A Very Scary Documentary

Cripes, I know I'm getting old when I'm posting PBS documentaries on here. Next week it'll be a retrospective on ABBA. Anyway...

The following link is to a PBS documentary on the discovering and marketing of what's cool. It's the scariest thing I've seen in while.

The usurpation of what finding an identity in our youth today may be the biggest contributor to the vapidness of the teenagers that I am starting to encounter. And the scary thing is that I didn't pick up on this before.

I just sort of assumed it was the usual as I get older they seem dumber kind of thing, that parents have been saying since Og watched his son, Thag, bang two black rocks together instead of two white rocks. I suspect that this is different. Finding your identity as a youth used to be more about a slow process of trial and lots of errors. It was painful at times but instructive and served as a good training ground for the roles that you would play later in life. Now there are no pecking orders in adolescence. There is only a morass of moderate coolness.

With the pre-packaging and marketing of identities now it is almost too easy to catch the tail end of a "cool trend" and be able to acclimate it to your life. The fact that it is being marketed as heavily as it is is the scary part of it. It is said that the marketing exists because it is a $150B industry. I imagine it is a $150B industry because it is marketed so heavily.

Where I am encountering it is in seeing young people come out of high school and college and enter the workplace. I regularly run into people who have little initiative and imagination in projects because they seem to simply be waiting for someone to tell them what to do in each and every step. If you never have to go out and impress someone with a new idea or a peculiar variation on an existing idea because all of your imagination forming years are being spent processing marketing you stand little chance of success in modern business. We may not be falling behind China and India because we lack engineers; it may be because the cool kids in Manhattan and Santa Monica are having Madison Avenue market the wrong things to the rest of us.


PBS Frontline Documentary

Oh, and while your watching it...stay off of my lawn.