Ideological criticism examines how the ideas of the dominant elites are embedded into texts and how after seeing them time after time as an audience we’re no long aware of their existence and just accept them as normal. This is not like approaches talked about previously such as semiotics but more like structuralism in that it is not focusing on individual parts but the whole text.
It’s not just looking at a text but taking it a step forward and examining how it interacts with the things we are experiencing in our lives. I think this can be broken down a bit more to be understood better so, here goes.
Dominant elites (all of those companies that we have sort of grown up with like Disney for example) use the idea of hegemony to help push their stance about something on to the audience. But they don’t just say “Hey viewers, buy our products, buy them because we’re making them and need someone to want what we make.” These elites they’re a bit smoother than that. Due to a combination of that smoothness and the fact that day after day we see these messages, they get exactly what they want: a consumer obsessed/driven culture.
By using their ideologies (their views on how things should be) and placing these views on us, without thinking twice about it we buy their products and get swept up in their ways. Smooth, huh?
All of this is a key puzzle piece in the concept of political economy and what a political economist focuses on. A political economist closely examines how these media conglomerates maintain power over us, they challenge the ideas that we’ve accepted (think counter-hegemonic forces) and while doing this they emphasize how essential the role of the owners of the media companies are.
In Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood all of these concepts and ideas are closely examined to help show how big the influence of the media is to children and how it is shaping their youth.
Marketing and the purchasing power of children is a major focus of political economists. With $40 billion dollars every year coming from childhood spending it’s no surprise that children as young as a few months old are becoming the main focus for marketers.
Susan Linn, the Director for Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, talks about how marketers are trying to make sure a child has a brand name in front of them at all times, this idea of cradle to grave consumers has influenced the way children are growing up. Here is the beginning of the film which gets a bit deeper into the concept of brand loyalty and the way that markers have started focusing on getting to children earlier and earlier.
Like I previously mentioned this has changed how children’s experiences during their youth have changed from the experiences many of us had growing up. Playing make-believe outside until the street lights came on with whatever we could get our hands on, that all sounds familiar to most of us right? But for children in this generation it has become about making sure you’ve got the right toys to play whatever game you want to play. (You can’t just pretend to be a wizard; you need to have the official Harry Potter outfit, wand, and magic book…duh!)
Harry Potter / Google Images
This idea no longer allows children to just be kids, but more realistically miniature sized adults. Because marketing campaigns are so focused on the materialism and instant gratification of a consumer culture children aren’t worried about being good people, but about being just like their favorite celebrities in order to get accepted.
A recent discovery on YouTube serves as the perfect example to demonstrate this consumer culture and the values being forced onto children at an early age. Introducing, Jenna Rose…
All of the contradictions in this video can literally make your head spin but it serves as evidence of what marketers are trying to accomplish. Jenna Rose, a 12 year old, sings about how she’s so excited that she’ll have the same jeans as her favorite teen-celebrities for four minutes all while bouncing around in her bedroom (complete with a fairy castle mural on her wall) and driving around in her own Mini-Coop (uhhh hello, in American you can’t be 12 and have a license, sorry to break it to you Jenna).
But really this is a marketers dream come true, she sees jeans that a celebrity she likes is wearing and needs to have them instantly (a political economists nightmare that the media have this much push in a child’s buying decision). Remember hand-me-downs? Well I have a strong feeling they don’t exist as an option to children anymore.
SpongeBob backpack / Google Images
It’s all about having one show or product and basically exploiting it into a thousand other products that they can buy, this way they can fit in when they’re at school. If everyone else at school is carrying a SpongeBob backpack, as a child you’d feel really left out if you didn’t have one too, which is exactly what marketers are hoping for.
We’re the only industrialized country that permits advertising to children, doesn’t that seem strange to anyone else? There are no boundaries anymore for how advertising works and this is seen as a major issue to political economists. This is the “so-what” factor that you might be asking yourself, you should care because messages are being sent to the children (who will one day grow up to run this country) and we don’t even do anything about these messages, we just accept it.
So think twice the next time you see a product placement in your favorite television show, keep in mind the ulterior motives the elites had in mind.
