Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the constant battle between marketers and the evolving strategies of young consumers to protect themselves from manipulation.
Douglas Rushkoff's quote illustrates the cyclical nature of marketing strategies targeted at children and adolescents. It suggests that while marketers invest heavily in understanding and exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people, these individuals eventually become aware and develop skepticism or defenses against such tactics. This ongoing cycle of adaptation indicates the complexity of consumer behavior in relation to marketing practices.
In practice
In a discussion on media literacy, one might quote this to illustrate how young people can be targeted by marketers.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door. But the reality is if you put a back door in, that back door's for everybody - for good guys and bad guys.
We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
Error-prone or biased artificial-intelligence systems have the potential to taint our social ecosystem in ways that are initially hard to detect, harmful in the long term, and expensive - or even impossible - to reverse.
So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.
Just think of what a world it would be if we could measure the characteristics of your body when you get sick and transmit those directly to a doctor or a computer. You could get diagnosed and cured instantly and wirelessly.
Technology is a tool, and it's a platform. Nobody gets arrested for being a blogger; people get arrested for dissent. Nobody gets arrested for putting information about themselves online; they get arrested for being an activist. I'm a strong believer in the fact that you should not blame the tools; you should blame the circumstances.
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