Download full edition - Youth Work Ireland

YOUTH STUDIES IRELAND(Rose, 1990; du Gay, 1997) and ‘flexibility’ (Alvesson, 1998). Thus, in addition to thecentripetal aesthetic hold ‘youth’ appeared to exert on global consumer society, Isuggest – drawing on the work of Marianne Lien (1997, 2004) – that notions of ‘flux’and ‘change’ were absorbed by the advertising community, ultimately serving toreinforce a bias of youth in commercial texts. In order to remain ‘up-to-date’ marketersand advertisers did not look to ageing consumers but disproportionately fixed theirgaze upon youth trends (Swayne and Greco, 1987).Employing data emerging from eight months fieldwork in the marketing 9department of a Norwegian food manufacturer, Lien considers ‘the ways in whichmarketing mediates and reconfigures notions of time, change, consumption andconsumers’ (2004: 48). Drawing upon accounts which seek to describe widespreadexperiences of change, such as Gidden’s ‘high modernity’ (1991) and Bauman’s ‘liquidmodernity’ (2000), Lien establishes a platform from which to investigate the processesof modernity (theorised in these accounts) as enacted and experienced within thecontext of a marketing department. Chief among Lien’s observations is that marketingis biased towards future scenarios and change: ‘Repeated references to novelties, news,the future and anticipated change serve to constitute what I will refer to as a bias oftemporality in marketing discourse’ (Lien, 2004: 49). Reconfiguring Lien’s ‘bias oftemporality’ to investigate youth, I suggest that a heavily futurist orientation and focuson change when producing advertisements inclines advertisers to prioritise youth intheir texts. In submitting to an ethos of constant change, unstable identities andendless wants (Campbell, 1987), consumer culture perpetuates a logic of disposabilityand an ‘aesthetics of ephemerality’ (Appadurai, 1996). O’Barr (1994) suggests that alladvertisements contain ideology. Thus, advertising representations provide paradigmsfor relations between members of advertising’s intended audience as well as thosedefined as outside it (Frith, 1997). In the case of commercial advertising, I argue thatthe ideology of consumerism condenses into an ideal of youth at the representationallevel 10 . Aging is arrested, ignored and resisted. My argument is not that a generallyfuturist orientation continually generates new kinds of appeals or techniques ofpersuasion but that the rhetoric of change and creativity – largely adopted to convinceclients that ideas are contemporary and ‘up to date’ – drives advertisers todisproportionately draw from and subsequently appeal to youth. ‘Partly due to itsconstant promotion of novelty, advertising is imagined to be the sign of the times,representing the leading edge of social change’ (Cronin, 2004: 34/5). Advertisers desireto stay abreast of change and this pushes them to disproportionately consider youthwhen attempting to capture the zeitgeist; the apparent fickleness of youth tastesperceived as naturally aligned to the ‘creative’ imperatives of advertising.Furthermore, I suggest that professional notions of societal flux which help to anchoryouth as a central aesthetic have in turn profound implications for industrymythologies, perpetuating a bias of youth in occupational terms. In the followingsection, I examine the linkages between textual and occupational fetishisations ofyouth via a discussion of interview work conducted with Irish advertising practitioners.44 VOL. 1 NO. 1 AUTUMN 2006