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| 製作老師
/ 林文淇
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A Brand by Any Other Name |
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A Brand by Any Other Name
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by Douglas Rushkoff
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1 I was in one of those sports "superstores" the other day, hoping to find a pair of trainers for myself. As I faced the giant wall of shoes, each model categorized by either sports affiliation, basketball star, economic class, racial heritage or consumer niche, I noticed a young boy standing next to me, maybe 13 years old, in even greater awe of the towering selection of footwear.
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2 His jaw was dropped and his eyes were glazed over - a psycho-physical response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment. It's a phenomenon known to retail architects as "Gruen Transfer," named for the gentleman who invented the shopping mall, where this mental paralysis is most commonly observed.
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3 Having finished several years of research on this exact mind state, I knew to proceed with caution. I slowly made my way to the boy's side and gently asked him, "what is going through your mind right now?"
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4 He responded without hesitation, "I don't know which of these trainers is 'me.'" The boy proceeded to explain his dilemma. He thought of Nike as the most utilitarian and scientifically advanced shoe, but had heard something about third world laborers and was afraid that wearing this brand might label him as too anti-Green. He then considered a skateboard shoe, Airwalk, by an "indie" manufacturer (the trainer equivalent of a micro-brewery) but had recently learned that this company was almost as big as Nike. The truly hip brands of skate shoe were too esoteric for his current profile at school - he'd look like he was "trying." This left the "retro" brands, like Puma, Converse and Adidas, none of which he felt any real affinity, since he wasn't even alive in the 70's when they were truly and non-ironically popular.
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5 With no clear choice and, more importantly, no other way to conceive of his own identity, the boy stood there, paralyzed in the modern youth equivalent of an existential crisis. Which brand am I, anyway?
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6 Believe it or not, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of youth culture marketers who have already begun clipping out this article. They work for hip, new advertising agencies and cultural research firms who trade in the psychology of our children and the anthropology of their culture. The object of their labors is to create precisely the state of confusion and vulnerability experienced by the young shopper at the shoe wall - and then turn this state to their advantage. It is a science, though not a pretty one.
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7 Yes, our children are the prey and their consumer loyalty is the prize in an escalating arms race. Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes. The revolutionary impact of a new musical genre is co-opted and packaged by a major label before it reaches the airwaves. The ability of young people to deconstruct and neutralize the effects of one advertising technique are thwarted when they are confounded by yet another. The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.
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8 The battle in which our children are engaged seems to pass beneath our radar screens, in a language we don't understand. But we see the confusion and despair that results - not to mention the ever-increasing desperation with which even three-year-olds yearn for the next Pokemon trading card. How did we get in this predicament, and is there a way out? Is it your imagination, you wonder, or have things really gotten worse?
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9 Alas, things seem to have gotten worse. Ironically, this is because things had gotten so much better.
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10 In olden times - back when those of us who read the newspaper grew up - media was a one-way affair. Advertisers enjoyed a captive audience, and could quite authoritatively provoke our angst and stoke our aspirations. Interactivity changed all this. The remote control gave viewers the ability to break the captive spell of television programming whenever they wished, without having to get up and go all the way up to the set. Young people proved particularly adept at "channel surfing," both because they grew up using the new tool, and because they felt little compunction to endure the tension-provoking narratives of storytellers who did not have their best interests at heart. It was as if young people knew that the stuff on television was called "programming" for a reason, and developed shortened attention spans for the purpose of keeping themselves from falling into the spell of advertisers. The remote control allowed young people to deconstruct TV.
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11 The next weapon in the child's arsenal was the video game joystick. For the first time, viewers had control over the very pixels on their monitors. The television image was demystified.
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12 Lastly, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed the TV receiver into a portal. Today's young people grew up in a world where a screen could as easily be used for expressing oneself as consuming the media of others. Now the media was up-for-grabs, and the ethic, from hackers to camcorder owners, was "do it yourself."
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13 Of course, this revolution had to be undone. Television and internet programmers, responding to the unpredictable viewing habits of the newly liberated, began to call our mediaspace an "attention economy." No matter how many channels they had for their programming, the number of "eyeball hours" that human beings were willing to dedicate to that programming was fixed. Not coincidentally, the channel surfing habits of our children became known as "attention deficit dissorder" - a real disease now used as an umbrella term for anyone who clicks away from programming before the marketer wants him to. We quite literally drug our children into compliance. Likewise, as computer interfaces were made more complex and opaque - think Windows - the do-it-yourself ethic of the Internet was undone. The original Internet was a place to share ideas and converse with others. Children actually had to use the keyboard! Now, the World Wide Web encourages them to click numbly through packaged content. Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information.
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14 But young people had been changed by their exposure to new media. They constituted a new "psychographic," as advertisers like to call it, so new kinds of messaging had to be developed that appealed to their new sensibility.
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15 Anthropologists - the same breed of scientists that used to scope out enemy populations before military conquests - engaged in focus groups, conducted "trend-watching" on the streets, in order to study the emotional needs and subtle behaviors of young people. They came to understand, for example, how children had abandoned narrative structures for fear of the way stories were used to coerce them. Children tended to construct narratives for themselves by collecting things instead, like cards, bottlecaps called "pogs," or keychains and plush toys. They also came to understand how young people despised advertising - especially when it did not acknowledge their media-savvy intelligence.
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16 Thus, Pokemon was born - a TV show, video game, and product line where the object is to collect as many trading cards as possible. The innovation here, among many, is the marketer's conflation of TV show and advertisement into one piece of media. The show is an advertisement. The story, such as it is, concerns a boy who must collect little monsters in order to develop his own character. Likewise, the Pokemon video game engages the player in a quest for those monsters. Finally, the card game itself (for the few children who actually play it) involves collecting better monsters - not by playing, but by buying more cards. The more cards you buy, the better you can play.
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17 Kids feel the tug, but in a way they can't quite identify as advertising. Their compulsion to create a story for themselves - in a world where stories are dangerous - makes them vulnerable to this sort of attack. In marketers terms, Pokemon is "leveraged" media, with "cross-promotion" on "complementary platforms." This is ad-speak for an assault on multiple fronts.
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18 Moreover, the time a child spends in the Pokemon craze amounts to a remedial lesson in how to consume. Pokemon teaches them how to want things that they can't or won't actually play with. In fact, it teaches them how to buy things they don't even want. While a child might want one particular card, he needs to purchase them in packages whose contents are not revealed. He must buy blind and repeatedly until he gets the object of his desire.
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19 Worse yet, the card itself has no value - certainly not as a play-thing. It is a functionless purchase, slipped into a display case, whose value lies purely in its possession. It is analogous to those children who buy action figures from their favorite TV shows and movies, with no intention of ever removing them from their packaging! They are purchased for their collectible value alone. Thus, the imagination game is reduced to some fictional moment in the future where they will, presumably, be resold to another collector. Children are no longer playing. They are investing.
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20 Meanwhile, older kids have attempted to opt out of aspiration, altogether. The "15-24" demographic, considered by marketers the most difficult to wrangle into submission, have adopted a series of postures they hoped would make them impervious to marketing techniques. They take pride in their ability to recognize when they are being pandered to, and watch TV for the sole purpose of calling out when they are being manipulated. They are armchair media theorists, who take pleasure in deconstructing and defusing the messages of their enemies.
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21 But now advertisers are making commercials just for them. Soft drink advertisements satirize one another before rewarding the cynical viewer: "image is nothing," they say. The technique might best be called "wink" advertising, for its ability to engender a young person's loyalty by pretending to disarm itself. "Get it?" the ad means to ask. If you're cool, you do.
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22 New magazine advertisements for jeans, such as those created by Diesel, take this even one step further. The ads juxtapose imagery that actually makes no sense - ice cream billboards in North Korea, for example. The strategy is brilliant. For a media-savvy young person to feel good about himself, he needs to feel he "gets" the joke. But what does he do with an ad where there's obviously something to get that he can't figure out? He has no choice but to admit that the brand is even cooler than he is. An ad's ability to confound its audience is the new credential for a brand's authenticity.
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23 Like the boy at the wall of shoes, kids today analyze each purchase they make, painstakingly aware of how much effort has gone into seducing them. As a result, they see their choices of what to watch and what to buy as exerting some influence over the world around them. After all, their buying patterns have become the center of so much attention!
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24 But however media-savvy kids get, they will always lose this particular game. For they have accepted the language of brands as their cultural currency, and the stakes in their purchasing decisions as something real. For no matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an autonomous or creative being.
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25 The more they interact with brands, the more they brand themselves.
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| 文句注釋 |
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| 1. | a pair of trainers | | 一雙球鞋（sneakers） | Return | | 2. | sports affiliation | | 運動社團或聯盟 | Return | | 3. | economic class | | 經濟階級（通常會用socio-economic class，以強調用社會經濟指標來區分的階級） | Return | | 4. | consumer niche | | 特定的（小眾）消費者群 | Return | | 5. | glazed over | | 目光呆滯（glaze 是玻璃，這個片語可能是描寫眼睛如同玻璃般無神） | Return | | 6. | self-contained consumer environment | | 什麼都有（自給自足無所需）的消費環境（self-contained: containing or having everything that is needed within itself 劍橋辭典) | Return | | 7. | retail architects | | 零售（賣場）建築設計師（包含室內規劃、裝潢與情境佈置等） | Return | | 8. | the most utilitarian and scientifically advanced shoe | | 最實用又是科學上最進步的鞋子 | Return | | 9. | too anti-Green | | 不環保 | Return | | 10. | "indie" manufacturer | | 獨立（小）製造商 | Return | | 11. | too esoteric for his current profile at school | | 不夠大眾化（太獨特）跟他現在在學校的形象不符 | Return | | 12. | he was "trying." | | 他會看起來裝模作樣 | Return | | 13. | "retro" brands | | “老的／過去的“廠牌 | Return | | 14. | when they were truly and non-ironically popular | | 這些品牌真的，不是諷刺的，流行的年代。 | Return | | 15. | Which brand am I, anyway? | | 我到底是哪種品牌？【人被商品化莫此為甚！實在是很悲哀。】 | Return | | 16. | who trade in | | 他們專作...生意 | Return | | 17. | the state of confusion and vulnerability experienced by the young shopper | | 年輕購物者感受到的混淆與無助狀態 | Return | | 18. | It is a science, though not a pretty one. | | 這是一種科學，雖然不是值得稱頌的科學 | Return | | 19. | an escalating arms race | | 一種加劇的武器競賽（比喻廠商間競爭的激烈） | Return | | 20. | children's predilections | | 孩童們的喜好（predilections=liking 是略微正式一點的說法） | Return | | 21. | capitalize on their vulnerabilities | | 利用他們的弱點（容易受害的處境）（capitalize on sth = to use a situation to your own advantage; 劍橋辭典） | Return | | 22. | media-savvy attitudes | | 聰明看待媒體的態度（savvy 一般作名詞使用 = practical knowledge and ability，例如political savvy；接在名詞之後結合為形容詞，如此處media savvy 就是懂得應付媒體的） | Return | | 23. | ironic dispositions | | 反諷的個性（也就是偏偏不應和以產反諷效果） | Return | | 24. | co-opted and packaged by a major label | | 被主流唱片公司收編然後包裝（co-opt = to include someone in something, often against their will; Cambridge Dictionary） | Return | | 25. | reaches the airwaves | | 被播送 | Return | | 26. | are thwarted | | 被停止／阻斷 | Return | | 27. | predicament | | 困境；an unpleasant situation which is difficult to get out of（Cambridge Dictionary） | Return | | 28. | In olden times | | 古時候（olden 是古字，這裡是故意使用） | Return | | 29. | a captive audience | | 被控制的觀眾 | Return | | 30. | authoritatively provoke our angst and stoke our aspirations | | 具有權威地激起我們的憂心跟煽起動我們的熱情 | Return | | 31. | they felt little compunction to endure the tension-provoking narratives of storytellers who did not have their best interests at heart | | 他們不覺得有道義要去忍受那些刻意激起緊張但卻不是真的為他們而製作的故事 | Return | | 32. | deconstruct TV | | 解構電視 | Return | | 33. | child's arsenal | | 孩子的軍火庫 | Return | | 34. | video game joystick | | 電動遊戲遙控桿 | Return | | 35. | a portal | | 一個入口（連接到網路世界） | Return | | 36. | attention economy | | 注意力經濟（注意力的價值就像金錢） | Return | | 37. | attention deficit dissorder | | 注意力不足（失調）症 | Return | | 38. | We quite literally drug our children into compliance. | | （由於看電視會經常轉台的小孩被認定為一種病症，要治療吃藥，因此）我們事實上等於是用藥物讓我們的小孩來服從（電視行銷顧問／規劃人） | Return | | 39. | psychographic | | 心理圖像（特質的描繪） | Return | | 40. | scope out enemy populations | | 仔細研究敵國人口 | Return | | 41. | trend-watching | | 趨勢觀察 | Return | | 42. | for fear of the way stories were used to coerce them | | 擔心這些故事說的方式是要來脅迫他們 | Return | | 43. | plush toys | | 絨毛玩具 | Return | | 44. | Pokemon is "leveraged" media, with "cross-promotion" on "complementary platforms." | | 皮卡丘是「被作用過」的媒體，在「互惠平台」上有「交互宣傳」效果（leverage 是槓桿作用，可當動詞用） | Return | | 45. | older kids have attempted to opt out of aspiration, altogether | | 年紀大一點的小孩則是試著要拋棄所有（購買商品的）想望 | Return | | 46. | wrangle into submission | | 透過手段使其順服 | Return | | 47. | impervious to marketing techniques | | 不受到市場行銷伎倆入侵／穿透 | Return | | 48. | they are being pandered to | | 被拉皮條去購買（如買春） | Return | | 49. | armchair media theorists | | （相對於學院裡的理論家，是家裡）座椅上的媒體理論家 | Return | | 50. | cynical viewer | | 帶著懷疑態度如犬儒主義者的觀眾 | Return | | 51. | ice cream billboards | | 冰淇淋廣告看板 | Return | | 52. | An ad's ability to confound its audience is the new credential for a brand's authenticity. | | 一個廣告能夠讓它的觀眾「不了」就是一個品牌夠正點的新能力指標 | Return | | 53. | cultural currency | | 文化流行與價值（如貨幣） | Return | | 54. | the stakes in their purchasing decisions as something real | | 他們（近似賭博的）購買決定所能夠帶來的獲益（如賭注的獎金）是真實的（意思就是：其實沒那麼嚴重） | Return | | 55. | the manufacturing of brands | | 品牌的製造生產（也就是一個品牌的價值創造） | Return | | 56. | brand themselves | | 把自己烙印（成為那些品牌的所有物） | Return | |
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