American culture: history, characteristics, and contemporary perspectives

American culture and the consumption (patterns) of American youth in television, film, and other entertainment venues

Mommy I want that!" When discussing how American culture 'corrupts' children, the first words to come to mind are usually four letter words, or words pertaining to highly sexualized scenarios. Yet the culture of American capitalist cultural consumption is if anything more omnipresent and equally damaging to American children. It has created a legacy of conspicuous consumption of unnecessary consumer products over the course of the past, present, and future of American television and culture. It is likely to continue to affect the minds of children, creating a generation who believes they are what they buy, rather than what they believe -- "Generation Bling! Bling!" As the generation to come after Generations X and Y are often called. Identity is being reduced to a commodity rather than a real culture of art, literacy, and moral judgment.

Children may still be barred from rated R (for restricted) films without a parent, their parents may install parental controls on their AOL accounts, yet children every day tune into cartoons that function essentially as half-hour long advertisements for plastic products and foods devoid of nutritional content. Great Britain recently banned advertising for, "burgers, crisps, fizzy drinks and even some breakfast cereals" during children's television shows, to forstall the corruption of its youth by advertising that preyed upon young and impressionable minds, stomachs, and palates. The government of Tony Blair answered cries regarding how one could define junk food by asking the British version fo the FDA, the "Food Standards Agency" to create a series of "lists based on sugar, salt and fat content." Thus, "items breaching prescribed limits," were banned during children's programming time.

However, England has a common law rather than a constitutional tradition, and thus no formal First Amendment. In contrast, in one ruling known as United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Incorporated, a law was invalidated that required cable television operators broadcasting channels "primarily dedicated to sexually-oriented programming" to "fully scramble or otherwise fully block" those channels or to limit their transmission to hours when children are unlikely to be viewing, set by administrative regulation as between 10 p.m. And 6 a.m. (Rotunda, 2003) In other words, even though the United States enacts certain prohibitions upon the consumption of children such as the movie ratings system, industries are encouraged to self-regulate, rather than to be regulated by the government.

However, the debate in the United States, unlike Britain as a country is distinct not only legally but because has centered upon sexual content in music lyrics, rather than, for instance, the 'bling-bling' aspect of encouraging children to buy, buy, buy without consideration of budget or health. Even British critics of the proposed law banning junk food advertising alleged the law would be a "devastating blow to the quality of children's television," because children's television was particularly in need, in Britan's cash-strapped times, of the money from advertising to make programs." (Hennessy, 2004) In other words, in television, particularly children's television, advertising money reigns supreme, because advertising money produces culture, even though it may have negative effects.

Children's advertising is in a double bind, for it is supposed to be somewhat educational, or at least, not harmful to impressionable young minds, yet it has the irresistable impact to corporations of offering them a generation of fertile young minds and potential consumers. Also, even more so than British television, which is partially government subsidized in most of its major venues, however, American television, has been nakedly rooted in advertising. Television advertisors sponsor programs covertly and overtly with their dollars. This is one of the reasons that McDonald's or movie promotional commercials for theme-related toys blend so seamlessly and skillfully with the television shows indended for a young audience. It simply makes financial and pyschological sense for, for instance, Toys R Us to advertise Care Bears toys featured in the Care Bears program children are watching. However, such an attitude creates an idea that entertainment and buying products are merged, and builds, in adolescence, a generation of individuals whom have become convinced that the diversity of music upon one's Apple iPod 'says' more about them as a person, in terms of character, than choices they make in the real rather than virtual world. Identity becomes totemic, something to be purchased on the market, something only available to those making a certain income, in American culture, rather than intrinsic to the individual.

This is one of the legacies, one might say, of America, where rather than outdated modes of valuing the human person, such as birth or class, one is evaluated by one's merit, ideally. However, merit and one's intrinstic worth in a capitalist culture is measured through the external traffic of commodities, rather than the internally exhibited merits of morality. Before television even existed, the institution of Hollywood and the film industry as one of America's primary cultural exports has been a contributing factor to this externality of American identity. The recently serialized 1920's novel in The New York Times, entitled The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, shows a 'hero' of sorts who makes himself up out of bootlegged money, corruption, and quite literally whole cloth in the form of nicely tailored European suits.

Allegations about Hollywood corrupting the youth of America thus do not take into consideration the larger picture and problem, that American identity itself is based in capitalist notions of commoficication. The first wave of moral anti-zealotry against Hollywood took place during the 1930's, when attempts to instill morality in Hollywood films via the Hayes Commission, for instance, featured industry prohibitions against a woman sitting on a bed unless one of her feet were on the floor, forcing actresses into physical acrobatics, as well as screenwriters, presumably. Thus, the hatred of Hollywood's bankrput nature did not begin with the Bush admistration of the present day, and remained sexual rather than commercial in its focus, quite misguidedly.

The current backlash of the 21st century reached feverish levels during the Clinton administration when Vice Presidental wife Tipper Gore demanded that music lyrics be rated and censored and after the Columbine shootings, the FTC released a report that "excoriated the entertainment industry for 'marketing' violent products that are, in the view of the FTC, not suitable for the young." The FTC accused the entertainment industry of being 'misleading,' "and darkly threatened to take some sort of enforcement action against it." But, as noted by Ronald D. Rotunda of the Cato Institute, a Visiting Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies at the University of Illinois, if "the FTC is truly concerned about misleading advertising, it should look at its own report; then it should look in the mirror. What does it mean to market to juveniles "when MetLife markets its insurance products by using Snoopy, the dog from the Peanuts cartoon series on billboards, commercials, and its homepage, where it "prominently displays the cartoon dog. As one browses the other links in the web page, we see Snoopy, Lucy, and the other characters selling life insurance, advising about a will, and so forth. Should "the FTC should investigate MetLife?" Although Rotunda makes this query, not seriously, but hyperbolically, indicating the limits of the law to police within First Amendment limitations, all of advertising, Hollywood, and American culture upon the burgeoning Internet, his suggestion is potent regarding how the friendly nature of the cartoon can mask, even for adults, a potent consumerist message that may not be sexual in content, or potentially obscene, but is seductive in its advertising potential.