Kris Holmes

Web Assignment

November 29, 2006

Dehumanization

            Fr. Kavanaugh worries that advertising is shaping our values, because he worries that the people of America will take the advertisements literally and that they will be so engulfed in them that they will not know what good values are anymore. The media shows many images to the people of America. There are advertisements about what to wear, what a person should eat, what they should listen to, and every other part of our lives. Fr. Kavanaugh thinks that people will start to pay to much attention to what others will think of them, start to become more materialistic. In a sense, we start to become more worried about goods that we do not really need. He does have good reasons to be afraid of what might happen in the future, because it does appear that America is getting to involved with buying things that make us look good. Some people do tend to just buy things, because they think that a gift will make them happy. Some people tend to focus too much on the gift part of Christmas instead of the thing that is important, the birth of Christ. While this is true for some people, I do not think that it is true for everybody. I think that most people do not really care what others think about their clothes or what they eat or other things like that. I know that the people that I know do not tend to focus too much, on what the rest of the world is wearing. True I do not know everybody at SLUH, so in fact, a person could be too concerned about what the “in” thing is, but I do not think it is as big at SLUH as it is in other places.

            The message of “The Merchants of Cool” is that teens are the biggest customers for companies. That really without teens most companies either would go out of business or would have to change. Teens I think really shape culture, meaning that without the teens opinions on certain things the media would not know what to put out their. We see advertisements for different shoes or clothes, because teens like those types of clothes, it could be said for pretty much everything that is advertised to teens. Once the culture is established then the more and more it is shown to teens the more teens that will follow it. This idea of teens following popular culture is what Fr. Kavanaugh does not like. So really the two movies really are saying the same thing, that teens tend to not really decide things fro themselves and that some teens do tend to just follow what the media tells them is cool.

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