Constructing the Taste of a New Generation: Branding and/as the Making of Audiences

• In Event: Techno-Social Generations and Communication Research

Abstract

In her 1991 book Desperately Seeking the Audience, Ien Ang offered a warning that bears constant repetition in our post-network, narrowcasting, you-may-also-like era, namely that the audience is always a discursive construct, created to fulfill some or other particular need. This paper therefore considers the discursive construction of technological generations as sociological generations by media advertising and branding. It examines instances in which branding efforts attempt first to divide the public into generational cohorts and then give raced, classed, gendered, and political shape to those generations. I will chart several prominent examples, including the branding of Apple, The Fox Network, MTV, and Facebook. All have claimed in their own ways to speak to and for a specific socio-technical generation, ushering it into being as a discursive entity in ways that exclude unwanteds and propose limited conceptions of who or what belongs in a generation.

Author

• Jonathan Alan Gray, U of Wisconsin - Madison