The Merchants of Cool
2001 · Film · documentary · 55 min
Directed by Barak Goodman
A documentary on the marketing of pop culture to Teenagers.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
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Hacker Cinema Hacker Cinema2001 · Film · documentary · 55 min
Directed by Barak Goodman
A documentary on the marketing of pop culture to Teenagers.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
No streaming data for this title.
5 comments on Hacker News
Reminds me of the documentary, “merchants of cool” https://youtu.be/0tYRoiJvhJ4
Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.
Why can’t both be true?
There is an argument to be made that gangsta rap made a generation of impressionable kids much more rough around the edges, as it defined the new “cool” for them. Even though it wasn’t “supposed to be for them”, they knew all the words, which are loaded with expletives and misogynistic lyrics, and sowing distrust of the police etc.
Maybe I am just a social conservative but I agree with this lady who tried, in vain, to fight against the capitalist machine that is ths music industry: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6gb1w72xA
Kids are impressionable — the Merchants of Cool documentary clearly shows how capitalist industries exploit that to sell more stuff: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/showscool/
It also helped shape a rift, in my opinion, between the Black and the White youth that grew up now, which had been closing thanks to Liberalism and efforts to move past it.
There was a PBS documentary almost two decades ago called Merchants of Cool, which discusses exactly the issue of celebrity status and how it is used to buy and sell “cool” to teenagers in order to influence their buyin decisions. What is scary is that this documentary was shot long before smartphones and social media - I imagine the effects are amplified by orders of magnitude since the proliferation of social media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctC56owCBJg
YouTube videos and reviews (online or not) are mostly just astro-turfed advertising campaigns. You and your friends are likely influenced by either of these things on both a conscious and subconscious level, which then feeds back into the advertising campaign (this works in both a negative and positive sense). [Edit: this is how the "cool" that you mention gets created. I highly suggest watching a PBS documentary called "The Merchants of Cool", if a bit dated, to see how prevalent this is]
As an example, take a look at any car magazine (e.g. Sports Compact Car) and read any of the articles. Or read a Cosmo or GQ article. The one thing they all have in common is they push a product through a story that doesn't even seem like advertising. It's both brilliant and slimy at the same time, and is the ultimate goal of any advertising campaign -- to assimilate itself into the culture without appearing that it is even trying. Like Apple.
Like it or not, we are all influenced by ads on some level, and if nothing else, the reason any one of us "hackers" should care about advertising campaigns is at least to appreciate, analyze and improve upon them for our own products.
Must watch video about subcultures, why they persist, how they grow, and why they all eventually die: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ (Merchants of Cool)