Four Films by Douglas Rushkoff
Frontline
Investigative Journalism
By Douglas Rushkoff
“Four Frontline films from Douglas Rushkoff focusing on modern culture, social media, advertising, and marketing.”
Generation Like: FRONTLINE explores how the perennial teen quest for identity and connection has migrated to social media – and how big brands are increasingly co-opting young consumers’ digital presences.
Originally aired: February 18, 2014.Produced by: Frank Koughan and Douglas Rushkoff.
Thanks to social media, today’s teens are able to directly interact with their culture — artists, celebrities, movies, brands, and even one another — in ways never before possible. But is that real empowerment? Or do marketers still hold the upper hand? In Generation Like, author and FRONTLINE correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (The Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders) explores how the perennial teen quest for identity and connection has migrated to social media — and exposes the game of cat-and-mouse that corporations are playing with these young consumers. Do kids think they’re being used? Do they care? Or does the perceived chance to be the next big star make it all worth it?
Digital Nation: Is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we’ve gained?
Originally aired: February 2, 2010.Produced by: Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff.
Over a single generation, the Web and digital media have remade nearly every aspect of modern culture, transforming the way we work, learn, and connect in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin (Growing up Online) teams up with one of the leading thinkers of the digital age, Douglas Rushkoff (The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool), to continue to explore life on the virtual frontier. The film is the product of a unique collaboration with visitors to the Digital Nation website, who for the past year have been able to react to the work in progress and post their own stories online.
The Persuaders: An inside look at the multibillion-dollar business and science of selling us on what we want.
Originally aired: November 9, 2004.Produced by: Rachel Dretzin, Barak Goodman, and Douglas Rushkoff.
FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar “persuasion industries” of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Through sophisticated market research methods to better understand consumers and by turning to the little-understood techniques of public relations to make sure their messages come from sources we trust, marketers are crafting messages that resonate with an increasingly cynical public.
The Merchants of Cool: FRONTLINE explores how America’s giant media corporations skillfully court the teenage consumer.
Originally aired: February 27, 2001.Produced by: Rachel Dretzin and Barak Goodman. Correspondent and Consulting Producer: Douglas Rushkoff.
They spend their days sifting through reams of market research data. They conduct endless surveys and focus groups. They comb the streets, the schools, and the malls, hot on the trail of the “next big thing” that will snare the attention of their prey — a market segment worth an estimated $300 billion a year. They are the merchants of cool: the creators and sellers of popular culture, who have made teens the hottest consumer demographic in America. But are these marketers merely reflecting a growing coarseness in teen culture, or have they helped create it? And have they gone too far in their attempts to reach the hearts — and wallets — of America’s youth?
About the Author:
Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. More About Douglas Rushkoff »
FRONTLINE is investigative journalism that questions, explains and changes our world. We tell the stories others can’t or won’t — from the rise of the NSA’s domestic surveillance dragnet, to the hidden history of the NFL and concussions, to the secret reality of rape on the job for immigrant women. Our investigations have helped breathe new life into terrorism cold cases, freed innocent people from jail, prompted U.N. resolutions, and spurred both policy and social change. We’ve been American television’s top long-form news and current affairs series since 1983, and we’ve won every major journalism and broadcasting award, including 106 Emmy Awards, 31 Peabody Awards and an Academy Award®. You can watch more than 300 of our documentaries online, for free, any time — and you can find our original digital reporting, interactives and analysis everywhere you are. More About Frontline »
See also in Internet Salmagundi:
