Just couldn't resist tossing out some observations about this piece in the Washington Post:
PowerPoint Slides: the New Puppy-Dog Eyes. The article is mostly a water cooler exploration, but does point to some trends of note:
Retailers have learned to tailor their marketing to kids' digital lives. The Web site for the popular teen clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch urges buyers: "Drop some major hints. Create a list, fill it with all your abercrombie wishes and we'll email it to everyone you tell us to." All parents have to do is point, click and buy.
The commercial moves to enhance the digital persuasiveness of Christmas lists invoke a bah humbug, but
the PowerPoint Christmas list Katie Johnson, age 11, sent off to her parents speaks to the growing media sophistication of young Internet users. Culling images from retailers sites and Google, identifying URLs for specific items, and crafting the slide show reveal technical skills that support the article's claim that
Adults have ceded ground to kids when it comes to technology, said Rob Callender, trends director for Teenage Research Unlimited, a consulting firm.
"Increasingly, teens are considered the most techno-savvy members of the household," Callender said. "Parents have kind of thrown up their hands."
I'd like to say that the technical skills demonstrated by the digital wish list accompany a rhetorical savvy visible in the emotional appeal for a dog that anchors the presentation, but I worry that the way the presentation fully adopts the commercial style really just shows a young voice buying and selling through the latest persuasive mode. I wouldn't say that it is fair to expect a more critical stance from Katie, but need to point out that the claims for (and evidence of) high levels of technical skills among youth continue to call for us to promote an accompaning rhetorical and critical sophistication. Does the slide show merely demonstrate the technical prowess of young consumers, or does it reveal media, rhetorical, and compositional savvy?
