Blahblah market blah blah conversations blah blah please hold blah

72. We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

73. You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

False prophet of the internet age. Deluded in the idea of the meek inheriting cyberspace.

What do you mean we are creating it? What about digital enclosure? What about websites tracking your interests and selling them to companies? What about Facebook owning everything you put on there, even if you take it off? What about warrantless electronic wiretapping? The Patriot Acts? We’re helping big corporations get more out of us, sure…but creating it?

“Immune to Advertising”? Check out Emotional Branding or how about Born to Buy. Sure, maybe you are immune when you are an adult that was not brought up around advertisements or markets, but not when you’re young and you’re getting a very expensive education from companies.

(CBS) In 1983, companies spent $100 million marketing to kids. Today, they’re spending nearly $17 billion annually. That’s more than double what it was in 1992.

Marketing firms and advertisers are looking to a younger demographic, increasingly targeting tweens and even younger children. And these kids have huge control over the flow of parents’ spending, statistics show — 8- to 12-year-olds spend $30 billion of their own money each year and influence another $150 billion of their parents’ spending.

Sure, you as an adult can be immune to advertising…but if children were so immune why would the companies spend so much money on making these children loyal from such a young age? They’re investing in their future consumers.

Markets aren’t really conversations. I don’t really know what ClueTrain means by this. That the CEO is talking to his consumers? That WalMart is treating their employees right? It seems like going through the internet is the best way to ignore conversation, considering you don’t have to see someone. It’s not like someone coming into your office demandning answers. Demanding discourse.

I think it’s important for our class to move into the direction of the market perspective. It is unavoidable as somehow it seems to me that everything on cyberspace is commodified. Everything is for sale, and everything is an object.