Marketing and Group Identity

In Kathy's article about Black Radio, she concludes by drawing a parallel between the construction of the African-American market and the rise of boycotts in the Civil Rights movement. This got me thinking about the ways in which being marketed to as part of a group makes it easier for us to participate in that group, and the extent to which group identity precludes group (any group, not just racial) action/activism.

For a more personal example, I'm thinking of the ways in which I got involved in the punk subculture when I was in late middle school. I didn't have a cool older brother or particularly cool friends to introduce me to new music, so my first exposure to anything even remotely influenced by punk was through mainstream commercial radio and magazines and I branched out from there. It's not too much of a stretch for me to say that my participation in the punk scene back in Wilkes-Barre (the picture to the left is a crowd at the primary venue there) began as a result of my being marketed to as someone who would consume a particular type of music and all the matching accessories and fashions etc. to go with it. This music was a pretty big deal for me, too--not only did going to shows and listening to music give me something to do that kept me out of trouble growing up, I could trace a direct line from most of my current political and social ideologies back through other media to certain albums I bought as a teenager. So in a big way the ways in which I engage in political activity and activism now is the result of years of gestation of seeds planted in me after being marketed to in a particular way.

I guess it's a little un-punk of me to not be pissed about this, but I'm not really--along with Kathy's article, it gives me a bit of hope for some positive effects that being part of the audience commodity can potentially have. In closing, though, I'd like to point to what I see as a pretty unique counter-example in the LGBT community--a community that has been able to engage in widespread political action and activism without ever (to my knowledge, at least) being significantly marketed to. I don't know that this illustrates anything beyond the fact that there are other avenues to the group construction that's a prerequisite for group activism, but it's interesting nonetheless.