Ch.5.1 Nature and Nurture are two distinct elements that control and mould our personal development. While one is associated with heredity, the other is associated with the environment where they live. A child’s nature develops at home; from his/her family members, while it is nurtured by the influence of the outside. As a child, there is not much that I did on my own. I would go to school, study, and play with other children till I developed a particular interest in a boy or girl whom I would call my friend. Mrs. Chan was my favorite teacher, and it is she who helped me choose what I believe, was right for me. As a child, I learned a lot about mannerism and how to behave with others, thanks largely to my parents who were my guiding force. Technology came into my life at the age of 6, when I started to watch television programs that interested me. I would switch channels and watch programs that appealed to me. I would also play games on the PC. When I began to learn music, I used an electronic keyboard and a guitar. I would use a computer to search for videos and tutorials to learn to play these instruments at home. Music, was perhaps in my genes, for, I took to music after I saw my father play the flute. As Powell (2006) says, “Nature endows us with inborn abilities and traits; nurture takes these genetic tendencies and molds them as we learn and mature.”
Adolescence is a period of physical and emotional change. This was a time when I first went to work and spent a lot of time introspecting’; who am I and what do I want to become? A feeling that juxtapose the painting by Norman Rockwell that shows a young girl facing the mirror with a magazine in her lap with the picture of a young actress seemed to overwhelm me. I began to see myself differently; I was looking for an identity, and this identity had to analogical to someone I dearly liked. So here I was a rebellious boy who wanted to be someone. This meant that I had to do something that was against my parent’s wishes, and independently. So, for the first time in my life, I began to spend time reading newspapers, browsing the internet, and speaking to friends and strangers to find a place and job for myself. It was also the time I fell in love. I began to use the internet for sending and receiving emails, used twitter to stay in touch with friends, used my mobile phone to speak to my parents and friends, and also send sms. Since I started working part-time after class, I had to stay up late to complete my homework and other assignments. I welcomed the weekends; because that was the only time I could relax and have some time to enjoy a bit of leisure.
Ch.5.2 There is a lot that marketers try, to entice consumers to buy products or services offered by corporate. However, while this style of marketing did well in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, consumers today, have started to demand products and services on their terms. While this works well for consumers, corporate find themselves staring into oblivion. Stacked with such odds, organizations had to look at marketers to look at means to develop unique ways to attract customer needs. Quite appropriately, a fast food’s customer relations commandment read: “The customer does us an honor when he calls; we are not doing him a favour by serving him.” This is when the concept of ‘cool’ came into being. ‘Cool’ for youngsters was a means to tell the corporate world what they wanted and how they wanted it. The marriage between the corporate and the media sought to identify and reach out to the youth to understand their needs, and serve it to them on a platter. The video, ‘Merchants of Cool,’ showed how Sprite succeeded in using this strategy to enhance their consummative. The idea was to understand the needs of the young minds, their likes and dislikes, and present them ‘that’ to gain their acceptance.
Knowledge generation and transfer is an essential part of a firms’ sustainable competitive advantage. Product development involves a lot of planning. There is no point in developing a product that may be highly technical if there are no markets for them, or if the present market standing and reputation become obsolete in the near future. If true customer satisfaction is the company prerogative, then there must be a serious debate on whether the company can and will invest in technological product development In order to do so, the first and foremost objective would be to analyse the organisational capability and resource availability to match customer demands. What corporate heads wanted was in short, “a prescription that would guarantee supra-normal profits consistently that would de-facto, become a strategic management’s version of the proverbial money machine” (Szulanski et al., 2006). For this, marketers had to develop a process that “identified or uncovered the connections between the social, cognitive and political processes, which would allow them to develop strategies to attract the targeted audience” (Szulanski et al., 2006). However, this does leave a serious precedent. Knowing very well that the corporate-media combine was focusing on them consistently, the youth began to see this as an opportunity to seek exclusivity. Behavioral changes could take place that instigates them to rebel and create a culture, alien to society.
Ch.6.1 The media plays a very significant role in our society today. It acts as a catalyst to the development of positive and negative opinion among the public. Be it through the shows we watch on TV, the music we listen to on the radio, to the books, magazines, and newspapers we read each day, the media has been known to propagate constructive and destructive critique. Poverty, gender, and cultural background continue to remain as serious out of school factors that continue to create marginality (Tilleczek, 2011, p.95). In the 1997 Canadian film The Education of Little Tree, shown on television, Little Tree, an aboriginal boy, is taken by a court order to an Indian School. Once there, he is told that once inside the school gate of the school, he should not ‘speak Indian’ again. When Little Tree meets the school headmaster, he is told that, “Americans don’t name children after objects, and is given a new name.” He goes through a lot of hardship because of his upbringing and declares his innocence. The movie depicts the inability of the boy to adjust to an alien environment and what the school says, “is a liability to they’re society” (Progler, 2011). Sorting of schools normally takes place internally, but lately, because nations compete for prestige, wealth and power, this has changed. Many American documentaries on schooling show how “the USA is losing its political and economic edge in the world of schooling to schools in India and China, by using math and science as an example to success. Two Million Minutes is one such movie that was televised” (Progler, 2011). Radio, television, newspapers and magazines have covered a number of events that have taken place in schools recently. Gun culture, drugs, racism, substandard education, high fee structures, and insecurity are splashed all over these media very often. 25 percent of the students across Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries are reported to have expressed their unhappiness with their schools Tilleczek, 2011, p.94). Asking a student to discard his/her religious practices because of safety concerns, or the inability of schools to protect the minority from racial and physical abuse, or only projecting a certain section of students for their achievements is some of the more common events covered by these media forums.
Ch.6.3 Youth friendships are developed through interactions and the best medium of interaction would be through personal interactions and frequent exchange of pleasantries. This must be done when youths are between 12 and 19, when they need their family support. The best way of studying this would be by associating and supporting them. A joint World Health Organization and Health Canada study, Trends in the Health of Canadian Youth (2004), showed that overall, grade 10 students, who had a more positive relationship with their parents were more likely to be happier, and satisfied with their lives (Tilleczek, 2011). This is because, even though they have their circle of friends, and their characters are bound to change, they must have strong and supportive friends and families to remain stable. However, today, with the advancement of technology, youth friendship has crossed boundaries to go international. For today’s youth, the give and take of friendship is carried through the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the more convenient medium of the internet. Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins are popular. There is, however, the dark side to this benevolence. The focus on the use of technology on the intellectual development of children, the social repercussions like cyber-bullying or sexual texts has become a worry, leading many to question the authenticity of friendships today. The idea of integrating digital culture to study youth friendship makes sense as it gives me a wider scope to engage and interact with a larger group of multi-cultural audience who may have different perspectives of how they view friendship.
References
Progler, J, (2011), TV Multiversity, Films on Schooling and Education, Accessed March 8, 2014, from http://tvmultiversity.blogspot.in/2010/06/films-on-schooling-and- education.html
Szulanski G, Porac J, and Doz Y, (2006), Strategy Process: Introduction to the Volume, The Challenge of Strategy Process Research, Accessed March 8, 2014, from http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/~baum/v22_intro.pdf
Tilleczek, K. (2011). Approaching youth studies: Being, becoming, and belonging, Toronto: Oxford University Press.
