Towards ethical consumerism: authors, teacher librarians and students in collaboration

By Camille Price

ACCESS, Vol. 21, Issue 4, 2007, pp. 5-8.

(The views expressed in articles are those of the author(s) concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of ASLA.)

Introduction

Identity, the notion of ‘one’s place in the world’ (McCarthy et al. 2003, p. 1), is not only built around consumer culture; it has become a commodity in itself. Youth are told by predatory advertisers that they can buy better versions of themselves. Advertisers’ deceptions are echoed and strengthened by popular culture and unchallenged by governments. The messages are homogenous and alternative voices are scarcely heard. Unethical corporate practice is lucrative and largely uncontested as globalisation’s inherent opportunities are manifesting as exploitation and a backlash against pluralism.

Some writers of teenage fiction are voicing dissent. MT Anderson’s Feed envisions a hyper-consumerist future with advertisements directly received by the brain via a transmitter. Scott Westerfeld responds to the commodification of the body in Uglies, where plastic surgery is a rite of passage. Randa Abdel-Fattah explores the confused identity of a young Australian Muslim in Ten things I hate about me. Drawing on the insights of these texts, this paper will discuss the impact of consumerism on youth. It will argue that, along with writers, teacher librarians are in key positions for shaping a future of ethical consumerism, but they must do so in partnership with students.

Advertising, popular culture and politics

[A]s a nation dedicated to freedom and free commerce … (Anderson 2002, p. 70)

Consumerist societies interpret freedom as the freedom to spend and substitute political choice with product choice. But the American president in Feed (quoted above) speaks of commerce in terms we are used to. Commerce, we are told, is something good, something to be proud of, something worthy of the dedication of a nation. We are supposed to associate consumerism with privilege, full realisation of our rights, democratic civilisation, ultimate freedom. To question its merit is to be unpatriotic, irresponsible, heretic, communist. The dire consequences of resistance are exemplified in Feed and Uglies.

The commodification of childhood and adolescence is viewed as defensible on the grounds that it serves a greater good: continued economic stability. Preston (2005, p. 61) explains that ‘the socialisation of children into consumers is necessary given the capitalist system’s need for future expenditure’. If youth have a right to consume, they have a right to be advertised to. Today’s youth are the most advertised-to, market-researched generation in history.

Occasionally, young people are paid to advertise, damaging relationship dynamics and forcing them into confused roles of both victim and stalker. More often, young people pay to advertise, displaying brand logos and pressuring peers to purchase. In Feed, Marty purchases a Nike speech tattoo, which means that he says Nike in every sentence. Anderson notes the irony that ‘[H]e paid a lot for it’ (p. 218), when the Nike corporation is the beneficiary.

Even within seemingly subversive youth movements, authenticity and autonomy are elusive due to ‘arrested development’: the fact that ‘we have ... no idea of what punk or grunge or hip hop as social and cultural movements might look like if they were not mined for their gold’ (Goldman & Papson, cited in Klein 2001, p. 72). Feminism and environmentalism have been similarly undermined by commercial ventures that distort the central concerns of the ideologies (Fry & Lousley 2001, p. 1).

The messages and pressures youth receive from advertisers cannot succeed in a vacuum – they need to exist in a broader context that youth feel they can relate to. This is where popular culture finds its primary role.

Popular culture may entertain, engage or inform to varying degrees, but these functions are merely means to a lucrative end: serving the interests of advertisers. Advertisers in turn serve popular culture by providing revenue. Governments accept and encourage this partnership as it embellishes economies and keeps the public distracted in their pseudo-freedom. Possible ill effects on consumers – even young ones – are dismissed as collateral damage.

Eroding self-esteem, suspending identity

It’s a trick … you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly. (Westerfeld 2005, p. 82)

It is lucrative and relatively easy to convince consumers that countless aspects of their appearance are unacceptable, need to be fixed and can be fixed with products or procedures. As observed by Berger (1972), advertising steals consumers’ love for themselves and offers it back for the price of the product. When it comes to youth, this is achieved so successfully that excessive anxiety over appearance is mistaken for a natural symptom of adolescence.

In order to exclude the maximum number of people, and therefore reap maximum financial rewards, the beauty ideal has to be as narrow as possible. Combining digital technology and cosmetic surgery, the current standard dictates absolute flawlessness, an issue explored in Uglies, where 16th birthdays mean mandatory surgical makeovers.

Currently, females are overwhelmingly targeted by tyrannical beauty ideals. But it is both girls and boys who undergo radical cosmetic surgery in Uglies. Here, Westerfeld responds to the current increase in objectified male bodies in popular culture. Mirroring female fame, male celebrities, whose alleged talent has no natural connection to appearance, are under increasing pressure – and contractual agreements – to fit a muscular mould and to strip down to prove it.

This shift does not indicate that the men who run advertising have had a sudden realization of equality issues, nor does it indicate that there are more women in advertising, or that the industry is responding to feminist outrage. It merely indicates a hyper-capitalist marketing philosophy, where the empowered group is now prepared to shoot itself in the proverbial foot for the sake of greater profits.

The money-spinning obsession with appearance does not only benefit the beauty industry (which is, itself, extremely broad); the tobacco industry, for example, benefits as girls take up smoking to stay thin (BBC 2003). It is as impossible to calculate the vast economic gains of poor self-esteem as it is to calculate the extensive social costs.

When built around the quest for perfection, identity is elusive, waiting somewhere just over the horizon, in the promise of the next product. This applies not only to beauty products and fashion, but to all trends as expressed by Feed’s protagonist: ‘It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it’ (Anderson, p. 219).

Girls and the myth of empowerment

Peter is flirting with me. My bra size hasn’t increased over the holidays. I haven’t had any collagen injections. (Abdel-Fattah 2006, p. 15)

While acknowledging the validity of Westerfeld’s predictions for males, it is important to emphasise that females remain disproportionately victimised by the beauty myth (Wolf 1991). In addition, women and girls are devalued by the news media and relegated to secondary roles in the broader media. As hegemony dictates (McQuail 2004), this situation is often misinterpreted as natural, rather than as a deliberate patriarchal construction, and is therefore denied adequate exposure, opposition and debate.

Chomsky observes that media allow debate only ‘within a framework that serves the dominant institutions’ (2002, p. 13). This is evident in the actions and appearance of most modern female protagonists. Females are allowed to stray outside traditional behavioural norms; they can be promiscuous, nasty and competitive, they can travel, have careers, take drugs, and even slay vampires if they want to. But they ultimately seek a heterosexual relationship and the culmination of all their searching and adventuring is the traditional role of femininity.

Similarly, slight variations in appearance exist within the dominant framework. For example, ethnic variations are allowed insofar as they are seen as exotic, but must be accompanied by ‘white ideal’ features such as blonde and/or straight hair, high cheekbones, narrow noses and, regardless of traditional norms or preferences within the ethnic group, thinness.

Abdel-Fattah’s Jamilah (quoted above) does not see herself reflected in popular culture and is therefore confused when she receives male attention. The receipt of male attention is a signifier of success for females across popular culture. Mulvey first asserted in the 1970s that women in film connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (p. 19). Despite some theorists' claims to the contrary, this remains true today and is taken to extremes in modern music videos, where the phallocentric voyeurism of the camera is overwhelming, regardless of the gender or perceived empowerment of the performer.

Popular culture’s sexism effectively serves patriarchy and consumer culture, thwarting the advances of liberation. Wykes and Gunter note that it is as though ‘all [females’] new-found financial independence was worth was the ability to buy versions of themselves that more men would desire’ (2005, p. 82).

Globalisation: paranoia and exploitation

If only people were smarter, evolved enough to treat people the same even if they looked different. (Westerfeld 2005, p. 97).

Globalisation, in theory, offers exciting possibilities: global understanding, intercultural awareness, universal human rights realisation, fair trade, surmounted stereotypes and even the cessation of conflict and war. In reality, the situation is characterised by paranoia and exploitation.

Some negative effects can be attributed to the threat to power inherent in globalisation’s destabilising possibilities. McCarthy et al. observe that post-9/11, America has been ‘defined by a hostility toward to rampant pluralism that … globalisation has proffered’ (2003, p. 2). The same can be said for Australia, where the Howard Government’s racist policies and involvement in the invasion of Iraq gained popular support.

Mainstream news can be regarded as a facet of popular culture, insofar as it is widely viewed, funded by advertising and compliant to popular ideology. Agenda-setting theory asserts that popular discussion and thought is determined by the news media (Larson 1986, as cited in Wimmer and Dominick 1994). Mainstream news aims not only to determine what we think about, but how we think about it. In Australia, current negativity toward Islam, Muslims, Arabs and the Middle East (as though they were one and the same) is actively encouraged by the mainstream news. Narrow and often incriminating stereotypes seek to dehumanise and homogenise individuals, categorising them as actual or potential terrorists, rapists, suicide bombers or veiled women.

Even beyond the news, popular culture offers no alternatives to these stereotypes. Deen, an Australian Muslim, asks: ‘… where is the human face I know? Where are my parents, my brother and my sister? Where are my friends?’ (cited in Mansuri 2005, p. 161). Exclusion, vilification and unchallenged negative stereotypes are political propaganda tools that cannot operate effectively without popular culture's assistance. This assistance is readily bestowed, and its ability to jeopardise the identity of certain groups is immense.

Ten things I hate about me responds to this dilemma. Set in the wake of the Cronulla riots, the novel explores the confused identity of Jamilah, an Australian-born daughter of Lebanese immigrants. Her battle with identity is largely due to mainstream media’s vilification of Muslims after 9/11. Jamilah’s Middle Eastern classmates endure constant racial and cultural taunts and she conceals her Lebanese origin to avoid a similar fate. She straightens her hair, dies it blonde and wears blue contact lenses, noting the privileges afforded to ‘blue-eyed, blonde girl[s] of Caucasian appearance. The yard-stick against which all Australians are measured’ (Abdel-Fattah 2006, p. 8).

Not all non-Anglo groups are vilified; some are simply ignored. Globalisation delivers global popular culture and promotes global consumerism. While the world-view of middle-class whites is solely represented and idealised, this amounts to cultural imperialism. Identity becomes confused by homogenous messages about lifestyle, values, relationships, religion, fashion and beauty where these conflict with cultural norms.

Citizens of the developing world do not feature in Western popular imagination and empathy for their denied rights is therefore low. This is evident in the continued exploitation of workers in free-trade zones at the hands of multinational corporations. Nike’s sweatshops made news briefly; consumers’ obsession with brands meant that a story about one of them was initially newsworthy. But outsourcing has since become accepted corporate practice (Klein 2001) and opposition has all but vanished from the mainstream press. Like the humans in Feed , we are obsessed ‘only with the consumption of products. We have no interest in how they were produced’ (p. 228).

Towards ethical consumerism

The only thing worse than the thought that it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever. (Anderson 2002, p. 154)

Teacher librarians must be visionaries, able to imagine a workable utopia and commit to it in daily practice. As LeCourt (2001) insists, a school should be a place where dominant ideology is exposed, questioned, critiqued and possibly undermined, rather than thoughtlessly reinforced. A future without consumerism is not an undesirable imagining, but it is unrealistic. The answers to overcoming the threats that consumerism currently presents to youth lie within the consumerist mould, with focus on an ideological shift toward ethical consumerism.

Unethical commercial practices include deliberate erosion of self-esteem, perpetuation of gender stereotypes, commodification and distortion of social movements, cultural imperialism, corporate outsourcing and exploitation of workers in free-trade zones. Unethical consumerism will cease if it is no longer lucrative. This will require reprioritisation on the part of consumers.

Teacher librarians must demonstrate commitment to this shift by becoming ethical consumers themselves and by actively opposing unethical practice. Consumer and globalisation issues can also be promoted through critical literacies and through acquisition policies that prioritise global perspectives and embrace subversive texts such as Feed, Uglies and Ten things I hate about me.

Teacher librarians must be leaders in preserving free speech and voicing opposition to policies that threaten schools’ autonomy, such as corporate sponsorship. They must ensure that staff and students are aware of avenues for dissent and actively advocate for dissenters within the school system and the wider community.

One of teacher librarians’ greatest challenges lies in exposing the predatory nature of consumer culture without alienating students. When parents and educators attempt to criticise, censor or restrict youth access to popular culture, we risk being ‘turned into policing agents while corporations emerge as champions of children’s freedom’ (Kapur 2006, p. 59). Polarisation can be avoided by involving students in staff professional development and policy development in the areas of popular culture and information communication technologies.

Teacher librarians must acknowledge that while youth are consumer culture’s primary targets, they are independent meaning-makers who are not always passive victims of those who seek to manipulate them (Mallan & Pearce 2003). However, youth need to be encouraged to question popular ideology through critical literacies and analytical frameworks, with the guidance and leadership of experienced educators. With mutual understanding and shared goals, students and teacher librarians can work together toward ethical consumerism.

References

Abdel-Fattah R 2006, Ten things I hate about me, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, NSW.

Anderson MT 2002, Feed, Candlewick Press, Cambridge, MA.

BBC 2003, Girls ‘smoke to stay thin’, BBC News International Edition, viewed 4 March 2007, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2969757.stm>.

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Bordo S 2003, Unbearable weight: feminism, Western culture and the body, University of California Press, Los Angeles.

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Fry K and Lousely C 2001, ‘Girls just want to have fun with politics: out of the contradictions of popular culture, eco-girls are rising to redefine feminism, environmentalism and political action’, Alternatives Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 24–27 (accessed 3 March 2007, from ProQuest online database).

Kapur J 2006, ‘Rehearsals for war: capitalism and the transformation of children into consumers’, Socialism and Democracy, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 55–70 (accessed 4 April 2007 from ProQuest online database).

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Mansouri F 2005, ‘Citizenship, identity and belonging in contemporary Australia’, in Akbarzadeh S and Yasmeen S (eds.) 2005, Islam and the West; reflections from Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp. 149–164.

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Preston C 2005, ‘Advertising to children and social responsibility’, Young Consumers, vol. 3, pp. 61–67 (accessed 27 March 2007 from ProQuest online database).

Westerfeld S 2005, Uglies, Simon Pulse, New York.

Wimmer RD and Dominick JR, Mass media research, 4th edn, Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, CA.

Wolf N 1991, The beauty myth: how images of beauty are used against women, William Morrow, New York.

Wykes M and Gunter B 2005, The media and body image, Sage Publications, London.

Camille Price emerged from her media studies degree as a passional advocate of media literacy for young people. She became an English and media teacher, travelled, then worked as a library assistant at the International School of Amsterdam from 2003 to 2006. She returned to Australia last year and is now learning skills tutor at Central Queensland University. She is currently enjoying a Master of Learning Innovation (Teacher Librarianship) at the Queensland University of Technology

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Last updated 11 January 2008