Chapter 1- The Cool Media
Chapter 1 defines the history and definition of the term cool itself. Rice describes it as an expression of rebellion or independence. This interpretation of cool is often represented as an image; James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Snoop Dogg have become icons that illustrate cool. According to Price, the internet has incorporated cool into a new electronic writing rhetoric.
Chapter 2- Surfing the Internet for Cool
In chapter 2, Rice illustrates how most Web sites have commercialized cool to be manipulative and persuasive. These types of web sites have tapped into mainstream culture and are attempting to lure a particular audience, mostly young teenagers, to purchase a produce or service. However, Rice points out that sites like Project Cool and Everything2.com have related cool to HTML writing. Here each word in an essay is interlinked to another website or essay, a process called cooling, allowing the writer to create unique connections.
Chapter 3- Advertising
In chapter 3, Rice explains how advertisements appropriate cool to sell a product by making consumers feel they are being independent and rebellious. Also, by creating icons and associating that symbol with cool, advertisers are able to persuade consumers a product is cool. Rice points out that to write about cool one must consider the effect of the reader’s attitudes about images.
Chapter 4- Advertising and Youth Culture
Chapter 4 explains the relationship between cool, consumerism, and youth culture. Because cool is always changing, coolhunters study how teenagers dress and alter the intended use of products. Corporations then try to replicate cool in their advertisements and designs to appeal to consumers. Rice gives Sprite as an example of using juxtaposition, the bringing of two unlike items together to create a new one.
Chapter 5- Resistance to Advertising: The Cool Approach
In chapter 5, Rice teaches how cultural jamming, the resistance of appropriative ad campaigns, can be incorporated into effective cool writing. Rice says advertisers use a process called interpellation which unconsciously possesses us to identify our attitudes with a product. However, Subvertise.org and Adbusters.org, two sites devoted to revealing advertisements true intentions, parody these ads to illustrate their distorted view of cool.
CoolHunting: The Merchant’s of Cool
In his video, Rushkoff makes some very startling connections between youth culture, consumerism, and music. Coolhunters seek out the trend setters among teenagers and study them. Then these coolhunters help corporations “bring the underground to the market.” By doing so, the teens culture has become consumerized and comercialized. Rushkoff focuses on how MTv uses these connections to promote music and products through appealing to the youth’s culture. I thought that it was interesting that Rushkoff notices that the media watches kids and sells them images of themselves, which inturn the kids imitate what they see; He calls this the feedback loop. From this point of view it seems that it difficult to separate cool and consumerism, but there are way to resist it as illustrated in chapter 5 of Writing About Cool. It is a paradox that cool and consumerism are connected. Cosumerism undermines the very essence of cool by making it mainstream and commercialized. As long as companies continue to exploit underground cool and bring it to the mainstream, teenagers, too caught up in mainstream cool, probably would not make a video like Rushkoff’s. Instead, they would have tried to mimic commercialized cool in their video.
