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TALKING HEADS

Between 1993-95, Roy F. Fox interviewed 200 high school students about Channel One commercials. His findings are collected in Harvesting Minds: How TV Commercials Control Kids. Despite the rather heavy-handed title, Harvesting Minds doesn't claim kids are being brainwashed, that TV is evil, that the end is near, etc. The text reads like exactly what it is--a research project. Fox isn't wrapped up with hard numbers or scientific proclamations; his study is open-ended and exploratory. The generalizations he makes are, for the most part, restricted to the confines of the study. So when he concludes that the kids he talked to showed almost no ability to critically examine commercials, it's quite possible that not all Channel One watchers are as messed up; it's quite possible that he wasn't asking the right questions; that rural Missouri isn't as media savvy as the rest of the world, or that the kids he talked to happened to all be retarded.

Fox pretty well sums up his findings in Manipulated Kids. These are elaborated in Harvesting Minds. The best parts of the book, however, are the comments by the kids themselves, the word-for-word transcriptions that appear throughout the book. Instead of doing a straight-up book review, I thought it'd be better to reprint some of these transcriptions and tie them to Fox's findings (illustrated and paraphrased by yours truly but the info here is all taken from the book).

Blurring Commercials with other types of programming

Kids knew that commercials sell products and service, but when asked how programs and commercials differ, they seldom mentioned selling products; instead, they'd cite length of time ("programs are really long"). Overall, kids in the study did not regard commercials as fundamentally different from television shows.

I don't like commercials because they get old so fast. We've seen 'em since the beginning of this year, and we had them last year.

If commercials get boring and old because you've seem them too many times, how do you solve that problem?

What I do in class is--if they're the same commercials, the same ol' basic stuff about Haiti or Bosnia or O.J. Simpson--I don't even watch. I just kind of block it out.

Either/Or Decisions

Evaluations were rarely based on multiple options. Students either "loved" or "hated" the ads themselves, acknowledging no middle ground. The most frequently used labels were "old" and "new"--rarely was anything "kind of old" or "somewhat new."

(to boy wearing Nike shoes) Why did you buy those?

Because I don't like Reebok.

Describing Intended and Obvious Inconsistencies

By far the majority of kids in the study did not criticize or evaluate commercials except to state vague generalizations (e.g. I hate commercials). Any analysis was confined to arguing trivial-to-obvious inconsistencies...and there was little to suggest that they could differentiate different categories or types of commercials.

Let me start with commercials I don't like, especially commercials with animals, like ads for pet food--that cat food and talking parrot commercial. It's like the cats actually understand and listen to a bird telling them not to eat it! I mean--it's natural habitat! Just the fact that the bird talks gets on my nerves. And he has an accent that doesn't even sound right!

Why don't you like that?

'Cause it's not what animals do. It's not real life.

Do you think the makers of this commercial know that it's not like real life?

Yeah, but it's just stupid--just downright stupid and idiotic, like that Energizer Bunny commercial, which shows the bunny fighting Darth Vader and then the batteries in his laser go out, but the bunny's laser is still goin'.

And this one is stupid, too?

Yes! Because you know they change the battery in the rabbit! They have to change the battery! I have never found an Energizer battery that has run that long in my entire life, and I've bought lots of those batteries.

Why do you buy Energizer batteries?

'Cause they last longer than everything else.

Denyin Commercials Impact

Lots of the kids said they didn't watch TV, commercials didn't affect them, etc. then broke out into song at the mere mention of, say, the Doublemint Gum song. Expressing some type of disavowal about commercials seemed to make it okay to enjoy other ones.

I saw Frutopia on a commercial and bought that.

Did you try this drink as a result of the commercial?

Yeah. The commercial's, like, really psychedelic and they have prismatic figures. It's like a kaleidoscope. And the bottle is really cool, too.

Why is the bottle cool?

It's just real colorful and has weird designs on it. It has bubble letters and little people and it has your brain and world on it.

Your brain?

Yes. It shows life and the mind. It's trying to say it's good for your mind and it's good for your body, and good for the earth. It has, like symbols, kind of, of what this means.

So why is Frutopia good?

I don't know. I don't pay attention to that stuff.

Have you ever bought something that you can connect back to a commercial?

Maybe if I walked into the store and I remembered that commercial, maybe it would remind me that I wanted to get some of that, but I don't think that I'd go out there just because I was thinking, "Oh, I saw this commercial on Channel One this morning, so I've got to buy this Gatorade."

How many of you have bought Gatorade? ...Did you try it because of the commercial?

YEAH!!!!!!!!!!

Well . . . maybe I remembered it subconsciously.

It's too long to include here but there's also an amazing dialogue between Fox and a relatively aware student named Jason. Given an assignment to create a "surrealist collage," out of magazine pictures, Jason pasted several items on a page: a barrel, an apple, a snake, a lemon, trees, a lizard, Kermit the Frog, an AT&T calling card and--smack dab in the middle--a big M&M. When Fox asks Jason why he put individual items in the picture, the boy gives all sorts of very conscious, elaborate reasons (stuff about the rain forest, fertilizers and herbicides, Bosnia) but when Fox asks him about the M&M, Jason responds: "I don't remember..." When Fox presses the question (M&M is heavily advertised on Channel One), Jason describes an M&M commercial in painstaking detail.

Note: A photo of Roy Fox was unavailable for this article. He is portrayed here by the lead singer of Extra Fancy.