. !” in the same way that Times Square is referred to. It is a tourist stop in the same way that any Broadway play or Central Park is. This is fairly unique for what is essentially an intersection, and has clearly created the argument that because tourists come freely to see, advertisers feel the right to clog up every last inch of real estate. There are more tangible safety issues resulting as well; for

every photo of a group hug in the middle of the intersection we see there are three taxi drivers swerving to avoid them, laying on their horns, of course further contributing to the problem. Perhaps the taxi drivers are the users most hurt here. Not only are they far less complicit to the experience as they are not tourists interested in snapping pictures but they are subjected to it many times a day, all the while trying to avoid hitting these tourists and each other. There may be no more stressful job in the history of the planet. To analyze the user’s wants and needs as the audience of advertising in Times Square, we must look at emotional and psychological well-being and the conscious and subconscious effects advertising manifests. At times it is difficult to discern between wants and needs here; is peace of mind a desire or a necessity? Further, if we assume there is a threshold that can be crossed from one to the other, how do we define that? For the sake of avoiding semantics, I’ll assume we

simply need our sanity, and that all attempts to bombard our senses with manipulations are an attack on this. If we are willing to accept this, the consequence is quite the burden. We are now in rough waters; if we owe peace of mind and sanity to all, and all media assaults jeopardize this, should it not stop all together? Again, a threshold. Even trickier here is our direct relationship as graphic designers with these advertisers. To me this is less about rhetorical posturing and more about ethics which I find myself navigating, questions of who I am and what sort of impact on the world I would like to have. I would like to empower the user in Times Square, to incorporate a sense of transparency and honesty into my design directed towards them. I ask myself in the subversive sense what would happen if the the entire place suddenly went haywire and glitched out. I am interested in using the vernacular of the internet here: broken links, possibly error pages. I aim to replace every piece of advertising in a doctored photo of

Times Square with a white rectangle with the small red X in the upper left hand corner which we are all familiar with as a broken image link. I feel this empowers the user against manipulation and challenges them examine their setting in a new context. There should also be a sense of overwhelming quantity that arises from this; while I don’t expect that many would literally count the number of rectangles they see, I feel like the sheer number of them would have a new impact on the viewer and again challenge them to question what they intake. In this sense this installation has elements in common with experiments that people have done where they write down every piece of advertising they come across during the day, simply to see the sheer quantity they take for granted. The installation could potentially be further subversive by putting up mock error code (think mySQL errors etc). Taking it further, there could even be a reference to what advertiser is currently renting the space and how much they are

paying for it in a way that presented as a tremendous mistake. I am reminded of sausage. They say if you enjoy sausage you do not want to see it being made. I aim to show how it’s made.

Alot f people think o E’R cool, IW guessE ...

THE DEATH OF COOL Logan Sayles

So it’s come to this. Where did the cool go? The word cool is fresh off the tongues of everyone in English speaking western civilization and the concept of cool has an even broader scope. “Cool is an aesthetic of attitude, behavior, comportment, appearance, style and Zeitgeist.” So where is it from, and where is it going? The concept of cool is has a more weight than you’d probably expect, it origins are 15th century Western Africa with the Yoruba and Igbo civilizations where it is one of the three pillars of a religious philosophy where it is literally translated as mystic coolness from the word itutu. Someone displaying itutu would be

mentally calm and show control, stability and composure. For the Yoruba, it is deeply connected with water and the idea of its “physical connotation of temperature.” This attitude traveled westward to the plantations of the United States in the 18th and 19th century where it was expressed in the music and art of African-American’s. It was really the evolution of roots music that paved the way for the mainstreaming of cool. The call and response beat and early American roots music gave birth to blues and gospel music of the Antebellum South where urbanization birthed the Jazz movement. Jazz, although a genre of music, was the very

definition of cool. Achromatic, dissonant, free flowing and laid back, jazz provided the bridge to cool for the rest of the world. The beat movement of the 1940s and 1950s was a counterculture of underground non-corformist youth who associated closely with jazz music and its “cool” nature. Beats put an emphasis on mobility, hitchhiking and roaming around the country and living in the moment. The shift from African-American society to the much larger scale of modern American counter-culture was the beginning of a trend. Counter-cultural movements continue to share the overwhelming notion of cool, and in the 1960s, advertisers and marketers realized that they could sell cool right back to the people who defined it and everyone else. This creative revolution in advertising defined the social shift in which advertisers and marketers attempted to attach the ever elusive quality of coolness to consumer products. The creative revolution of the 1960s was largely in response to the social upheaval of the times. The civil rights movement played

a huge role in this realization as youth were resistant to corporations and the idea of the upper class and a continued focus on freedom of the individual. Rather than focus on hard numbers and the science of persuasion, admen payed attention to the emphasis of youth and mobility and appropriated the things that defined the culture. This ideas of appropriation and reappropriation are nothing new. Jazz and the idea of cool were appropriated by mostly white youth and became the beat movement. A very good example is also the Mod movement in 1960s United Kingdom. Youth appropriated the symbols of the upper class, tailored suits, short hair and fine Italian scooters and totally ruined its meaning as a marker of the wealthy. The appropriation of cool by advertisers was no different than what the Mods were doing, except rather than material symbols of a class, admen appropriated an entire cultural movement and used it as a tool of consumerism. This use of cool in advertising infiltrated

every facet of media to the point of where advertisement and cool go hand in hand. They have become ubiquitous and we encounter them everywhere in our daily lives. This saturation has forced advertisers to engage in alternative forms of advertising to keep up with the ever changing cycle of cool that information mobility has afforded. Starting with cable television in the 1980s, the way people received information, entertainment and advertisement became increasingly global, but on a more individual scale. Channels like MTV catered to a specific youth demographic, but instead of only being available to people within broadcast range, it was available worldwide through satellite and cable. The birth of the internet and contemporary electronic social networking continue the trend of mobility and the rush for advertisers to conquer what is cool and use it to their own advantage. Rather than appealing to thousands through print and television, advertisers focus on the individual now.

The paradigm has shifted again though. Just as advertisers of the 1960s appropriated “cool” from counterculture, counterculture is appropriating consumerism. Cool has been lost in the depths of the television and the computer and fully realized as a tool of advertising. The hipster movement, or anti-movement, of the 2000s represents a full on embrace of consumerism and its marriage to cool, letting it go by the wayside. Cool will always exist, but it no longer holds its original meaning or connotations. The feathers in the hat of the hipster are hedonism and vanity. The ever-increasing focus on the individual throughout the last six decades provided the platform for the hipster mantra of microcosm. Through blogging and social networking, any individual has a stage that the whole world can see. Cool is no longer about being socially aware or fighting the corporations, or the man, or oppression. Cool has become a cyclical game between the consumer and the producer that is refereed by advertisers.

* Rober Iger: Disney CEO

BRANDING COMMUNITIES Jonathan Stephens

Branding used to refer to a mark left on an animal or slave to represent ownership. Today, branding has become a mark of culture identity for a consumer to belong to the subcultures of brand communities. This phenomenon of brand communities, defines the intertextuality present in today’s society, allowing someone to ‘belong’ to a variety of groups focused on their individual interests or consumptions. To begin, a brand community is defined, by the Journal of Consumer Research, as a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand.

Smack Inc, a firm focusing on community branding, defines it as, “a group of people interacting with one another based on their love of a brand.” These brand communities originated at the dawn of the Information Age with increased freedom from geography (i.e. internet, cell phones, etc.). In 1995, Albert Muniz Jr. and Thomas O’Guinn first classified brand communities in a paper for the Association for Consumer Research Annual Conference. Six years later, another journal was released that has become the basis of knowledge in this area of study. Brand communities developed because of the increased accessibility to the world

first have something a community around nothing can’t be created, there has to be something to congregate around, be it a product, idea, or concept.

second know who now, just who do you want to be in on this newfound community? this has to be decided to know how to represent the product. macs have designers, facebook has students. who do you have?

through ungeographically bound devices. Instead of a group congregating at a coffee shop or the barbershop, they would confer in a chat room or an e-mail thread, where the participants could each be in a separate country. The world became much larger, permitting people to connect of ones with similar tastes or preferences. An example would be Myspace, where one may search for a band under ‘Music’ and find persons with the same taste. The availability isn’t the only reason for the emergence of brand communities. People wanted, and still do, feel the need to belong to a group; and they use the product of a marketer to develop these similarities and ties. In an ever expanding world, the miniscule feeling one may feel increases, not finding their niche. Brand communities are just one way of providing a way of connections through consumerism. A variety of steps have to be taken for brand communities to form. They don’t sprout out of a product and it’s consumers,

they need planning and nurturing. The first step in building a brand community is to have an identity, have a brand. The customer has to be able to connect with the identity, or brand, developed. There should be values associated with the company whenever a person hears the name. For example, the grocery store Harris Teeter, has a known identity. When customers hear the name Harris Teeter, if familiar with the chain, they think of friendly people, green, and the commercial jingle. They are able to form an intimate connection with the company, making them return. The same is true with any store or product, there has to be an developed consciousness of a kind. They need to see that this product and brand is different than the others available and worth the commitment. The second step of forming a brand community is to know whom the identity will identify with, who will shape a community around the brand. If the brand personality were new and trendy, the base community

of designing sites now is to design with a blog, allowing web surfers to comment and interact with each other on the site itself. The most common and best option, though, is to use multiple means of interaction. In the world today, to maintain interaction is to have accessibility at a constant level. The fourth step is to gather certain persons around the brand to help spread the word. Smack Inc. describes these persons as connectors, mavens, and salesmen. Connectors are just what the name implies, they are people who have connections and can reach a multitude. When planting a church, usually the church advertises to the popular kids of high schools or middle schools, using them as connectors to help provide a base. Next are the mavens, the innovators. These people will answer the inquiries of others, speaking to them about it, and adding more members to the community this way. The final, salesmen, connect with people talking and planting the idea of the product into the other’s head. The

third make it easy now there has to be a way for these random strangers to interact and want to interact. the internet is a cheap and easy way to do this. make a person in sourthern alabama want/able to talk to someone in northern england as easy as possible.

fourth mark people there are different types of people in this wide world. use these different people to communicate and aid in your community formation.

would be hipster or trendy subcultures. If the products are a variety of dog products, the foundation should be built on dog owners who regularly groom their pets, maybe owners who take their dogs to shows. Whatever the scenario, the most important thing is that there are shared rituals and traditions between each person. Next, there needs to be the creation of opportunities for these people to interact. There is a plentitude of ways for this to happen in today’s society. Web forums constantly have people interacting: talking about a product, offering help, asking for advice, and then conversating beyond the product. Also, there could be conferences. These allow people to meet in person, coming from all over, to form connections and interact on a more personal level. The Internet is another very important resource to exploit as well. There are social networking sites where one can make a page for the product and form ‘fans’ and a product website is a must. A popular way

em ins ail ce tant blo ll pho mess for gger nes a /te um s xt s

nic

ati

typ

am ou

another based on their love of a brand. These brand communities take attention and purposeful planning in order to form, just as suburban or urban communities need planning. They are crucial in today’s society because of the intertextuality and mobility present in today’s society. There needs to be an identifying, rallying quality to the product, if to be valued, and it has to be available on multiple planes of experiences. Thus brand communities exist. Thus brand communities will continue to grow

rne

fac my eboo flix spac k tw ter e lin itter ke din

nte

ial

ork

ost

fre

tly

make the community exclusive. the exclusivity of the group will make the persons in the group place a higher vallue in the community. if they’re not in college, they’re not in the group. or, if they’re not don’t have an ipod, too bad.

idea of the brand becomes increasingly appealing to the other, adding another to the community. Each character provides a way of expanding the community. New members will also be one of the people wanted, adding even more members to the community. The final step of branding communities is to provide an exclusivity value to the community itself. In most cases, ownership of the product is admittance into the exclusive club. For example, you wouldn’t show up to a Harley Davidson HOG rally with a Yamaha, you’re not a member of the HOGS. The more exclusive a community is, the higher the value is placed onto that community. In the indie music genre, it’s the exclusivity of the music and the independence of it that makes it enjoyable to those ‘indie kids’. They separate themselves from music brands just as the community formed should separate by identity itself with similar available products. In conclusion, a brand community is a group of people interacting with one

e ern

int

fifth say no to some

n m ei on r o f perSquar e Likmes ears! Ti ew Y N

of our So maunryely must fans s M of having DREA t is Jo-Bro. all tha

WHEN TELEVISION SHAPED PLAY Will Calloway

In 1982, the Federal Communications Commission passed a ruling lowering, and in some places removing entirely many of the restrictions and standards it had developed around television programing. Some of those standards dealt with the barriers between advertisement and programming, particularly in children’s television. Within a year of their destruction, an entire genre of television was beginning to form in the gap where those barriers had once been. The use of television and film properties to sell products was nothing new, of course; Walt Disney and George Lucas had long ago blazed that trail with the extensive merchandising of their own

franchises. On the other hand, what the merchandisers of 1982 were beginning to attempt was something rather different. In this new genre of children’s television, from G. I. Joe to My Little Pony, was attempting to invade the imaginative space of the child consumer, reconstructing the narrative structure of their play. It was a genre that quickly developed its own tropes, many not so different from those in classic folk lore or myth. These narrative turns, however, were not so concerned with their cultural identity. Rather they were chosen for their ability to shape and define the young consumer’s habits and desires. These “toy/television” programs of were not the

first to employ this methodology, however. In fact, it was a marketing strategy that had found itself almost three decades earlier, in the most popular doll ever produced. Before the 1959 introduction of the Barbie doll, most children’s dolls played off of the familial relationship between mother and daughter. Many girls had long ago been introduced to the narrative structure that defined the maternal relationship, the cultural normative of the nurturing and protective parent, coddling and caring for their child. Playing with a doll then allowed the girl to recreate this relationship, actively incorporating themselves into the cultural fantasy of mother and daughter. Mattel, with the creation of the Barbie doll, sought to change this relationship. In his book Out of the Garden Stephen Kline described the introduction of the doll of the market, “Barbie was carefully and consciously designed not as just another plaything, but as a personality... provided with a ‘back-story’ - a narrative that established her personality profile

within an imaginary but familiar universe.” (170) This narrative would come to dominate the context of play that children previously might have derived from cultural norms and familial relationships. Marketing executives at Mattel quickly found how dramatically they had transformed the play surrounding their toy. In Kline’s words, the girls playing with the Barbies identified with the manufactured character of the toy, rather than it’s role, accepting the constructed narrative as the backbone of their imaginative play. Mattel had transformed the interaction between children and their toys, and had created an almost frighteningly desirable product in the process. For many decades to come, however, Barbie’s backstory would venture little outside the average toy commercial. It wouldn’t be until the `82 FCC ruling that product narratives would find a fuller format, and their full persuasive potential. In Simulacra and Simulation, the philosopher Jean Baulliard discusses how, in the rise of modern technology, simulated envi-

ronments will begin to engender the reality outside the simulation. In order to appreciate the marketing genius behind the toy/television genre, it’s necessary to recognize how these shows manifested that interaction. By operating on two distinct levels, the toy/television show was able to create a simulated environment that forced itself into the material world. The first level to every show was the basic story and narrative content of the show that helped develop the visual environment for the show. The second level was the marketing strategy and consideration behind that same story and narrative content, effectively facilitating a child’s recreation of the visual environment. In the essay The Empire of Play Stephen Kline defines the toy/television genre into various categories based on their narrative structure and, consequently, the type of toys they were attempting to sell. By and large the largest of these categories were what Kline calls the “Action Teams” shows. The very title of “Action Teams” betrays a great deal about the content that

composed these programs. For instance, each show focused on an diverse cast of action adventurers. In some shows this meant a relatively stable and unchanging group such as Thundercats’ titular Thundercats team, allowing for better audience identification and character recognition. Other shows provided a cast that seemed to grow with every episode, such as the Transformers’ heroic Autobots, creating a continually expanding reservoir of marketable properties. In practice, both methods immediately created a ready base of action figures to market to the show’s audience, while their incorporated diversity insured an identification between audience members and the characters on screen. Much like Barbie commercials 30 years earlier had created a character that caucasian girls could identify with and desire, every action team featured a cast of personalities and backgrounds, even going so far to incorporate stereotypically African American and female characters in settings that were essentially

raceless, (Thundercats’ cast of cat people, for instance) and sometimes genderless (The non-organic stars of Transformers.) The program’s intrepid team of protagonists were then pitted against a dastardly cast of evil characters. While the conflict therein formed the core of nearly every episode, it also, as Kline describes in The Empire of Play captured boys’ attentions and gave structure to their play. By adopting simple and broadly defined narrative foundations for the television show, merchandisers created a simulation that was not only easy to understand, but also attractive to recreate in the material world. The conflict between good and evil was then often fleshed out with a fantastical setting, chosen not only for it’s attractiveness to young audiences, but also for how such settings necessitated play sets, vehicles, and other accessories to flesh at the young consumer’s recreation. It was perhaps the strength of tropes like these that both guaranteed the genre’s original success, but also played into its

eventual demise. The necessity of a fantasy setting, the marketing potential of a diverse team of adventurers, even the structural requisite of the conflict between good and evil, these elements proved so effective at driving the imaginations and desires of children that it was not long before the field was flooded with carbon copy television series and toy lines. Networks eventually turned back to more traditional licensing methods, developing intellectual properties and their consumer offspring separately. The lessons learned from the toy/television genre were not forgotten, however, as few dolls or action figures are produced today without some adjoining story line and narrative. Even “Action Team” shows still show up now and again, though their staying power lends more to a passing fancy than the full out craze that developed under shows like G. I Joe, He-Man, and Carebears during the 80s. In a sense, the world of license-based video games has taken on the role that the toy/television show created. Able to essentially incorporate themselves

the simulation through interactive software, young consumers can supplant the need for material interaction entirely, with the television progenitors left to explore a more varied, if no less cliched, field of narratives.

WARNING:

HAZARD - Psychological marketing warfare. Not safe for children.

people All thesineg and dreamng about us thinki time... all the

BUY AMERICAN. BE SOMEBODY. Nick Romanos

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2009. Dick Clark is participating in his annually televised New Year’s Rockin’ Eve just like every other year. It just wouldn’t be the same without him. There are some headline artists preforming that we can remember from years past, ranging from Lionel Richie to Ludacris. These stars are not the main focus, however. As the “main event” performance comes into focus, we see three well-dressed young men take the stage. To the casual fan of popular music, they seem almost unrecognizable. They are well built and fashionable, defining what society deems attractive in young men. Before one of them mutters a

single lyric, a gleeful uproar explodes from a crowd of pubescent girls. The Jonas Brothers took the stage to begin 2009 in Time Square. Disney and its business partners smoked a celebratory cigar. America has a history of passing its “culture” on to other nations. Unlike other societies more steeped in tradition, like the Czechs with their beer or Spain with the running of the bulls, the culture that defines America is not so much one that reflects the identity of its people, but rather, the stuff these people buy. Ever since emerging as the world’s most prosperous nation following World War Two, success as an

American has been defined more and more by the inanimate objects one possesses. It is easy, after all, for one to identify his or her place in society based upon personal possessions. Purchased items can vary so much in appearance, demand, price and a number of other “classifiers”, one can simply latch on to one item of group of items and use this as a means to identify with other people. The concept of fanaticism is born. As massive media outlets, originating in the United States, ranging from television to the web have burrowed their way into the thicker, cultural soil of other nations, the “American Way of Life” is becoming increasingly well known across the globe. With corporations based in America pumping more and more funding into international marketing campaigns, the proliferation of fads is more possible now than it ever has been. Things found to be popular and profitable in the United States are now finding their way to other reaches of the world at a feverish pace. The movie industry, strongly

based in Hollywood and New York now has the means to promote an American film and release it in twenty countries within a two week span. With the world more connected than ever by virtue of its rapidly evolving media, there are seemingly no limits to the amount of people a corporation could reach if given the proper resources. With this ability to spread one’s cultural mantra to the entire Earth comes a great power. As with all power, there must come a proportionate quantity of responsibility. Companies that disseminate the “American Way” into other cultures must do so in a way that does not completely infringe upon the pre-established systems of tradition, rooted in centuries of history. So much of what contributes to the continued cultural identity of a society is the way the children in said society are raised. This is not to say children of the world should not strive to be global citizens, pushing the limits of the social preconceptions instilled in them at a very young age. There must be a healthy balance.

The Jonas Brothers seemed to spring into the mainstream media out of nowhere. At the beginning of 2008, very few Americans knew of them other than middle-school aged girls and or avid Disney Channel followers. By New Years 2009, they had become house-hold names. Whether or not this was completely by their own doing is doubtful. One must take into consideration that Disney is the principal owner of the American Broadcast Company (ABC) which, coincidentally, televises “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve”, the program on which the Jonas Brothers performed. “What is wrong with the Jonas Brothers?” one might ask. Nothing. This is exactly the problem. The Jonas Brothers are three, squeaky clean, dark haired, clean shaven, well dressed, chaste, Christian boys. The total sense of purity attached to them is not only unrealistic but seemingly manufactured. By Disney marketing the Jonas Brothers to a target audience of eight to fourteen year old girls, they create an unreasonable

sense of what to expect in a man in the minds of naive young women, just beginning to feel attractions towards the opposite sex. These expectations developed in youth can lead to a sort of dissatisfaction with life, the sort of unhappiness that spawns additional purchasing to soothe such feelings and reestablish new sense of identity. The Jonas Brothers themselves could be said to represent the various aspects of the system that promotes them. Their black, Ray Ban sunglasses reflect the opacity by which huge companies do business behind closed doors. The fact that all three are white males parallels perfectly with the typical corporate power structure which, for years, has been primarily comprised of individuals of similar gender and pigment. The rings they wear as a symbol of their devotion to God and their willingness to remain chaste until marriage reflect almost a sort of shackling, not necessarily to their religious beliefs (which may or may not be another product of their rights-holders) but rather, to

KA-CHING!

the companies that, for lack of a better term, own them. The average citizen can not see through most corporate marketing schemes. Rather than question the greater cultural implications of the Jonas Brothers, a father will purchase for his pleading daughter that ticket to go see the Jonas Brothers 3-D concert, or the Jonas Brothers fruit snacks she had seen advertised on TV and could care less as to what they tasted like. Why wouldn’t he? He wants his daughter to be interested in good, wholesome, well-to-do young men when she finally starts dating. This ought to be a good start. Meanwhile all of the money being fed into the system by moms and dads across the country is being re-invested in new, fresh ways of manipulating culture domestically and abroad. As the currently cuddly Jonas Brothers mature into men and edge away at their perfections as new temptations in life arise, another craze will already be brewing. When the Jonas Brothers begin

losing momentum and the world no longer sees value in the entertainment they can provide, they will fall off the ledge, like so many other “boy-bands” before them. The system could care less; milk the cow for all it is worth until it sputters and goes off to die. Don’t even bother considering how this “cow” might affect the way people perceive the world that surrounds them as they too age. In the end, it will not matter who is performing on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve come 2010. Disney will be lighting their cigars regardless as the fireworks take to the sky. Just another year of making money.

