A month ago I went to Independence Center Mall with a group of students from Fort Osage Church of the Nazarene to conduct a study of the mall and it’s marketing towards youth. As an observer the students asked me to park at the north mall entrance, which was not surprising considering the number of adolescents congregating at the entrance. Upon entering the mall I immediately encountered a large kiosk promoting information on Simon-owned shopping malls. As I went past the kiosk, I took the elevator down past the lower level to the food court. When the doors opened the place was swarming with adolescents, some eating, others mingling and still others just hanging out. This location seemed to be the focal point of social interaction and economic commerce. It seemed like the mall created a space for youth that attracted them toward the center of the mall, moving them away from the adult-targeted department stores at the ends of the mall creating a small world for the youth that resembled a mini-economic metropolis.
What is the youth fascination with malls? I began to realize that for youth the mall is much more than a place to buy something, it had become a habitat for identity formation, but what kind of person would the mall cultivate? At the heart of this issue is that mass media and mass communication are beginning to fill the role of identity formation that once was shared with interpersonal relationships. Therefore, in order to understand who these youth of the electronic age, one must first look at the nature of mass communication and its effect on interpersonal communication. This paper will discuss various forms mass communication, but will focus on marketing to provide a more concrete example of mass media’s affects. Finally, this paper will show how this marketing takes the form of interpersonal relationships in a space like the mall and how this shapes the identity of youth. I will attempt to provide some analysis how this is affecting the Church and what is being done about this issue.
The Relationship Between Mass Media and Interpersonal Communication
Before we understand the current situation with youth identity, we must first look at the world in which they live, a world that is largely driven by media. Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart’s book Inter/media discuss four stages of growth in mass media. First, the new medium is viewed as a toy. At this stage, the medium is not taken seriously by scholars and researchers. The next stage of interest and involvement is concerned with the techniques of this phenomenon. People want to know how it works and are intrigued by its effects. Now the medium has become “commercialized.” The third stage of media usage and involvement can be labeled as the “artistic” stage. At this point the medium has been institutionalized, surviving the critics and legitimatizing its functions. The fourth stage is where the medium has become so much a part of the scheme of things that much of the public is unaware of how dependent it is. “The medium comes to be accepted as ‘natural’ as running water, electricity, and automobiles, and it fulfills a need that the medium itself helps to create.”[1] Furthermore, those in the forth stage of media involvement have begun to view media as a total system, which includes all the ways human beings receive and process information; symbolize thoughts, feelings and experiences, encode messages, and the ways these functions relate to the sociocultural context. In short it becomes engrained in the way of life of the individual and how the interact with culture. It seems that American society in particular youth can be found in this fourth stage. Gumpert and Cathcart show that mass media cannot be viewed as an external force that manipulates receivers, but must be understood in light of interpersonal communication. Neither can interpersonal communication be examined apart from the mediated communication that surrounds the individual. What emerges is a theory that contends that mass media and interpersonal communication have become part of dynamic interactive system, where no part can be removed from the other. This paper hopes to examine how the form of mass media known as marketing or advertising has affected interpersonal communication.
Professors S.J. Ball-Rokeach and Melvin Defleur claim that the modern industrialized, urban society has made others dependent on the media for information, for news, for social correlation, and for value clarification because we no longer depend on those close communal interpersonal relationships to meet those needs. Figuring out how dependent we are on the mass media might enable us to determine how much they affect our values and priorities. The media does not have the power to determine uniformly the exact content of interpretations that every person constructs. However, by controlling what information is and is not delivered and how that information is presented, the media can play a large role in limiting the range of interpretations that audiences are able to make. The problem for media has tended to be the volatile audience of youth, who through the process of establishing an identity, constantly try on different characters seeking to find which one fits. Mass media had to find a way to limit these interpretations in youth in order to “sell” them, whether that be selling entertainment, music, or apparel.
The Relationship between Mass Media and the Interpersonal World of Youth:
Many people tend to understand popular culture from the debate concerning the impact of mass media on culture. For many early critics, the media was seen as that which manipulated the “masses” by use of entertainment. Thus, the values of dominant groups in society controlled the mass culture. Ross Snyder claims that our consciousness takes on the structures of the media of communication. He claims that the mind is a working replica of the world fed into it. He quotes Marshall McLuhan’s point that the electronic medium itself is the message that forms the mind. McLuhan claims that new media are not the bridges between man and nature, but they are nature. McLuhan is referring to the nature of mass communication just in and of itself. However, Snyder shows that the content of the program is also important. Snyder shows that the medium of television is the fundamental factor whose influence is compounded when the viewer accepts the world presented to him as the real world rather than the flesh and blood world around him. He illustrates this point by stating that the youthful viewer is sure that the real world is not that of the viewer’s own parents or teachers, but rather the world that the youth culture has programmed for him or her and that viewer shapes his family relationships and community activities and youth culture of his or her community to resonate with this real world.
The problem occurs when mass media attempts to project these values on people and persuade them to adopt these values as reality. Television for example, blurs the fictional and the real in different ways. We don’t know the outcome of a football game or news reports. Television becoming simultaneous with reality shows its impact. This is multiplied on youth who do not have the experiences that older adults do in determining what is reality in media. In their essay titled “Coming of Age in the Global Village: Television and Adolescence, Ronald J. Faber, Jane D. Brown and Jack M. McLeod show how adolescents who have little personal experience in things like occupations for example, may more readily accept the television portrayal of various occupations, while an older viewer may compare the television portrayal with his or her prior understanding of the occupation. The teenager’s ability to think abstractly about the underlying roles being portrayed will affect what is learned from the message. In interpersonal relationships we are able to seek ways to find common experience in order to make things understandable, but in mass media the only thing we have to go on is what is communicated. Media recognizes this and goes to great lengths to make what is communicated seem real. The conventions and methods employed by media sources to manipulate and control projected images requires specialized knowledge about such things as lenses, editing, lighting, image size, music, and a host of other technical and esthetic factors.
It could be argued that all mass media uses this persuasion, but the strongest impact this occurs is marketing. There tends to be a similarity among role types on the mass media and the values that go with each role. This is the media marketing of cool. In each case the role implies certain values and situations are manipulated in the media to make this type of role and its values appropriate. Gumpert and Cathart write that “conflict exists in this situation because it reverses the fundamental relationship among role, value, and situation found in usual interpersonal context.”[2] In face-to-face- communication all of us play a variety of roles. A student must balance the roles of not only student, but also son or daughter, companion, confidant, leader, follower, in all kinds of real world transactions. These roles are vital to human interaction because they represent the mutually agreed upon expectations that we hold for ourselves and for those with whom we interact. Moreover, the values that we hold determine the appropriateness of the roles we assume and the roles we assume reinforce or negate values. Effective interpersonal, face-to-face communication is based on being able to enact roles which are appropriate to the situation.
Ross Snyder says that television brings a strange new kind of face-to-face communication. A new kind of presence. “‘Presence’ is what the person has turned on the television to find. He [or she] turns on the set not primarily for information or even entertainment. Rather he [or she] wants a cure for his [or her] loneliness and a sensing that the world is still in touch with him [or her]. He [or she] wants a vivid human being right there before him [or her]. Not just their surface, but the struggling, enjoying part of them. That’s what presence is.”[3] The heart of mass communication is presence. Whether it be through marketing, soap operas, or even concerts, the question remains “how do we understand this face-to-face communication that is a one-way communication mediated by corporate strategies.
However, this presence does not reflect our values. Instead, media manipulates itself to make it appropriate to the role, creating for us an image of a role that is always appropriate because the situation and the values have been manufactured for the role rather than vice versa. Daniel J. Boorstin recognizes this difference in what he calls a celebrity and a hero. A hero is someone who has appropriately reacted to the demands of a situation in a way that makes us feel that important values have been upheld. A celebrity, on the other hand, is an image of a role and is dependent on mass media to create situations and events appropriate to that role. Boorstin goes on to say that mass media has made us suspicious of role taking in our interpersonal relationships because of our confusion between image and role. “There are those, also, who fear that when media images become the role models for young persons, we are bound to have an increase in alienation as more and more persons find out that these mythic roles are inappropriate for working out the day-to-day problems of interpersonal communication.”[4]
If we are going to disentangle relationship issues between mass media and interpersonal relationships, Fisher and Brown say that we need to focus both on the results and the process that will yield those results. We need to ask ourselves what a well-managed relationship between mass media and interpersonal will look like. We will first look at the results of mass communication in the form marketing. Then we will look at the strategies of marketing that have yielded those results.
The Results: The “Space” Where Mass Media and Interpersonal Relationships Meet
Some sociologists like Mike Males claim that the 1990s was the most anti-youth period in American history. A possible reason for this could be that youth have been shut out of the larger society, as Ann Powers, a writer for the New York Times has discussed. Schultze and Ankler seem to say that this shut out is due to a lack of intimacy. They write “for Western youth, the quest for intimacy is defined on one hand by traditional interpersonal communication and on the other hand by mass-mediated electronic communication.”[5] Increasingly sociologists have observed face-to-face interaction is no longer the only determinant of personal and intimate interaction. It does not happen frequently nowadays that children grow up in a household shared by three generations, in a neighborhood where activities include multiple generations, or in a social framework where generation-mixing is common. Many youth have hardly ever had a serious conversation with adults. The social world of their parents did not include children. To a great extent, electronic media has filled the void that was left by the erosion of authority and interpersonal relationships within family and local institutions. The unfortunate truth, Schultze and Anker tell us, is that youth no longer look to traditional authority sources for intimate relationships, but now turn to peers and the media, the only two groups that always seem to be there with open arms. To qualify there are attempts made by those traditional sources of authority. However, many times they lose out to the promise of intimacy with celebrities whose public identities are carefully fashioned. It is true that television now constitutes a major source of guidance for interpersonal behavior, along with what one learns from parents, churches, and local communities. It functions in a way as a guide to the latest fashions, trends and gadgets of the world. It does not reinforce the concrete ways of interpersonal life found in individual neighborhoods, towns or subcultures, but it shows the ways things are done in the “big world.” These places do not represent any of these spaces because mass media itself has become part of the public space. Because of this, youth have created their own society, which has greatly influenced corporate society. Giroux writes,
“Young people are increasingly excluded form public spaces outside of schools that once offered them the opportunity to hand out with relative security, work with mentors, and develop their own talents and self-worth. Recreational space is now privatized as a commercial profit-making venture. Gone are the youth centers, city public parks, outdoor basketball courts, or empty lots where kids could play stick ball.”[6]
In communities where there are no youth centers or other places youth can congregate, hanging out at the mall may be a developmental necessity.
Stuart Hall understands subculture as those “resistant cultures” in society. He characterizes “resistant cultures” as rebelling against authority figures. Furthermore, Hall states that youth culture has attempted to resist authority by creating subcultures. These subcultures have a particular kind of dress and speech as well as certain symbols that define who they are. Mass communication restructures our communal lives by inviting us to ignore religious communities and to identify instead with people who consume the same goods and services that we do. No longer are people identified by race, nationality, or religion, but by the clothing they were and the music they own. Many times youth may feel that they have more in common with strangers than with their own families and local communities. Schultze says, “like spiritual amnesiacs, we rush to keep up with the cultural fads and lose sense of our religious past. Unlike the church, the media always accept us and entertain us; advertisers and filmmakers never reject us.”[7] Through developing distinctive ways of dress, music, and behavior, young people are able to make ‘cultural space’ for themselves. In this cultural space they find meaning and identity over and against the dominant culture. Ward writes,
“Young people create a sense of self, community life, and meaning by symbolic consumption and behavior. They do this by the creative use of cultural artifacts delivered to them by the widespread availability of the products of mass production. The relationship between the industry of popular culture and the young people who consume the products of this industry forms the basis of the continuing discussion of popular culture.”[8]
In the 1950s, Edward T. Hall understand space to be a silent language organizing the action and thought in any given culture. Hall is best known for his work in proxemics, a term used to describe a person’s spatial behavioral patterns. Hall claims that one’s perception and use of space are biologically based, but is modified by a unique culture. The very language of television suggests that distance is a factor in the terms, “close-up” and long shot, for example. Oddly though, shot selection is not discussed in terms of distance but image size. Now, it is genuinely agreed upon that mass communication has moved beyond proxemics and is focusing how to create “spaces” for youth to grow under what is being sold. The authors of Dancing in the Dark contend that all media emphasize either spatial or temporal relationships working in subtle ways to disconnect audiences from local communities and traditional ways of life. Media has generated shared understandings and feelings about the world for youth. Youth are given emotional and intellectual portraits of themselves, the wider society and their place in it. Mass communication enables young people to transcend local and personal isolation to participate in one large national as well as international youth community. “From the 1950s to the present, the electronic media have shaped the youth culture by changing adolescents’ patterns of communication and redefining their community life.”[9] In the dynamic interplay between the entertainment industry and youth, media have learned how to appeal to the young customers through marketing and in turn, youth have learned how to live up to the commercialized version of teen life. As a result, youth are not as interested in the local and traditional ways of life as they are in the newest national fads and trends. Youth gravitate away from localism and toward broader national trends and movements.
Marketers for malls have realized there is a need for public space and have begun to create a whole world for youth in the mall, which is evident locally in Independence mall.[10] With 32 million people in America , this is the largest group of teenagers in history. They may well be the most studied group as well. Marketing groups go to great lengths to study the trends and culture of youth. Kids represent an important demographic to marketers because they have their own purchasing power. They can also influence their parents buying decisions. Youth seem to have more autonomy and decision-making power within the family than in previous generations. They are also more vocal about what they want their parents to buy.[11]
The online publication Today’s Parent shows that while adults see malls as a place to shop, teenagers go to the mall for social interactions. For younger teens the mall can be a “third home” right behind house and school. However, those crowds of teens gathered at the mall in the evenings and on the weekends are doing more than just hanging out; they are buying. Last year, teens remain in the mall 200 days and spent $175 billion dollars.[12] Because of this, the money marketers spent on advertising to youth has soared from $100 million in 1990 to more than $2 billion in 2000.[13] A youth’s world is a world made of marketing. It pervades every aspect of life. A walk in the street may as well be a stroll through the mall.
Pete Ward in his book, God at the Mall, quotes Tricia Williams who says, “Teenagers may not have the maturity or depth of teaching of older Christians, but they are still the ones who are best equipped to communicate with their friends at school. They speak the language, they understand the trends in fashion and music; they share the same concerns and interests.”[14] I would add that they are most effective because they collectively meet together where they share life and fellowship. Perhaps more than any other context, the mall is an environment where all youth are found.
In the 1970s and 1980s a new mall seemed to open up every three or four days in the United States .[15] Surburban malls replaced neighborhood markets. What Daniel Boorstin calls “consumption communities” became the substitute for ethnic neighborhoods and religious communities. Currently, malls account for 14 percent of all U.S. retailing (excluding cars and gas) which is about $308 billion in annual sales.[16] In the mid-1980s “brand” marketing began to grow, which changed the corporate focus from producing products to creating an image for their brand name. Media Awareness shows that many corporations such as Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein have moved their corporations to countries with cheap labor in order to exploit those countries and use the extra funds to create powerful and persuasive marketing messages. Marketers realize the importance of implanting brand recognition in people at a young age.
“A whole way of life has grown up around the shopping center. For very young children it has replaced the playground to become a training ground for a lifetime of consumerism. (Surveys indicate that two and three-year-old children can distinguish among nationally advertised brands and can point them out on the store shelves. For teenage Americans, it has become the after-school place where all the latest products can be checked out so that one can be in style. Media advertising has created a new value hierarchy: life, liberty and the pursuit of consumer products.”[17] Mass media make consuming not only exciting and attractive, but link it with the “ American Way.” Studies show that on average we see about 3,000 ads per day. The Center for a New American Dream claims that babies as young as six months can form mental images of logos and brand loyalties can be established as early as two. So, by the time youth are going to school, they already know hundreds of logos and by the time adolescents turn 18 years-old, they have seen 10 million ads.[18]
Youth’s desire for public space is made even more evident in the recent debate on mall curfews for youth. Many malls all over are setting strict curfews for youth under eighteen to be accompanied by a parent or guardian in the mall from six to nine pm many times on the weekends. The Jackson Sun Newspaper in Jackson, Tennessee writes about the grief this curfew is causing on teenagers. Sixteen year-old Janell Sharp says, “We don’t have places to go in Jackson. That’s why were at the mall. Soon we won’t have anywhere to go.”[19] However, most all malls are quite certain that without teenagers there, profits will surely plummet. The Star Tribune reflects this tension in an article entitled Teens: The Lifeblood and Headache of the Mall which says that many shopping centers have been trying to capture the booming teen market without alienating older shoppers.[20] Diana Haytko is the associate professor of marketing at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. She says, “Mall patronage is declining for every other demographic group except teens, both boys and girls” adding that “teen girls prefer to shop specialty stores over the large department stores. They prefer the stores targeted directly to them such as the Limited and Limited Too, Rave, Wet Seal. Older girls seem to like American Eagle, Abercrombie and Hollister.”[21] It is not surprising that Hollister, the new offshoot of Abercrombie and Fitch, would become so popular. Hollister’s is a surf-inspired clothing chain whose entrance is assembled to portray a front porch. It has added living-room type spaces with leather lounge chairs so that youth can sit down and read one of the many magazines (Mostly surfing magazines loaded with advertisements that look very similar to the clothing they sell).
However, the mall was not enough. Marketers had to find other public spaces in youth culture to expand their control and seep into the spaces of interpersonal communication. The Media Awareness Network shows that school used to be a place where children were protected from the advertising and consumer messages in the world, but not anymore. Low on money public schools have to lease out space in their hallways, buses, restrooms, cafeterias, and lunch menus making such spaces billboards for the highest bidder. Enthralled by the free equipment and the money, schools willingly let marketing produce the curricula materials that only build brand loyalty and build business. A story on National Public Radio told of corporations that were buying classrooms and giving them state-of-the-art equipment in exchange for free advertising. It is even possible for a corporation to buy an entire school. For a few million the school’s name can be changed to that of the company. Another area is the Internet, which may be the future of malls for youth. One consumer predicts that soon teenagers will be spending online. There is just one minor setback, the necessity of a credit card, but that’s changing. Several web vendors are beginning to issue web-only debit cards that let teens buy items off their site. Issuers have mailed out 3.2 billion card solicitations last year, and now an estimated seven out ten college students have their own cards.
The results of this saturation are evident throughout American culture. As Giroux states, “Childhood at the end of the twentieth century is not ending as a historical and social category; it has simply been transformed into a market strategy and a fashion aesthetic used to expand the consumer-based needs of privileged adults who live within a market culture that has little concern for ethical considerations, noncommercial spaces, or public responsibilities…As culture become increasingly commercialized, the only type of citizenship that adult society offers to children is that of consumerism.”[22] The increasing influence of corporate powers in commercializing youth and eliminating non-commercial space is an attempt to turn institutions back over to the authority of the market. Thus they will buy any advertising method they can in order to build a world surrounded by consumerism so that youth will develop an identity centered as “buyer.” Advertisers focus on speed of efficiency, which often lowers standards. But how can youth let this happen? Do they know they are being scammed? Why don’t they rebel against such manipulation? In order to answer these questions one must look at the marketing strategies of the media.
Marketing Strategy: Use Interpersonal Communication to Persuade
Robert Avery and Thomas McCain contend that “media-person encounters” are inherently different than interpersonal ones because of the sensory potential, control over the exchange, and knowledge of the source. The critique has been made that media has less potential for sensory integration than interpersonal. The frontline special “Merchants of Cool” says that advertisers have recognized this and are using underground forms of marketing by employing youth to secretly get on chat rooms and go to parties in order to spread the word on a product in a more sensory-oriented way. There is also a lack of reciprocity in the past. Feedback is important in that it informs the participants whether genuine sharing of personal information is taking place.[23] Avery and McCain say that “in order for media transactions to be more similar to interpersonal transactions, the audience member must perceive an opportunity to control what he or she sees and hears during the transaction itself.”[24] Malls are a perfect example of such control, by providing a section of the mall directed toward youth to keep them contained as well as to provide a public space of interpersonal interactions where they feel they in control to create their life. What may be unspoken in all of this is the life they are creating is in an atmosphere of products.
On the day after Thanksgiving, commonly called “Black Friday,” employees of American Eagle wore MP3 headsets and listened to music.[25] For every $75 purchase, customers will earn ten free downloads from Sony and be entered in a contest where over 1,600 MP3 players will be given away. American Eagle’s chief marketing officer, Michael Leedy, says it’s all about fulfilling teen aspirations. He asks, “How can I give the whole lifestyle to them?” This is a very important question, one that a company like Sprite had to answer. In the PBS movie “Merchants of Cool” Sprite came to the realization that normal products will not sell anymore; there must be something more that accompanies the product. Teens respond to the image of “cool”, but “cool” keeps changing. So, the question then becomes, “How do we map out what is cool?”
Marketers first developed “cool hunting” where companies would hire “culture spies” to find the trendsetters who are ahead of the pace.[26] Marketers measured the level of influence these trendsetters had by how much they gained the respect and admiration of other youth. “Cool hunting” was a very profitable business strategy because if companies can promote a trend while it is still underground they can corner the market. When corporate culture markets a trend, the trend becomes popular, but by this point it is killed by its own popularity; the trend dies. This is the paradox of this system. In other words, the minute a trend is discovered and established it dies. With this realization, marketers began to seek to become the trendsetters and the cool image-makers themselves. Instead of marketing the product itself to fit into a certain image, corporations now attempt to transcend the image by convincing consumers to embody a lifestyle which forces them to fit into the corporation’s created image.
For example, Sprite cloaked itself in the genuine cool: hip-hop music. They were selling a lifestyle. They used a marketing company named Cornerstone, which uses “buzz-marketing.” “Buzz marketing” occurs when the coolest kids in a community are chosen to use or wear a certain product in order to create a buzz. Buzz marketing or street marketing can also help a company use trendsetters to give their products “cool” status. Because of this, the ultimate marriage of a corporation (Sprite) and culture (hip-hop) has been made. Furthermore, the media and big businesses have found ways to market their products to certain separate age-related markets using interpersonal methods.
Corporations have stopped creating products and have begun to create lifestyles which are sold to youth who are searching for identity. Thus, youth culture is greatly shaped by economic forces which can be manipulating at times. If consumerism is considered the lifestyle for youth, then the mall can be considered their home where this interpersonal communication takes place.[27]
As this lifestyle begins to sell, teens begin to repeatedly impersonate those vendors of cool. Real life and media life begin to blur. One must ask, is media really reflecting the world of kids or are kids merely reflecting the life of that which is portrayed by the media? The answer is “both.” Interpersonal communication may be most important for mass media in advertising. Schultze and Anker are right in that that the entertainment is attempting to “read the tea leaves of social and cultural change” in youth. Marketers realize that they don’t own nor can create “cool” alone, but it must be cultivated. The book Marketing Cool describes this cultivation as the “Feedback Loop.” The feedback loop begins when the media watches youth and sells it back to them. Then youth watch those images and aspire to be that image the media portrays, while media watches the youth and tries to give them new images. Corporate culture thus positions people as both subject and object of commodification, as objects to be bought and sold and in the marketplace. It is true that the corporate culture goes to great ends to understand youth. However, the problem is that these studies of youth are not ultimately for their well-being. All that research does not understand the youth as a person but as a customer; it is after all called marketing research. The research doesn’t listen to the young with the purpose of making youth happier, but to make youth consumers.
With this apparent crisis on our hands the question arises “Is there any way to break this loop?” There has been one major attempt in an unlikely place, namely rock music. Rock music has always been rebellious, but that rebellion was usually directed towards parents. Yet, now rock directs its rebellion towards the marketing society and MTV, which tell people what to wear and what to hear. In Strauss and Howe’s cohort theory, they propose that each generation will rebel against the previous generation. Ward added that style became this rebellion against ways of thinking and social structures that were previously installed. Thus the trendsetters were now the ones who fought “corporate pigs” which manipulated and oppressed others. For a moment, it seemed like the rebellion against pop-culture marketing may have defeated the corporate giant. However, instead of resisting this rebellion, the media quickly embraced and accepted the rebellion as part of youth culture. Corporations took that rebellion and found some way to package it. So, now corporations such as Sprite, hire a celebrity such as Grant Hill to make a commercial that ironically ridicules celebrity sponsorship. Other commercials are produced as low-budget commercials that many times explicitly persuade youth that this company does not spend its funds towards the advertising of the product, but on the quality of the product, thus rebelling from the norm. Thus, the cool hunt ends here when rebellion is packaged. Corporations can now take any form of rebellion and promote it. Furthermore, corporations promote rebellion against parents, authority figures, and even institutions such as the Church, declaring that none of these groups really understands the youth. Corporations declare that they alone understand youth. If this corporate lie is accepted to be true, this may be the greatest move yet in producing youth as both consumer and product to be consumed.
Giroux states, “As market relations expand their control over public space, corporations increasingly provide the public spheres for children to experience themselves as consuming subjects and commodities with limited opportunities to learn how to develop their full range of intellectual and emotional capacities to be critical citizens.”[28] For most of youth there is no separating one’s market identity from some more spiritual identity. Dean Borgman shows how this identity is blurred in his essay titled, “Culture, Youth, and Media. He discusses how television has become a nanny or baby sitter of children. He says that television has become like a member of the family taking youth by the hand and leading them into the adult world. He claims that children of the electronic age are hurried through life. He cites John Wiley Nelson who compares modern media to religious observances. He says movies may function like community church or revival services. Television may be more like family devotions. Magazines instruct individuals as personal devotions. Pop music, like the hymnody of the church, allows a scattered community to feel and reflect on personal and cultural issues at deep levels.[29] It is the corporations and the media outlets throughout the nation that keep pushing this pop-culture identity. “Commercial culture has removed childhood from the civic discussion of rights, public responsibility and equality and turned it into a commodity.”[30]
This paper ultimately addresses conflicting values that are found between mass media and interpersonal relationships. I contend that youth are looking for a public space allotted to them in order to develop their identity. The public space that they are allowed to grow and develop interpersonal relationships will have great influence on the values they hold. “The media, more than interpersonal interaction, have become the testing grounds for our value systems.” [31] Through advertising, dramatization, entertainment and news, we are all instructed directly and indirectly, about important values. However, James Chesebro points out that mass media does not accurately reflect the diversity and complexity of the American value system.
Gerald R. Miller argues that heavy doses of media messages may inhibit our ability to relate interpersonally precisely because it exerts a powerful impact on people’s perceptions of other interpersonal interactions, influencing the way in which the information is processed and interpreted as well as distracts persons from gathering the kind of information they need to relate effectively in interpersonal settings. He critiques these “merchants of cool” who use people to make social and cultural predictions in order to better promote a product. He says, “when predictions about communicative outcomes rely heavily on cultural and/or sociological information, the communicators are engaged in impersonal communication; when predictions are heavily grounded in psychological information, the communicators are engaged in interpersonal communication.”[32] He shows that this distinction cannot be clearly made in mass media because it is psychologically connected to interpersonal communication in such a fundamental way that the influence of one domain affects the other. Furthermore, he questions how consumption of these mass media messages influence people’s perceptions of others. He concludes that extensive exposure to media messages predisposes persons to view other people as undifferentiated role occupants or simplistic cultural and sociological caricatures, rather than individuals.
In the early 1960s, Marshall McLuhan contends that the social channels of communication in print privatize a person encouraging withdrawal and individual study rather than communal activities. Ironically, he praises television as that thing which will bring us back into the oral culture of community. However, I contend that television can “detribalize” a person removing one from the need to participate in an oral culture. We have become a “soundbyte” generation as one pastor told me who know longer speaks in stories but in movie quotes. Schultze says that we are often preoccupied with mass media that it becomes our form of communication. We fill our lives with manufactured messages and slogans that we often lose a sense of our own value as gifted communicators. Today, there seems to be a push back toward reading, claiming that television is dumbing down children.
Shultze also points out the importance of interpersonal communication saying that “without a sense of our personal past, we may lose our self-identity to a ‘world of motion without any memory, which is one of the clinical definitions of insanity’”[33] Schultze is showing a balance that needs to take place in communication between time and space so that we do not destroy our traditions. He shows that if we strengthen one it weakens the other. For instance, if we focus on family then we can lose what is going on nationally. Conversely, if we focus on spreading popular culture around the world, then we weaken the local proximate community. Mass media threatens local communities when they challenge orality. However, they are never an acceptable substitute for the interpersonal communication between friends, family and fellow Christians. We have the skill to build these media empires, but Schultze claims that we lack the critical and interpretive ability to make sense of media world and guide it toward shalom. This is what the media cannot create. With all of its innovations, media cannot create a space of shalom. This can only come in the orality of our lives. Now we must figure out how we can create this space.
Schultze writes “by scientifically reducing human communication to a mechanical process of sending and receiving messages, scholars [and marketers] sometimes rob it of its creativity and spiritual mystery. Moreover, these transmission views of communication tend to foster manipulation and control instead of love and service. I argue for a cultural view of communication that emphasizes the human ability to co-create culture.”[34] Schultze points out that transmission theories of communication like mass media tend to disregard God and assume that people are relatively passive communicators thereby promoting exploitive relationships. Schultze shows that it was Protestants who originally invented the modern communication theory for evangelism, but it developed into the mass persuasion industries of advertising and public relations. “A theory that was developed for the purpose of evangelizing people became the magic formula for revealing how to persuade people to purchase soap, adopt new fashions, vote for a political candidate, and select a particular movie. In fact, the social-scientific approach to the study of communication is now directed nearly entirely toward the secular purposes of marketing and propaganda. Advertisements have become the secular evangelists of our time.”[35]
Schultze is not arguing to gain this mode of communication back because even at that time when devising systems for mass evangelism, Protestants focused on the impact of human technique and not the power of God. Schultze sees another alternative to communication. The cultural view of communication that he argues for is a highly interpretive, interactive and creative mode of communicating. “As I suggested earlier, models of communication are also models for communication. When we understand communication as a means of manipulation and control, we create cultures that promote symbolic exploitation and encourage monologic communication like advertising and propaganda in which senders’ only goal is to manipulate receivers…As I suggested in chapter 1, people cocreate communication; we constantly interact with others, including mass communication.”[36] Schultze explains that this cultural view of communication is the art of subjectively interpreting meaning and significance of people’s shared cultural activities. The question then becomes how does this theory of communication work itself out into practice?
Mass Media’s Interpersonal Role: Media as Priest
Now that we have seen how mass media has formed the identity of youth as consumers by the process of using interpersonal spaces such as the mall for marketing, we can begin to decipher the role that mass media in relation to interpersonal communication. Schultze analyzes Jean’s Shepherd’s novel, A Fistful of Fig Newtons saying that advertising is at the heart of American popular belief. Schultze claims that media serves a religious role in society. He shows that media is more of a priest-like role in society, not challenging values and beliefs but rather affirming existing ones. “The commercial media in particular affirms our culture more than they try to change it. As priests, the media offer society and uncritical portrayal of itself.”[37] He shows how we worship a mass-media mythology. Myths serve to create shared experiences and capture a community’s particular beliefs about life. It is in this tribal storytelling where identities are formed. Mass media packages these beliefs in a way that appeals to us. Schultze shows that this marketing no longer attempts to change beliefs, but as we have learned, it tells people what they want to believe. “The media repeatedly say to the tribe, ‘This is who we are. This is our name. Join our rituals and believe.’”[38] Maybe the most priestly communicators are the marketers and advertisers who do not question what we want, but only tell us how to get what we want thus making advertising the media’s pulpit.
While media is involved in these myth-making they rarely use stories, but images and music. These emotive tools, provoke feelings that can stand in the way of self-examination. Thus we seek media to confirm what we want to believe not necessarily what is truthful. We tend to go one of two extremes, either we idolize mass-media or we claim that it is inherently evil. In the former, the Church has sought to be that public space, but in many ways tries to mimic the marketing strategies of the mall. Alex Klein addresses this issue, which he calls “Pop-Mart Religion.” He says, “Churches think they can save us by replacing choirs with rock bands, by adding dress-down ‘kids only’ congregations, and by warping the culture of piety to fit our ‘hip’ sensibilities.”[39]
Church’s are overlooking the element of interpersonal communication in an attempt to borrow strategies from marketing. Klein is questioning whether religious groups such as the Church can succeed in adopting the same techniques of market research and go beyond purchasing patterns to effectively minister to youth today. He admits that all of youth culture is commercialized and the marketing techniques of corporations have “come to dominate every nook of our cultural landscape.”[40] However, Klein shows the irony of the Church using the same marketing strategy as large corporations.[41] He speaks as one of youth today saying, “Yes, we’re disillusioned. Yes, many of us have, at best, a shallow sense of spirituality. But much of this comes from what I’ve just been talking about. We’re choking on fluff. Its faceless chain stores, and meticulously target-audience pop-culture. And by mimicking these strategies the Church is only giving youth more of that fluff to try and lure people.”[42] It seems that by using the same marketing strategies, the Church is in a sense selling religion, Church, and God. We must not also idolize technology by putting too much faith in it to the point that we convince ourselves that salvation from all problems is found in it. This has become such a problem that Schultze says it is difficult to know where faith begins and consumerism ends.
Pete Ward shows that in society youth are recognized as merely “young and impressionable.” This is further expressed by the Church, which has never valued youth culture as something that youth have created. Therefore, the Church looks at the media as purely evil. The Church many times seeks to replace this evil power by “Christianizing” it with the intention to produce alternative subcultures for Christians. Thus, pop-Christianity is born. However, as John Fiske suggests, it seems that pop culture is never imposed on youth but that all culture is a living thing that is developed from within interpersonally. As in the case with the feedback loop, most of marketing is discovering what youth seem to want and then packaging a product in hopes that it will be bought by young people. However, it is ultimately up to youth to choose whether or not a corporation becomes successful. Thus, to offer an alternative subculture, which youth themselves have created, seems to miss the point. We wrongly assume that media is inherently evil , but mass communications can be used to promote peace and joy. Technology can be effective only as much as the people who use it.
Interpersonal’s Mass Media Role: Media as Prophet
In light of this crisis, we must ask, “Where can children find narratives of hope, semiautonomous cultural spheres, discussions of meaningful differences, and non-market-based democratic identities?”[43] In short where can youth build relationships that are not shaped by marketing strategies? It seems that the church would be the obvious answer, but we have already reviewed the Church’s relationship with mass media. Therefore, I propose that the Church must be the prophetic voice that calls out the systemic evils in the midst of our culture and draw us back into interpersonal relationships through radical discipleship.. The church is dangerously close to losing one of the functions as the Church. By not addressing the social evils, the Church has begun to assimilate itself to function as any other institution. Thus, the commoditization of religion occurs in which each person becomes an object of disputed value, disassociated with neighbor, and alienated from self. Klein reminds of the critique against commoditization echoed by the prophets in Scripture that spoke out against the rulers and principalities of the world which view people as things.
The Church cannot ignore the impact of youth culture because as one can see if we do not engage youth in their culture than some other institution will and like the mall provide space for youth to develop their identity in however that institution sees fit. Schultze says that we need to determine the appropriate place for mass media in society, church, and home. We must consider how we can push these corporations to create edifying programs, and challenge the ways people uncritically use mass media in their lives. It seems what Schultze is claiming as well as what I am advocating is that mass media itself should be used as a prophetic tool. Once value conflicts inherent in such movements are posed and clarified by the media, audience members are moved to articulate the own value positions. Therefore, the Church must reclaim that role of prophet, which looks beyond the façade of society and sees the diseased state of culture and society. It is the role of the prophet to identify these evils for what they are and seek out a way to rid not only the church of these evils, but to reform the entire society.
Media prophets reveal what others do not see so that people might perceive things the way they really are. It involves taking mass media more seriously than just mere entertainment. However, Schultze reminds us that without a community of accountability, prophetic critics can become self-seeking and destructive priests of their own agenda. Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz both propose for a critical pedagogy that provides a critical understanding of how social structures work while focusing on how the negative aspects can be changed. Pedagogy is an attempt to influence how knowledge and identities are produced within and among social relations. “It would begin with popular experiences so as to make them meaningful in order to engage them critically.”[44] Any group that wants to influence the way things are learned and how identities are formed is doing critical pedagogy.
Youth ministry must empower youth to critically engage society as active agents of faith. David E. White writes, “Youth ministry that does not engage youth in discerning and engaging the powers and principalities – the social forces that constitute their lives – risks working only in the cracks and crevasses of systems and structures that colonize more and more of life.”[45] The media does not see youth as a prophetic presence in society today. What is worse is that the Church continues to practice this aggressive marketing to youth. Youth ministry must “engage them critically and equip them with the skills to see the dangers of consumer market.”[46]
Changing our youth ministry involves building a critical consciousness at a time when “market cultures, market moralities, and market mentalities are shattering community, eroding civic society and undermining the nurturing system for children.” Critical discernment includes an understanding of how culture shapes the lives of people and how it constitutes a defining principle for understanding how lives, identities, and values have been manipulated and abused. Critical discernment also recognizes that action must be taken in the education of these issues and the prevention of these abuses.
Ward adequately summarizes with, “A theology of ministry must seek to be a distinctive expression of the gospel in light of current social situations.”[47] The job of the pas