A great thought from one of my favorite feeds

If you don't have Andy Crouch's "Culture Making" blog in your RSS reader, you should add it right now. And if you don't have an RSS reader, stop what you're doing and read this link immediately. It's 2009, peeps. Newspaper is dead and TV is dying. It's time to make the transition to better ways of getting your news.

But as I said, here's a great quote from Andy's book review of Rob Walker's new book "Buying In." I've added my own emphases:

Here, then, is the real problem with the argument that this new generation sees right through traditional advertising and therefore is not fooled by its messages: Everybody sees right through traditional advertising. You’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that you’re being pitched to when watching a thirty-second commercial.

But recognition is not the same thing as immunity. And what’s striking about contemporary youth is not that they are somehow brandproof, but that they take for granted the idea that a brand is as good a piece of raw identity material as anything else. These are the consumers, in fact, who are most amenable to using brands to fashion meaning for themselves—to define themselves, to announce who they are and what they stand for.

Great thoughts. I've already added the book to my amazon wishlist, but maybe it needs to move to the top.