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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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08 August 2010 By Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock
While the "empire of consumption" has been around for
a long time[1], American society in the last 30 years
has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of
children - one marked by a major transition from a
culture of innocence and social protection, however
imperfect, to a culture of commodification. Youth are
now assaulted by a never-ending proliferation of
marketing strategies that colonize their consciousness
and daily lives. Under the tutelage of Disney and
other megacorporations, children have become an
audience captive not only to traditional forms of
media such as film, television and print, but even
more so to the new digital media made readily
accessible through mobile phones, PDAs, laptop
computers and the Internet. The information,
entertainment and cultural pedagogy disseminated by
massive multimedia corporations have become central in
shaping and influencing every waking moment of
children's daily lives - all toward a lifetime of
constant, unthinking consumption. Consumer culture in
the United States and increasingly across the globe,
does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and
happy childhood: it exhibits the bad faith of a
society in which, for children, "there can be only one
kind of value, market value; one kind of success,
profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one
kind of social relationship, markets."[2] But
corporate-controlled culture not only exploits and
distorts the hopes and desires of individuals: it is
fundamentally driven toward exploiting public goods
for private gain, if it does not also more boldly seek
to privatize everything in the public realm. Among US
multimedia megacorporations, Disney appears one of the
least daunted in attempting to dominate public
discourse and undermine the critical and political
capacities necessary for the next generation of young
people to sustain even the most basic institutions of
democracy.
The impact of new electronic technologies as
teaching machines can be seen in some rather
astounding statistics. It is estimated that the
average American spends more than six hours a day
watching video-based entertainment and, by 2013, the
numbers of daily hours spent watching television and
videos will match the numbers of hours spent
sleeping.[3] The American Medical Association reports
that the combined hours "spent in front of a
television or video screen is the single biggest chunk
of time in the waking life of an American child."[4]
Such statistics warrant grave concern, given that the
messages provided through such programming are shaped
largely by a $263-billion-dollar-a-year US advertising
industry[5], which sells not only its products, but
also values, images and identities largely aimed at
teaching young people to be consumers. A virtual army
of marketers, psychologists and corporate executives
are currently engaged in what Susan Linn calls a
"hostile takeover of childhood,"[6] seeking in the new
media environment to take advantage of the growing
economic power wielded by children and teens. Figures
on direct spending by young people have dramatically
increased in the last ten years to the point where it
is now estimated that each year pre-teens and
teenagers marshal "$200 billion in spending power."[7]
And this is not all. Young people also exert a
powerful influence on parental spending, offering up a
market in which, according to Anap Shah, "Children
(under 12) and teens influence parental purchases
totaling over ... $670 billion a year."[8] Because of
their value as consumers and their ability to
influence spending, young people have become major
targets of an advertising and marketing industry that
spends over $17 billion a year on shaping children's
identities and desires.[9]
Exposed to a marketing machinery eager and ready to
transform them into full-fledged members of consumer
society, children's time is conscripted by a
commercial world defined by the Walt Disney Company
and a few other corporations, and the amount of time
spent in this world is as breathtaking as it is
disturbing. Typical children see about "40,000 ads a
year on TV alone," and by the time they enter the
fourth grade, they will have "memorized 300-400
brands."[10] In 2005, the Kaiser Family Foundation
reported that young people are "exposed to the
equivalent of 8½ hours a day of media content ... [and
that] the typical 8-18 year-old lives in a home with
an average of 3.6 CD or tape players, 3.5 TVs, 3.3
radios, 2.0 VCRs/DVD players, 2.1 video game consoles
and 1.5 computers."[11] There was a time when a family
traveling in a car might entertain itself by singing
or playing games. Now, however, many kids have their
own laptops or cell phones and many family vehicles
come equipped with DVD players. Family members need
not look to each other or the outside world for
entertainment when a constant stream of media sources
is at their fingertips. Today's kids have more money
to spend and more electronic toys to play with, but,
increasingly, they are left on their own to navigate
the virtual and visual worlds created by US media
corporations.
In what has become the most "consumer-oriented
society in the world," Juliet Schor observes that kids
and teens have taken center stage as "the epicenter of
American consumer culture."[12] The tragic result is
that youth now inhabit a cultural landscape in which,
increasingly, they can only recognize themselves in
terms preferred by the market. Multi-billion-dollar
media corporations, with a commanding role over
commodity markets as well as support from the highest
reaches of government, have become the primary
educational and cultural force in shaping, if not
hijacking, how youth define their interests, values
and relations to others.
Given its powerful role among media-driven modes of
communication, the Walt Disney Company exercises a
highly disproportionate concentration of control over
the means of producing, circulating and exchanging
information, especially to kids. Once a company that
catered primarily to a three- to eight-year-old crowd
with its animated films, theme parks and television
shows, Disney in the new millennium has been at the
forefront of the multimedia conglomerates now
aggressively marketing products for infants, toddlers
and tweens (kids age eight to twelve).[13] Web sites,
video games, computer-generated animation, Disney TV
and pop music - developed around franchises like "High
School Musical," "Hannah Montana" and the Jonas
Brothers, and accessible online with the touch of a
button - are now sustaining Disney fans into their
teenage and young adult years. Allied with multimedia
giant Apple, Inc. (Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the single
largest shareholder in Disney) and the cutting-edge
animation studio Pixar, Disney is beyond doubt a
powerful example of the new corporate media at the
beginning of the 21st century.
Disney not only represents "one of the best-known
symbols of capitalist consumerism,"[14] but also
claims to offer consumers a stable, known quantity in
its brand-name products. Understanding Disney's
cultural role is neither a simple nor a trivial task.
Like many other megacorporations, it focuses on
popular culture and continually expands its products
and services to reach every available media platform.
What is unique about Disney, however, is its
titanium-clad brand image - synonymous with a notion
of childhood innocence and wholesome entertainment -
that manages to deflect, if not completely trounce,
criticism at every turn. As an icon of American
culture and middle-class family values, Disney
actively appeals to both conscientious parents and
youthful fantasies as it works hard to transform every
child into a lifetime consumer of Disney products and
ideas. Put the Disney corporation under scrutiny,
however, and a contradiction quickly appears between a
Disney culture that presents itself as the paragon of
virtue and childlike innocence and the reality of the
company's cutthroat commercial ethos.
Disney, like many corporations, trades in sound
bites; the result is that the choices, exclusions and
values that inform its narratives about joy, pleasure,
living and survival in a global world are often
difficult to discern. Disney needs to be addressed
within a widening circle of awareness, so we can place
the history, meaning and influence of the Disney
empire outside of its own narrow interpretive
frameworks that often shut down critical assessments
of how Disney is actually engaged in the commercial
carpet bombing of children and teens. Understanding
Disney in the year 2010 requires that we draw
attention to the too often hidden or forgotten
corporate dimension surrounding the production,
distribution and consumption of Disney culture and, in
so doing, equip parents, youth, educators, and others
with tools that will enable them to critically mediate
the ways in which they encounter Disney. In 1999,
Disney was a $22 billion profit-making machine.[15]
Ten years later, Disney is generating over $37.8
billion per year and quickly expanding the market for
its products in countries such as China, where the
latest Disney theme park - Hong Kong Disneyland -
opened in 2005, and another park is slated for
development in Shanghai.[16] Now a worldwide
distributor of a particular kind of cultural politics,
Disney is a teaching machine that not only exerts
influence over young people in the United States, but
also wages an aggressive campaign to peddle its
political and cultural influence overseas. As global
capital spreads its influence virtually unchecked by
national governments and the international community,
citizenship becomes increasingly privatized and youth
are educated to become consuming subjects rather than
civic-minded and critical citizens. If today's young
people are to look ahead to a more rather than less
democratic future, it has become imperative for people
everywhere to develop a critical language in which
notions of the public good, public issues and public
life become central to overcoming the privatizing and
depoliticizing language of the market.
Disney's Marketing Juggernaut
One measure of the corporate assault on kids can be
seen in the reach, acceleration and effectiveness of
Disney's marketing and advertising efforts to turn
kids into consumers and childhood into a salable
commodity. Every child, regardless of how young, is
now a potential consumer ripe for being commodified
and immersed in a commercial culture defined by
brands. The Walt Disney Company spares little expense
in generating a coherent brand image and encapsulating
its many products and services within the seductive
symbolism of childhood innocence and wholesome family
fun. The company's approach makes Disney a
particularly useful case for understanding corporate
strategies directed at youth in the new media
environment. At the same time as Disney represents
nostalgia and tradition, it has become a global leader
in transforming digital technologies into
profit-making platforms and developing a
consumer-centered discourse that deflects criticism
away from, while it softens, what can only be called
boldly commercial self-promotion. Disney, with its
legion of media holdings, armies of marketers and
omnipresent advertisers sets out not just to exploit
children and youth for profit: it actually constructs
them as commodities while promoting the very concept
of childhood as a salable commodity. Childhood ideals
increasingly give way to a market-driven politics in
which young people are prepared for a life of
objectification that will simultaneously drain them of
any viable sense of moral and political agency. This
is especially true in the current consumer society in
which children more than ever mediate their identities
and relations to others through the consumption of
goods and images. No longer imagined within the
language of responsibility and justice, childhood
begins with what might be called the scandalous
philosophy of money, that is, a corporate logic in
which everything, including the worth of young people,
is measured through the potentially barbaric
calculations of finance, exchange value and
profitability.
Disney, perhaps more than any other corporation,
has created a marketing powerhouse that uses the
pivotal educational force of children's culture in
combination with new digital media technologies. Kids
can download enormous amounts of media in seconds and
carry around such information, images and videos in a
device the size of a thin cigarette lighter. Moreover,
"[media] technologies themselves are morphing and
merging, forming an ever-expanding presence throughout
our daily environment."[17] Mobile phones alone have
grown "to include video game platforms, e-mail
devices, digital cameras and Internet connections,"
making it easier for marketers and advertisers to
reach young people.[18] Kids of all ages now find
themselves in what the Berkeley Media Studies Group
and the Center for Digital Democracy call "a new
'marketing ecosystem' that encompasses cell phones,
mobile music devices, broadband video, instant
messaging, video games and virtual three-dimensional
worlds," all of which provide the knowledge and
information that young people use to navigate their
place in families, schools and communities.[19] Disney
along with its researchers, marketing departments and
purveyors of commerce largely define and control this
massive virtual entertainment complex, spending vast
amounts of time trying to understand the needs,
desires, tastes, preferences, social relations and
networks that characterize youth as a potential
market.
The disconnect between market values and the ethical
responsibility to care for children is on full display
in Disney's almost boastful use of research to mine
the inner lives and experiences of young children.
That Disney's insidious strategies receive front page
coverage in The New York Times and are presented
without so much as a critical comment is a testament
to how commercial values have numbed the public's
ability to recognize the danger such values often
present to children. According to The New York Times,
Disney is at the forefront of finding ways to
capitalize on the $50 billion dollars spent worldwide
by young boys between the ages of six and 14.[20] As
part of such an effort, Disney seeks the advice of
educators, anthropologists and even a research
consultant with "a background in the casino industry,"
not only to study all aspects of the culture and
intimate lives of young boys, but to do so in a way
that allows Disney to produce "emotional hooks" that
lure young boys into the wonderful world of corporate
Disney in order to turn them into enthusiastic
consumers.[21] Disney's recent attempts to "figure out
the boys' entertainment market" enlisted the services
of Kelly Pena, described as "the kid whisperer," who
attempts to uncover what makes young boys tick by
using her anthropological skills to convince young
boys and their parents to allow her to look into the
kids' closets, go shopping with them and pay them $75
to be interviewed. Ms. Pena, with no irony intended,
prides herself on the fact that "Children ... open up
to her."[22] Given Disney's desire to expand into
boys' culture, the company's announcement in 2009 that
it had purchased Marvel Entertainment Inc. came as no
surprise. Marvel's comic book empire owns the licenses
to approximately 5,000 superhero characters. The Wall
Street Journal remarked that by "bringing in macho
types such as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, the
Marvel deal would expand Disney's audience, adding
properties that appeal to boys from their preteen
years into young adulthood." [23]
It is even more disturbing that Disney and a
growing number of marketers and advertisers now work
with child psychologists and other experts, who study
young people in order to better understand children's
culture so as to develop marketing methods that are
more camouflaged, seductive and successful. Disney
claims this kind of intensive research pays off in
lucrative dividends and reinforces the Disney motto
that, in order to be a successful company, "You have
to start with the kids themselves."[24] Several
psychologists, especially Allen D. Kanner, have
publicly criticized such disingenuous practices.[25]
Disney's recent attempt to corner the young male
market through the use of sophisticated research
models, ethnographic tools and the expertise of
academics indicates the degree to which the language
of the market has disengaged itself from either moral
considerations or the social good. It is clear that
Disney's only goal is to win over the hearts and minds
of young people so as to deliver them to the market as
both loyal consumers and commodities. In such
unscrupulous strategies, the contradiction becomes
visible between Disney's public relations image as a
purveyor of wholesome entertainment and the hidden
reality of Disney as a political and economic power
that promotes ideology conducive to its own corporate
interests, thereby impoverishing the imaginative
possibilities of youth and dismantling the public
foundations for a thriving civic culture.
Childhood, Inc.
Corporate culture is rewriting the nature of
children's culture, a trend that becomes visible in
the various ways traditional boundaries once
maintained between the spheres of formal education and
entertainment are collapsed. According to Lawrence
Grossberg, children are introduced to the world of
logos, advertising and the mattering maps of
consumerism long before they can speak: Capitalism
targets kids as soon as they are old enough to watch
commercials, even though they may not be old enough to
distinguish programming from commercials or to
recognize the effects of branding and product
placement.[26] In fact, researchers have found that
while children as young as three years old recognize
brand logos, not until they are around eight years old
do they understand advertising's intention to
manipulate their desires.[27] But this has not stopped
corporations from exposing kids from birth to
adulthood to a consumer blitz of advertising,
marketing, education and entertainment that has no
historical precedent. There is now even a market for
videos for toddlers and infants as young as three
months old. Not surprisingly, this is part of a
growing $4.8 billion market aimed at the youngest
children - an area of multimedia culture into which
Disney recently expanded.[28]
In 2000, Disney purchased the Baby Einstein Company
from its founder, Julie Aigner-Clark, who had created
a line of products and toys known to mesmerize these
youngest television watchers by displaying, for
example, vibrant moving objects while playing a
soundtrack of classical music selections. The
marketing of the products suggests that parents can
purchase toys and videos that will not only enable
their children to develop good taste in music, but
also make them capable of great intellectual
achievements. (Disney/Pixar's 2004 film "The
Incredibles" plugs the Baby Einstein franchise
shamelessly when one character exclaims, "Mozart makes
babies smarter.") Despite objections against the
marketing of baby videos as educational media by
organizations such as the Campaign for a
Commercial-Free Childhood, Disney persists in using
clever packaging for the videos that implies they are,
at best, beneficial learning tools to be used in a
child's most formative years and, at worst, harmless
distractions for infant audiences. And the marketing
strategy works. A 2007 survey by the Kaiser Family
Foundation found that 48 percent of parents believe
that baby videos have "a positive effect on early
childhood development."[29] The news that baby DVDs
and videos actually impair infants' cognitive
development broke in 2007 when the University of
Washington issued a press release about a study
published in the prestigious Journal of Pediatrics
that concluded infants eight to 16 months old, who
were exposed to one hour of viewing baby DVDs and
videos per day, displayed slower language development:
those children understood on average six to eight
fewer words for every hour of viewing than infants who
did not watch the videos.[30] Reading to a child once
a day, by contrast, produced an observable increase in
vocabulary.[31]
How did Disney respond to the researchers'
findings? President and CEO Robert Iger demanded that
the University of Washington immediately retract its
statements on the grounds that the study's assessment
methodology was faulty and the publication of the
results was "misleading, irresponsible and
derogatory."[32] Disney's main objection was that the
study did not differentiate between brands when it
tested the effects of baby videos on language
development. Mark Emmert, president of the University
of Washington, refused to comply with Iger's demand
for a retraction and instead articulated a need for
more "research aimed at helping parents and society
enhance the lives of children."[33] While this
research was clearly not enough to deter Disney from
marketing its Baby Einstein wares as beneficial for
babies and toddlers, other researchers have found that
one of greatest costs associated with surrounding very
young children with screen media is a reduction in the
time they spend engaging in creative, unstructured
play. In a 2007 report, the American Academy of
Pediatrics lamented, "time for free play has been
markedly reduced for some children."[34] Yet Disney's
message to parents continues to foster the idea that
parents should not only accept the ubiquitous presence
screen culture in their babies' lives, but view it as
an inevitable fact of life, one pointless to criticize
and impossible to change.[35] In an utterly cynical
gesture, the Baby Einstein web site cites a 2003
finding by the Kaiser Family Foundation that "in a
typical day, 68% of all children under two use screen
media."[36] This statistic is not presented as
something that should alarm concerned parents and
encourage different parenting practices; on the
contrary, it becomes simple proof of "the reality of
today's parents, families and households" and an
indicator of how the American Academy of Pediatrics,
which discourages television viewing for children
under two years old, is simply stuck in the past.37.
Disney's marketing tactics utilize the idea that
parents who want their kids to keep up in a highly
competitive world must supply them with every
available product that purports to nurture young
minds. In 2007, Disney launched an educational web
site for parents, DisneyFamily.com, which offers
parenting advice "in a manner that is compelling,
comprehensive, entertaining and, most importantly,
objective." The web site taps into the growing
parenting industry, claiming to target "the more than
32 million moms that are online in the US."[38] Given
Disney's attempt to refute work by leading researchers
in children's health, it is unclear what the web site
intends to publish as "articles from experts in the
parenting field." But if the so-called expertise is
not useful to parents, they can at least download a
coupon from the "Family Tool Box."[39] The web site
also features the "Disney Family Learning Center,"
developed in collaboration with Sony Electronics and
Powered, Inc., an online education provider that also
happens to specialize in social marketing. Disney
finds ways to promote Sony's and its own products when
advising parents on child development, entertainment
options and other "family-relevant information" in its
online courses, such as "Traveling Light with Kids and
Technology" and "Contact Management for the Busy Mom
and Dad."[40]
The Internet's commercial potential is certainly
not lost on Disney, as Steve Wadsworth, president of
the Walt Disney Internet Group, stated, "There is
massive opportunity here."[41] Harnessing the power of
virtual space is a strategy openly championed by CEO
Robert Iger, whose stated goal is for the company to
establish "clear leadership in the kids and families
online virtual worlds space around the globe."[42]
Disney views online media as an opportunity not so
much to enhance children's lives as to make money for
shareholders, enjoy low overhead costs and keep the
company's film and television franchises profitable.
The Disney.com site, redesigned in 2007, includes
video games, social networking, customized user
content and videos on demand. As of the summer of
2009, approximately 16 million users have designed
customized fairy avatars that inhabit Pixie Hollow at
DisneyFairies.com.[43] Internet sites offering
cooperative games and social networking to children
seem like a relatively innocuous option in a media
culture currently exploiting every imaginable angle to
populate reality television's competitive worlds of
winners and losers. It is far less innocuous, however,
that these web sites help Disney collect and use
personal information to assail consumer groups with
targeted, cross-promotional advertising. Web-based
social media not only acculturate children to being
constantly bombarded with advertising, but give them
the illusion of control while they are actually being
manipulated.
Disney's interest in capturing the attention of
very young people through the Internet has also
involved the acquisition of Club Penguin, a web-based
virtual world, in a $700 million deal in 2007.
Disney's Club Penguin targets kids ages six to
fourteen and provides each user with an animated
penguin avatar that interacts in a snow-covered world,
chats with other users and earns virtual money to
purchase items such as pets, clothing and furnishings
for an igloo home. Users can play for free, but must
pay $5.95 per month for access to certain features of
the game. As an interactive and "immersive
environment," Club Penguin enables Disney to train
children in the habits of consumption - merchandise,
such as stuffed penguins, is advertised on the site -
while making direct contact with its global consumer
base through the online network. Similarly, Disney's
"Pirates of the Caribbean," for children under ten
years of age, lures kids into a virtual world of
consumers that is predicted to include 20 million
children by 2011.[44] As Brooks Barnes points out in
The New York Times, these electronic malls are only
superficially envisioned by developers as
entertainment or educational sites. Their main
purpose, she states, is to enable media conglomerates
to "deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises
alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new
customers."[45]
In order to tap further into the youth market,
Disney's recent strategy has involved spending $180
million on video game development. Disney-branded
online space includes the Internet's first multiplayer
game for kids, "Toontown Online." As Sara Grimes
points out, multiplayer online games "construct entire
cultural experiences based around beloved characters,
fantasy and play [but] entry into these worlds is only
possible through a perpetual cycle of
consumption."[46] Another product, the video game
"Epic Mickey," revamps the character of Mickey Mouse
in an alleged effort to make him more appealing to
today's generation of youth. The mouse will no longer
embody a childlike innocence and generosity, but will
instead be "cantankerous and cunning" and will exhibit
"selfish, destructive behavior."[47] With Mickey's
popularity in decline in the United States, Disney's
market-driven agenda is visible not only in its
willingness to transform the hallowed icon upon which
its corporate empire was built, but also in the very
way it has transformed Mickey Mouse's character.
Although Disney's representatives suggest that this
reimagining of Mickey Mouse merely reflects what is
currently popular among young people, it seems more
aligned with the current ideology of a ruthless
economic Darwinism (also evident in reality TV shows)
that has little to do with the needs of children and a
great deal to do with a survival-of-the-fittest view
of the world perpetuated by market-centered culture.
The recent moves by the Walt Disney Company to darken
the characters it incorporates into its cultural
offerings should be seen as less a demystification of
the brand image of Disneyfied innocence and more a
signal of the company's desire for a growing
compatibility between its public pedagogy and a
commercial culture's ethos of egocentric narcissism,
social aggression and hypermasculinity.
The issues surrounding Disney culture as a source
of identity for young people are complex. Adult
existence, according to Zygmunt Bauman, involves
"changing one's ego" through "an unending series of
self-focused pursuits, each episode lived through as
an overture to the next."[48] Whether or not this is a
dramatic departure from the way life was lived in the
past, it is nevertheless becoming clear that today's
youth also are now caught up in negotiating shifting
identities through processes that involve a constant
engagement with educational sites throughout the
culture. How much more challenging, then, will young
people who are just embarking on the process of
identity development find the navigation of a
commercialized culture that appears to offer limitless
choice in terms of selfhood, yet, effectively limits
the choices that both children and adults can make in
extending their sense of personal and collective
agency?
One sign of how the Walt Disney Company seeks to
intervene in children's lives by shaping their
identity narratives was evident in the company's 2009
announcement that it would be redesigning its chain of
340 Disney Stores to mirror a theme park design. Based
on the prototype called Imagination Park, the
renovated stores will be entirely networked with
interactive technology to create a multisensory
recreational experience that encourages consumer
participation and emphasizes community through
collective activities.[49] The Disney store
refurbishment project's "goal is to make children
clamor to visit the stores and stay longer" and will
cost approximately $1 million per store. By enabling
visitors to generate a narrative for their own
consumption, the stores will offer the illusion that
kids are the producers of meaning and have the
capacity to customize their identities through the
stories that are created around Disney products and
places. Such power is not necessarily false and it is
undoubtedly seductive in a world of narrowing
opportunities for agency and expression - perhaps even
more so for children and youth for whom such
opportunities are few and for whom the spectacular has
not yet lost the appeal of novelty. At the same time,
it confines the imagination and any corresponding
sense of community to the narratives on offer, which
ultimately all lead back to immersing the individual
in fun, conflict-free processes of consumption
designed to generate corporate profits.
It is astounding the ease with which Disney's
conventional fantasy formula for young adults -
recently updated and reissued in films like "High
School Musical" - reduces unpleasant and contradictory
lived experiences to the "trials and tribulations" of
well-off kids who "just want to fit in," and can
easily do so by participating in consumer culture.
Elayne Rapping observes a similar thematic message in
the design of Disney World, which, not unlike the
world of the "High School Musical" films, is "uniform
in its middle-American, asexual, uninflected
sameness," all of which works to embody a "sense of
classless luxury and unthreatening sameness ... a
synthetic spirit of democracy" that promises a kind of
belonging free from the "stress of competition."[50]
The Disney celebrity factory has long been masterful
at churning out clean-cut teen idols who symbolize
these wholesomely bland American values. Miley Cyrus (aka
Hannah Montana) is one of the latest incarnations of
Disney's star-making power. According to a New York
Times article, for many people, but especially for
those "parents unnerved by the spectacle of the Spears
family," Miley Cyrus represents a positive role model
for "millions of girls still figuring out how they
feel about boys."[51] Cyrus plays the character Miley
Stewart in the Disney TV show "Hannah Montana"
alongside her real-life father, country singer Billy
Ray Cyrus. The show focuses on the story of a teenage
girl, who wants to lead a totally normal life at home
and school and, therefore, decides to keep it a secret
that she is also the superstar pop singer Hannah
Montana. She achieves this goal by changing her
clothing and hair color. On the show, then, the lead
character, Miley Stewart, has a rock-star altar ego
named Hannah Mont
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