Cage of Flesh
By Marie Miller and Richard Birch
Media and Culture 2 SOCI 3077
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Marie Miller and Richard Birch
Marie Miller is a first year Psychology and English student in the Laurentian Bachelor of Arts Program at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario. She is a graduate of the Early Childhood Education Program and believes in setting children up for success so they may become the best they can be. Email: jalonfarms@sympatico.ca
Richard Birch is a second year Sociology student in the Laurentian Bachelor of Arts Program at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario. His professional background is in commercial finance and in the entertainment industry. His current academic interests lie in gender politics, queer theory, and sexuality studies. Email: energetika@msn.com
Abstract
The embodied self as represented in mass mediated images of gender, sexuality, and ideal body types constitutes a performative, socially constructed identification. As the body, whether perceived in the constructivist mindset as either female, male, or of any transgendered or androgynous identifications in this gender spectrum, can be measured in sociological terms as a commodity useful for the production of wealth in techno- capitalism. Concepts and perspectives in the area of study known as the sociology of the body allow the social researcher to discover, deconstruct, and elaborate on the relationships between the embodied individual and master processes of capitalism, productive symbolic order, and the synergies between these two constructs in accordance to the agency of the embodied individual in a socially constructed world. The reification of these relationships by the utilization of the mass media, specifically in the area of fashion, advertising, and children’s toy products constitute a new asylum for the oppressed and sexually controlled. This paper examines these relationships under the premise that all agencies of the oppressed are also, thus, constructed.
Cage of Flesh
Talking about people’s bodies is speaking about textual realities of the body as social constructions. Sociology of the body requires the social scientist to examine the outside within. Subjectivity is key to understanding the relationships between textual realities and master processes in society. Agency is also in question in this analysis. To know the social reality of gender exploitation in the media and advertising, subjective accounts are essential to uncover social fact in its constructivist ethnographical framework. This paper is an institutional ethnographic deconstruction of the productive master processes as they relate to gender exploitation in the media. Sex, gender, and gender choice are typically subordinate to ideologies that control what the mass media present to us. It seems that when people think of the media, or question the role of the media as an agent of socialization in postmodernity, there is a misconception that it is the media which dictates and instils that which is influential, economically functional, and label-specific to gender and sexuality. The mass media as an agent is looked upon as that which creates constructs, identities, and showcases the agendas of groups and or populations. However, is it truly mass media, which is being served in the process of oppression? The media is not the origin of such oppression. It is not the purveyor of any such mode of social control. Socialization does not equal control. Socialization is not congruent with the mechanization and systemization of global ideologies about the body, gendered identity, sexual identity, agency, and the embodied-self. Systems and mechanisms do not produce the platform from which oppressive activity is built and cultivated on. Processes however do disclose origins of forms of oppression. Capitalism is not a system. It is a process, a master process of the production of wealth and furthering the capital potential of industry. The embodied-self, the human form, the un-individual is such a component of capital that is the unit of analysis in this research project. By examining the meaning of the body in the media, in fashion industries, and in the advertising industry we can gaze upon the body, whether male or female or in any transgendered or androgynous form, to be the commodity is has been constructed as. The body is a cage of flesh, the controlled un-individual without agency locked away in postmodern ideologies of sexual control and productive order, and the advertising industry is the new postmodern asylum.
Advertising and Fashion Industries as The New Asylum
In this paper we will examine how mediated images of body ideals and beauty iconography have become ways for master narratives of productive order to capture the body, the embodied self, and the un-individual, through the use of modern institutional control systems. As Michel Foucault elaborates, “both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation” was essential for modern Western capitalist processes to assert control over female and male sexuality through an evolved format of prison-like “mechanisms and strategies of power” (Foucault, 1977). We must recognize that sex is “historically subordinate to sexuality”; that sexual activities and also gender imagery are mediated by ideas that themselves relate to underlying structures of power (Foucault, 1988). The embodied self is viewed by, those who wear it and by those who impose ideology on the wearer is entirely a social construction. Furthermore, how we as wearers experience our bodies in postmodernity is thus, also a social construction designed along the parameters of power and ruling relations. The particular ways in which the body is viewed and experienced discloses structures of knowledge of how power is exercised in postmodern society. The advertising industry has taken over the insane asylum and the prisons of early industrialization, which both had the purpose of controlling the body and the embodied self. Because of the poststructuralist world as a result of an emerging “scientifico-legal complex,” which is the phenomenon where science and legal law has replaced the church and biblical law as mechanisms for bodily and sexual control, the body has come to be characterized as a cage of flesh in which we all inhabit in a bureaucratically charged continuum of capitalist restrictions and constructed freedoms (Wallace & Wolf, 1999). Look at the largest buildings in a city. Historically the churches were the largest constructs in a centre, the temples signified what ideologies were in control. The temples are now the banks, finance companies, and multinationals that control lines of credit and capital resources that are socially constructed as essential for furthering the development of wealth and economic power. To tie this into sociological thought of the body, our bodies are capital to be exploited for the further development of wealth. This gives a new perspective to the term human resource. As Jean Kilbourne states, “advertising helps to create a climate in which certain attitudes and values flourish and others are not reflected at all” (Kilbourne, 1999). This shows the structure and direction of how ideologies on human and cultural capital are maintained in society. She also states, “it is impossible to measure the influence of advertising on a culture, we can learn something by looking at cultures only recently exposed to [advertising]” (Kilbourne, 1999). She provides an historical comparative ethnographic analysis about the Gwich’in tribe of Alaska. In 1980 this tribe was introduced to mass media, initially in the form of American television. Within a span of ten-years the tribe’s culture diminished as a result of the monocultural invasion from multi-national corporate culture. “Beaded moccasins gave way to Nike sneakers” (Kilbourne, 1999). This exemplifies the evasive and clearly manipulative abilities advertising can have on a single cultural identity. This form of manipulation creates consumers. More importantly it creates a consumerist culture, where one did not exist before, and with such longevity directly proportional to the age of it’s target marketing. In other words, the younger the respondent to advertised mediated imagery, the harder and stronger the impact it will have on the bottom line.
To equate this to issues of gender exploitation, look at how women and men have been targeted by the advertising industry. Clearly women have been victimized more heavily than men historically in how their bodies have been exploited as cultural capital. However, in recent years it has also become very apparent that this is not merely a feminist issue. Historically control mechanisms, which were designed to keep gender and sexuality in check, were constructed through the use of prisons and asylums. Female and male sexuality, as problematic, was to be controlled in order to enforce conformist behaviour. Any sexual or gendered behaviour, which was deviant, was to be caged. In essence caging the flesh was congruent with caging the mind of the sexual being through the simple act of turning names into things. Again we turn to the idea of bodily constructivism for explanation on how the body reflects the reality and knowledge on gender and sexuality. As Eric Wolf states, “by turning names into things we create false models of reality” (Wolf, 1997). The embodied self is ultimately and constantly controlled by a system of naming and labelling. Through semiotic uses of terms like fat, thin, beautiful, ugly, exotic, plain, masculine, and feminine, the corporate productive order has been able to set definitions for ideal body formats. Images of thinness, beauty, and exoticism relate to knowledge of desire and control.
Zygmunt Bauman in his work, which explores the social constructivist notions of survival and embodiment, suggests that beauty and the pleasure derived from the constructed embodiment of beauty, is tied to agency. Beauty, in a sociological perspective is equal to the control over our physical selves both as animals and oppressed social individuals. His argument is positioned on the idea that obsessive conformist attitudes towards health and beauty, specifically felt by women and oppressed individuals, are “an attempt to belie the ultimate limits of the body” (Wolf and Wallace, 1999). As a result, the oppressed in a consumerist culture buy into fad diets, purchase gym memberships, and invest exuberant amounts of personal wealth into the cosmetic products and cosmetic surgery industries in order to construct youth on an aging embodied self. “Yet in the end those limits hold: we cannot all look like supermodels or champion bodybuilders, and in the end we all die” (Wolf and Wallace, 1999).
Dr. Harrison Pope, co-author of The Adonis Complex says:
Barbie is to blame for women’s distorted body image. We are now educating our girls to be aware of impossible body goddesses. Studies show that boys increasingly suffer from eating disorders, root cause G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe [is a] ripped, mega muscular warrior who would have 27-inch biceps and other proportions achievable only through years of bench presses, protein diets and the liberal use of steroids. (Cloud, 2000).
The obsession with obtaining the extreme-masculine look is a phenomenon with men, increasingly as strong as the obsession for the ideal female embodiment in women. What fuels this obsession and desire says Pope, “are the ridiculously outsized bodies purveyed by Hollywood, magazine covers, and even action-toy manufacturers…One of the biggest lies being handed to American men today is that you can somehow attain by natural means the huge shoulders and pectorals of the biggest men in the magazines” (McDougall and Schuler, 2003). What is the message being sent to young men in techno-capitalist culture? They are learning about their bodies in a completely skewed fashion. “They don't realize that the 'hypermale' look that's so prevalent these days is essentially unattainable without steroids" (McDougall and Schuler, 2003).
Age Compression
Age compression was first theorized in the early 1990s in response to an evaluation of consumer behaviour, specifically that of the children’s toy target market. It later became equally important in the children’s clothing industry, specifically for young girls and young teenage markets. “Factors from media and technology to working mothers have propelled kids toward adulthood” (MacArthur, 2001). Children are literally growing older at a younger age because of influences in techno-capitalism. “Kids have access to information and influences that are mature more than ever” (MacArthur, 2001). Cognitively children are required to absorb information much earlier in life, which would suggest a phenomenon that would link age compression to a notion of information compression. Techno-capitalism requires markets to evolve, products to change, and fashions to change in order to produce more wealth in the industry. It’s exciting for children to have what the teenagers are wearing. Media influences are increasingly making it difficult for parents to have an opinion and even say no to the wants, because the want of the products directly represents the needs of techno-capitalist productive ideology, which they are enslaved by.
This phenomenon can be recognized in two of three child developmental areas of research, which are cognitive, physical, and emotional. An acceleration of cognitive and physical skills have definitely advanced, but emotional development remains a constant and cannot be linked theoretically to age compression (Girl Scouts of Mid-Continent Council, Inc., 2000). Emotionally young children and adolescents lack the skills to deal with this acceleration. Results include tension and stress, which is a new phenomenon never before recorded with this age sector. How has this happened and who let it happen? “Parents are wondering how toys lost [children’s focus] in the first place. Who is responsible for this ever-earlier adolescence?” (Boston College Chronicle, 2004) Parents are trying to keep up to the societal image and in order to do this they must have at least a dual-family income so thus to maintain a required über-consumerist lifestyle. This is evident in households where technology is the babysitter. Factors from media and technology to working mothers have propelled kids toward adulthood. Then, the techno-babysitters have become the market developers and sales reps for the multinational food and toy companies. Half of U.S. families have dual incomes, while another one in four is a single-parent household, so “kids are being forced to be more responsible and live on their own,'' (MacArthur, 2001). Even though marketers say they don’t believe that children are able to make intellectual decisions before the age of twelve, the advertising industry targets children from the early age of one. “There hasn’t been a mechanism or a forum for the marketers to step back and say, ‘Hold on, we’ve crossed some lines here and things have gotten out of hand’” (The Boston College Chronicle, 2004). Unfortunately, they don’t appear to be cleaning up their act…
Another result of age compression as it relates both psychologically and sociologically to children, is the hijacking of children’s innate and essential imaginative play. Play is key to any stage of children’s learning, and for all levels of childhood development. Play is where children learn all sociological skills of interaction, which they will carry with them in all social and intimate relationships throughout their life. Even the Ontario government has recognized this important facet of early childhood development and has subsequently launched the Ontario Early Years Centres, which came out of the provincially funded Early Years study. “There is powerful new evidence from neuroscience that the early years of development from conception to age six, particularly for the first three years, set the base for competence and coping skills that will affect learning, behaviour and health throughout life” (Early Years Study, 1999). When you use technology you have to answer the way the computer wants you to. The technology does the thinking, the planning and is in charge of the creativity. When a child plays with dolls, blocks or Legos, they can be anything, anyone, go anywhere their imagination soars.
Conclusion
The body is a cage of flesh, the controlled un-individual without agency locked away in postmodern ideologies of sexual control and productive order, and the advertising industry is the new postmodern asylum. In deconstructing the mass mediated oppression of groups based on the constructed parameters of gender, it is clearly that this is fundamentally one of the most important problematic social realities recognized since industrialization. The body, as historically thought to be the embodiment of human existence, the framework for physical and even emotional experience as historically observed by scientifico-legal institutions such as the state and scientific realms, even though no less influential in postmodernity for it’s ability to explicate the natural tendencies of human relationships as they are perceived in mass media, is something much more that simple scientific and social definitions. In the ethnographic institutional framework of the advertising industry, as a mechanism for control of gender and sexuality by techno-capitalist productive order, the body is a commodity and a shell for postmodern slavery. The advertising industry as a mechanism for control has been useful for this process to assert knowledge of the body, as it is ordained as a surplus human resource. If we are to seek the structure of knowledge as it pertains to how the embodied self is a product of social constructivism, we must know, as Foucault insists, that we only can experience our embodied selves as social constructions (Foucault, 1977). In techno-capitalist postmodernity, this experience and any accounts of such experience is regulated by how our bodies produce knowledge as textual realities in a market driven, commodity based mass mediated culture. How much farther can society be pushed? Women cannot achieve the level of physical thinness as depicted by fashion models without collapsing, men are intrinsically in a fragile state, and children can’t be forced to grow up any faster than what is already expected of them.
References:
A Generation ‘Born to Buy’? (2004, November 5). The Boston College Chronicle. Retrieved March 29, 2005, from http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v13/n5/schor.html
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane.
Cloud, J. (2000 December). Never Too Buff. Time Europe, 155 (16), Retrieved March 29, 2005 from EbscoHost online database (Men & Their Bodies).
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Allen Lane.
Foucault, M. (1988). The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume 3 (R. Hurley, Trans.). Toronto, ON: Random House of Inc.
Girl Scouts Mid-Continent Council, Inc. (2000). Pre-teen Girls Caught In ‘Age Compression’ Crunch, New Girl Scout Study Shows. Retrieved March 29, 2005, from http://www.girlscoutsmcc.org/pdfs/news_preteens.pdf
Kilbourne, J. (1999). Can’t buy my love: How advertising changes the way we think and feel. New York, NY: Touchstone.
MacArthur, K. (2001 December). Compression Quandary. Advertising Age, 72 (7), Retrieved March 29, 2005 from EbscoHost online database (Academic Search Premier).
McDougall, C. & Schuler, L. (2003 March). Buyin’ Bulk. Men’s Health, 18 (2), Retrieved March 29, 2005 from EbscoHost online database (Trends).
Ministry of Children and Youth Services. (1999). Early Years Study: Reversing the Real Brain Drain. Retrieved April 5, 2005, from http://www.children.gov.on.ca/CS/en/programs/EarlyYearsInitiatives/Publications/Early YearsStudy.htm
Wallace, R.A. & Wolf, A. (1999). Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition (5th ed.). Toronto, ON: Prentice Hall of Canada, Inc.
Wolf, E. (1997). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Media and Culture 2 SOCI 3077
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Marie Miller and Richard Birch
Marie Miller is a first year Psychology and English student in the Laurentian Bachelor of Arts Program at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario. She is a graduate of the Early Childhood Education Program and believes in setting children up for success so they may become the best they can be. Email: jalonfarms@sympatico.ca
Richard Birch is a second year Sociology student in the Laurentian Bachelor of Arts Program at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario. His professional background is in commercial finance and in the entertainment industry. His current academic interests lie in gender politics, queer theory, and sexuality studies. Email: energetika@msn.com
Abstract
The embodied self as represented in mass mediated images of gender, sexuality, and ideal body types constitutes a performative, socially constructed identification. As the body, whether perceived in the constructivist mindset as either female, male, or of any transgendered or androgynous identifications in this gender spectrum, can be measured in sociological terms as a commodity useful for the production of wealth in techno- capitalism. Concepts and perspectives in the area of study known as the sociology of the body allow the social researcher to discover, deconstruct, and elaborate on the relationships between the embodied individual and master processes of capitalism, productive symbolic order, and the synergies between these two constructs in accordance to the agency of the embodied individual in a socially constructed world. The reification of these relationships by the utilization of the mass media, specifically in the area of fashion, advertising, and children’s toy products constitute a new asylum for the oppressed and sexually controlled. This paper examines these relationships under the premise that all agencies of the oppressed are also, thus, constructed.
Cage of Flesh
Talking about people’s bodies is speaking about textual realities of the body as social constructions. Sociology of the body requires the social scientist to examine the outside within. Subjectivity is key to understanding the relationships between textual realities and master processes in society. Agency is also in question in this analysis. To know the social reality of gender exploitation in the media and advertising, subjective accounts are essential to uncover social fact in its constructivist ethnographical framework. This paper is an institutional ethnographic deconstruction of the productive master processes as they relate to gender exploitation in the media. Sex, gender, and gender choice are typically subordinate to ideologies that control what the mass media present to us. It seems that when people think of the media, or question the role of the media as an agent of socialization in postmodernity, there is a misconception that it is the media which dictates and instils that which is influential, economically functional, and label-specific to gender and sexuality. The mass media as an agent is looked upon as that which creates constructs, identities, and showcases the agendas of groups and or populations. However, is it truly mass media, which is being served in the process of oppression? The media is not the origin of such oppression. It is not the purveyor of any such mode of social control. Socialization does not equal control. Socialization is not congruent with the mechanization and systemization of global ideologies about the body, gendered identity, sexual identity, agency, and the embodied-self. Systems and mechanisms do not produce the platform from which oppressive activity is built and cultivated on. Processes however do disclose origins of forms of oppression. Capitalism is not a system. It is a process, a master process of the production of wealth and furthering the capital potential of industry. The embodied-self, the human form, the un-individual is such a component of capital that is the unit of analysis in this research project. By examining the meaning of the body in the media, in fashion industries, and in the advertising industry we can gaze upon the body, whether male or female or in any transgendered or androgynous form, to be the commodity is has been constructed as. The body is a cage of flesh, the controlled un-individual without agency locked away in postmodern ideologies of sexual control and productive order, and the advertising industry is the new postmodern asylum.
Advertising and Fashion Industries as The New Asylum
In this paper we will examine how mediated images of body ideals and beauty iconography have become ways for master narratives of productive order to capture the body, the embodied self, and the un-individual, through the use of modern institutional control systems. As Michel Foucault elaborates, “both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation” was essential for modern Western capitalist processes to assert control over female and male sexuality through an evolved format of prison-like “mechanisms and strategies of power” (Foucault, 1977). We must recognize that sex is “historically subordinate to sexuality”; that sexual activities and also gender imagery are mediated by ideas that themselves relate to underlying structures of power (Foucault, 1988). The embodied self is viewed by, those who wear it and by those who impose ideology on the wearer is entirely a social construction. Furthermore, how we as wearers experience our bodies in postmodernity is thus, also a social construction designed along the parameters of power and ruling relations. The particular ways in which the body is viewed and experienced discloses structures of knowledge of how power is exercised in postmodern society. The advertising industry has taken over the insane asylum and the prisons of early industrialization, which both had the purpose of controlling the body and the embodied self. Because of the poststructuralist world as a result of an emerging “scientifico-legal complex,” which is the phenomenon where science and legal law has replaced the church and biblical law as mechanisms for bodily and sexual control, the body has come to be characterized as a cage of flesh in which we all inhabit in a bureaucratically charged continuum of capitalist restrictions and constructed freedoms (Wallace & Wolf, 1999). Look at the largest buildings in a city. Historically the churches were the largest constructs in a centre, the temples signified what ideologies were in control. The temples are now the banks, finance companies, and multinationals that control lines of credit and capital resources that are socially constructed as essential for furthering the development of wealth and economic power. To tie this into sociological thought of the body, our bodies are capital to be exploited for the further development of wealth. This gives a new perspective to the term human resource. As Jean Kilbourne states, “advertising helps to create a climate in which certain attitudes and values flourish and others are not reflected at all” (Kilbourne, 1999). This shows the structure and direction of how ideologies on human and cultural capital are maintained in society. She also states, “it is impossible to measure the influence of advertising on a culture, we can learn something by looking at cultures only recently exposed to [advertising]” (Kilbourne, 1999). She provides an historical comparative ethnographic analysis about the Gwich’in tribe of Alaska. In 1980 this tribe was introduced to mass media, initially in the form of American television. Within a span of ten-years the tribe’s culture diminished as a result of the monocultural invasion from multi-national corporate culture. “Beaded moccasins gave way to Nike sneakers” (Kilbourne, 1999). This exemplifies the evasive and clearly manipulative abilities advertising can have on a single cultural identity. This form of manipulation creates consumers. More importantly it creates a consumerist culture, where one did not exist before, and with such longevity directly proportional to the age of it’s target marketing. In other words, the younger the respondent to advertised mediated imagery, the harder and stronger the impact it will have on the bottom line.
To equate this to issues of gender exploitation, look at how women and men have been targeted by the advertising industry. Clearly women have been victimized more heavily than men historically in how their bodies have been exploited as cultural capital. However, in recent years it has also become very apparent that this is not merely a feminist issue. Historically control mechanisms, which were designed to keep gender and sexuality in check, were constructed through the use of prisons and asylums. Female and male sexuality, as problematic, was to be controlled in order to enforce conformist behaviour. Any sexual or gendered behaviour, which was deviant, was to be caged. In essence caging the flesh was congruent with caging the mind of the sexual being through the simple act of turning names into things. Again we turn to the idea of bodily constructivism for explanation on how the body reflects the reality and knowledge on gender and sexuality. As Eric Wolf states, “by turning names into things we create false models of reality” (Wolf, 1997). The embodied self is ultimately and constantly controlled by a system of naming and labelling. Through semiotic uses of terms like fat, thin, beautiful, ugly, exotic, plain, masculine, and feminine, the corporate productive order has been able to set definitions for ideal body formats. Images of thinness, beauty, and exoticism relate to knowledge of desire and control.
Zygmunt Bauman in his work, which explores the social constructivist notions of survival and embodiment, suggests that beauty and the pleasure derived from the constructed embodiment of beauty, is tied to agency. Beauty, in a sociological perspective is equal to the control over our physical selves both as animals and oppressed social individuals. His argument is positioned on the idea that obsessive conformist attitudes towards health and beauty, specifically felt by women and oppressed individuals, are “an attempt to belie the ultimate limits of the body” (Wolf and Wallace, 1999). As a result, the oppressed in a consumerist culture buy into fad diets, purchase gym memberships, and invest exuberant amounts of personal wealth into the cosmetic products and cosmetic surgery industries in order to construct youth on an aging embodied self. “Yet in the end those limits hold: we cannot all look like supermodels or champion bodybuilders, and in the end we all die” (Wolf and Wallace, 1999).
Dr. Harrison Pope, co-author of The Adonis Complex says:
Barbie is to blame for women’s distorted body image. We are now educating our girls to be aware of impossible body goddesses. Studies show that boys increasingly suffer from eating disorders, root cause G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe [is a] ripped, mega muscular warrior who would have 27-inch biceps and other proportions achievable only through years of bench presses, protein diets and the liberal use of steroids. (Cloud, 2000).
The obsession with obtaining the extreme-masculine look is a phenomenon with men, increasingly as strong as the obsession for the ideal female embodiment in women. What fuels this obsession and desire says Pope, “are the ridiculously outsized bodies purveyed by Hollywood, magazine covers, and even action-toy manufacturers…One of the biggest lies being handed to American men today is that you can somehow attain by natural means the huge shoulders and pectorals of the biggest men in the magazines” (McDougall and Schuler, 2003). What is the message being sent to young men in techno-capitalist culture? They are learning about their bodies in a completely skewed fashion. “They don't realize that the 'hypermale' look that's so prevalent these days is essentially unattainable without steroids" (McDougall and Schuler, 2003).
Age Compression
Age compression was first theorized in the early 1990s in response to an evaluation of consumer behaviour, specifically that of the children’s toy target market. It later became equally important in the children’s clothing industry, specifically for young girls and young teenage markets. “Factors from media and technology to working mothers have propelled kids toward adulthood” (MacArthur, 2001). Children are literally growing older at a younger age because of influences in techno-capitalism. “Kids have access to information and influences that are mature more than ever” (MacArthur, 2001). Cognitively children are required to absorb information much earlier in life, which would suggest a phenomenon that would link age compression to a notion of information compression. Techno-capitalism requires markets to evolve, products to change, and fashions to change in order to produce more wealth in the industry. It’s exciting for children to have what the teenagers are wearing. Media influences are increasingly making it difficult for parents to have an opinion and even say no to the wants, because the want of the products directly represents the needs of techno-capitalist productive ideology, which they are enslaved by.
This phenomenon can be recognized in two of three child developmental areas of research, which are cognitive, physical, and emotional. An acceleration of cognitive and physical skills have definitely advanced, but emotional development remains a constant and cannot be linked theoretically to age compression (Girl Scouts of Mid-Continent Council, Inc., 2000). Emotionally young children and adolescents lack the skills to deal with this acceleration. Results include tension and stress, which is a new phenomenon never before recorded with this age sector. How has this happened and who let it happen? “Parents are wondering how toys lost [children’s focus] in the first place. Who is responsible for this ever-earlier adolescence?” (Boston College Chronicle, 2004) Parents are trying to keep up to the societal image and in order to do this they must have at least a dual-family income so thus to maintain a required über-consumerist lifestyle. This is evident in households where technology is the babysitter. Factors from media and technology to working mothers have propelled kids toward adulthood. Then, the techno-babysitters have become the market developers and sales reps for the multinational food and toy companies. Half of U.S. families have dual incomes, while another one in four is a single-parent household, so “kids are being forced to be more responsible and live on their own,'' (MacArthur, 2001). Even though marketers say they don’t believe that children are able to make intellectual decisions before the age of twelve, the advertising industry targets children from the early age of one. “There hasn’t been a mechanism or a forum for the marketers to step back and say, ‘Hold on, we’ve crossed some lines here and things have gotten out of hand’” (The Boston College Chronicle, 2004). Unfortunately, they don’t appear to be cleaning up their act…
Another result of age compression as it relates both psychologically and sociologically to children, is the hijacking of children’s innate and essential imaginative play. Play is key to any stage of children’s learning, and for all levels of childhood development. Play is where children learn all sociological skills of interaction, which they will carry with them in all social and intimate relationships throughout their life. Even the Ontario government has recognized this important facet of early childhood development and has subsequently launched the Ontario Early Years Centres, which came out of the provincially funded Early Years study. “There is powerful new evidence from neuroscience that the early years of development from conception to age six, particularly for the first three years, set the base for competence and coping skills that will affect learning, behaviour and health throughout life” (Early Years Study, 1999). When you use technology you have to answer the way the computer wants you to. The technology does the thinking, the planning and is in charge of the creativity. When a child plays with dolls, blocks or Legos, they can be anything, anyone, go anywhere their imagination soars.
Conclusion
The body is a cage of flesh, the controlled un-individual without agency locked away in postmodern ideologies of sexual control and productive order, and the advertising industry is the new postmodern asylum. In deconstructing the mass mediated oppression of groups based on the constructed parameters of gender, it is clearly that this is fundamentally one of the most important problematic social realities recognized since industrialization. The body, as historically thought to be the embodiment of human existence, the framework for physical and even emotional experience as historically observed by scientifico-legal institutions such as the state and scientific realms, even though no less influential in postmodernity for it’s ability to explicate the natural tendencies of human relationships as they are perceived in mass media, is something much more that simple scientific and social definitions. In the ethnographic institutional framework of the advertising industry, as a mechanism for control of gender and sexuality by techno-capitalist productive order, the body is a commodity and a shell for postmodern slavery. The advertising industry as a mechanism for control has been useful for this process to assert knowledge of the body, as it is ordained as a surplus human resource. If we are to seek the structure of knowledge as it pertains to how the embodied self is a product of social constructivism, we must know, as Foucault insists, that we only can experience our embodied selves as social constructions (Foucault, 1977). In techno-capitalist postmodernity, this experience and any accounts of such experience is regulated by how our bodies produce knowledge as textual realities in a market driven, commodity based mass mediated culture. How much farther can society be pushed? Women cannot achieve the level of physical thinness as depicted by fashion models without collapsing, men are intrinsically in a fragile state, and children can’t be forced to grow up any faster than what is already expected of them.
References:
A Generation ‘Born to Buy’? (2004, November 5). The Boston College Chronicle. Retrieved March 29, 2005, from http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v13/n5/schor.html
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane.
Cloud, J. (2000 December). Never Too Buff. Time Europe, 155 (16), Retrieved March 29, 2005 from EbscoHost online database (Men & Their Bodies).
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Allen Lane.
Foucault, M. (1988). The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume 3 (R. Hurley, Trans.). Toronto, ON: Random House of Inc.
Girl Scouts Mid-Continent Council, Inc. (2000). Pre-teen Girls Caught In ‘Age Compression’ Crunch, New Girl Scout Study Shows. Retrieved March 29, 2005, from http://www.girlscoutsmcc.org/pdfs/news_preteens.pdf
Kilbourne, J. (1999). Can’t buy my love: How advertising changes the way we think and feel. New York, NY: Touchstone.
MacArthur, K. (2001 December). Compression Quandary. Advertising Age, 72 (7), Retrieved March 29, 2005 from EbscoHost online database (Academic Search Premier).
McDougall, C. & Schuler, L. (2003 March). Buyin’ Bulk. Men’s Health, 18 (2), Retrieved March 29, 2005 from EbscoHost online database (Trends).
Ministry of Children and Youth Services. (1999). Early Years Study: Reversing the Real Brain Drain. Retrieved April 5, 2005, from http://www.children.gov.on.ca/CS/en/programs/EarlyYearsInitiatives/Publications/Early YearsStudy.htm
Wallace, R.A. & Wolf, A. (1999). Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition (5th ed.). Toronto, ON: Prentice Hall of Canada, Inc.
Wolf, E. (1997). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
posted by energetika at 9:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home