Final Project

Kids these days are spending twice the amount of time in front of a TV or computer screen than they are spending in a classroom, says Ed Mayo in his book Consumer Kids, making them the perfect target for excessive advertisement. According to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, advertisements have the potential to cause major problems in a child’s life, including “dependence on the things [they] buy for life satisfaction, a “me first” attitude, and conformity.” Unless advertisements are blatantly obnoxious, such as Happy Meal advertisements on school report cards in Orlando, we hardly notice the extent to which we are bombarded with them beginning in infancy. Television and radio have been marketing arenas for decades, although marketing has gone beyond commercials and implanted itself in programs themselves, but with our increasing obsession with the Internet come new horizons for corporations. Websites not only have pop-up ads, but also are beginning to incorporate advertisements in the content of the site and this is often a major issue on websites designed for children. These advertisements convince us our lives will be better if we buy the product. This has a major effect on our perception of happiness. As technology advances, we are convinced that we can’t live without a certain product, be it an MP3 player or a new cell phone; we feel the need to constantly upgrade our gadgets. The constant exposure to advertisement we experience in our technologically dominated lives has given us an insatiable demand for new products and has formed a consumer culture that creates a perpetual dissatisfaction in our lives. As we forge on into the new technologically dependent society we have created, we must decide whether excessive consumerism is the right way to live.