In Chapter 1, Rice defines cool and how it has evolved from the associations with James Dean and Marlon Brando to today’s personalities like Snoop Dog and Jay-Z. Independence and rebelliousness are defining attributes of cool. Cool is associated with a certain mystique, excitement and intrigue. Cool is what we embrace as being admirable and different, something to aspire to. To drive people to various websites, the word cool is used in their URLs.
Rice discusses in Chapter 2 how the counter-culture of the 60’s with its rebellion and independence still helps to define cool. This has been grabbed by the corporate world and used to market products, goods, and services. For instance, Netscape used this rhetoric to outline cool sites as defined by Netscape. They in turn were linked to various brand names that therefore were associated with cool, which translated into profits. Commercialism uses cool rhetoric to market to audiences, primarily teenagers. Rice also discusses cool in relation to writing, specifically HTML. Through interlinking, (example on Everything2.com), users can navigate to many sights on various topics. This process is called cooling (what we have done in this assignment).
The relationship between advertising and cool is discussed in this chapter. Appropriation is done on the Internet for marketing purposes, or in other words, reworking/redoing an idea or concept and using it in a manner that is different than intended from the creator of the original idea. The ideal marketing goal is to take a product and make it into an icon.
Chapter 4 involves the hunt for cool. Coolhunters look for trends among teens, such as what they are wearing as well as how they are wearing it. This research is taken and worked into marketing products to appeal to teens. Cool changes quickly and often. Ironically, the message of cool is to be independent, different, and rebellious, while the marketing goal of cool is to get people to buy their cool product. For example, Sprite’s message of being independent was mixed with hip-hop music making it cool. Cool involves contradiction and paradox in relation to consumerism.
Resistance to Advertising through the cool approach is the main theme for Chapter 5. Cultural Jamming is used to critique advertising. Subvertise.org is a site that tries to show how commercial advertising actually has underlying intentions. Adbusters.org is another such site, which produces
spoof ads. These organizations urge us all to be more critical of our part in consumer culture.
The video The Merchants of Cool illustrated how cool is marketed to teens by linking products and trends to music. Coolhunters look to teens for cool trends and with this research, new marketing is created to address these new trends. This is a fast paced, ever changing cycle. Once cool is discovered, it is killed. Teens seem to be oblivious to how they are manipulated by the consumer, corporate world. Marketing cannot be obvious to teens or they will tune out. In an attempt to be unique, teens actually provide coolhunters with new information, new ideas in which to market. Rebellion against mainstream in the form of rage rock was captured by the corporate world, packaged and resold to teens. It’s a never-ending loop – teens define what’s cool, corporations seize the concept and sell it back to this culture. I don’t think the teens interviewed would have made the same type of video. My opinion is that teens don’t see how corporations manipulate them, how their idea of cool is commercialized and fed back to them. These groups feed off of each other, always trying to shock, or rebel to gain that aspect of cool. Commercialism seems to define behaviors of teens and of course teens behavior influences commercialism.
