Kapitalist Kids
Channel: LIVING SOCIOLOGY
Date: 2019-12-11

First Person, Plural on CFUV-fm, Victoria, BC 
Originally aired September 26, 2002

This week we talked with Dr. Dan Cook, Assistant Professor in Advertising at University of Illinois. "Imaginations can be colonized," asserts Cook in an article in LIP magazine last year.  This colonization of children's imaginations are part of an overall change in the way we think about childhood and serves to further the hegemony of capitalism, and specifically, consumption.  What can a parent do?  What should we all be doing?
 
When Henry Ford said that he had to pay his workers enough for them to be able to buy the cars they were making, he was recognizing a basic component of economics:  supply and demand.  Advertising has made the relationship between supply and demand much more complicated.  No where is this relationship more complex than in children's advertising.  Children do not generally have jobs in North America.  They are consumers first and foremost and paying attention to their consumption is one way to crack the consumer nut.  Do children demand "Pokemon" or is the supply of "Pokemon" and the advertising meant to sell that supply driving children to purchase them.  We discuss the ways in which oligarchical institutions (media and education) have worked together to support this phenomenon of Kapitalist Kids.

copyright: Carl Wilkerson and Pattie Thomas

http://sociologylegacy.pbworks.com/w/page/93415334/Episode%2019%20Kapitalist%20Kids