We are asked at the beginning of chapter 5 in Instant Identity, “are the girls (teens and tweens) buying the empty vessels of popular culture that the corporate companies have out there to do so with advertisements and pop-up? In their choice of products to advertise on their IM platform, it seems they have little interest in specifically targeting the adolescent population with their advertising and pop-up banners. This might be because the generation that uses IM most prevalently, Generation Y, is often consumer savvy and technologically adept than the generations before it, so the companies that deploy IM messenger services have developed other ways to insert advertising more subtly into the technology (I.I. pg. 96). This surprised me because I figured the main people that actually pay attention to pop-ups and advertisements would be the Generation Y. Some subtle methods they use have been to offer its IM users the use of icons that can be placed on their IM window next to their log-in name – a fun, graphic articulation of taste or identity. This is how hegemonic forces link consumerism and patriarchal discourses in this new space – and it seems to be working in a certain degree: early statistics on this means embedding information within the advertising on IM demonstrate that this type of ad has already shown moderate success with users clicking on the ads at a much higher rate than on typical banner advertising. If this is the cultural ideal that girls are being “sold” – and, if the statistics are accurate, apparently buying into, to a certain extent, then we can expect the stereotypes and cultural expectations of girls as shallow consumers to continue well into this new digital age, even in a medium where they are actors in creativity in its context. This somewhat undermines the notion of encoding/decoding model that assumes that consumers buy into dominant meaning that advertisers intend them to take from an advertising text, clearly, the audiences often resist or even ignore the messages sent from advertisers to suit their own needs (I.I. pg.99). In my opinion, I believe that it’s great that this new Generation Y is smart enough to, for the most part, ignore the media advertisements on computers. If we can continue this then maybe we can all help young women’s self-esteem stay positive and they can come to realize that the media isn’t always the right people to follow. Do you think that the media has a positive or negative affect on Generation Y?
I would say mostly a negative effect b/c advertisements reinforce narrow conceptions of gender and identity in general. The beauty ideal is also very powerfully reinforced through ads in often explicit, sometimes subtle ways. We do not see enough variety in ads and they often promote products that uphold other oppressions, esp. those coming from sweatshops, etc. They do not typically promote critical thought but rather conformity and acceptance possible only through consumption (according to the ads themselves).
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