Commercial media manufacture teenage identity and counterculture to drive consumerism

Evidence

Marketers commercialized a teen counterculture with new entertainment media that could serve their purposes well. A PBS documentary, The Merchants of Cool, provides a glimpse into how marketers crafted the media to shape the buying habits of teenagers (Dretzin & Goodman, 2001). Through “cool hunting,” marketers looked for what was cool and the trendsetters and early adopters. The hunters must become cool themselves to avoid being seen as establishment outsiders. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 999

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to existing vault claims about media shaping social character and the culture-industry argument in The Frankfurt School reading.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 999