Sam Kendrick

Prompt 6

It has long been known in the fields of product and service marketing that the youth demographic represents a source of seemingly endless revenue, and as a result, many businesses organizations seek to profit from the expendable income of the modern young person. Private music instructors, acting coaches, and talent agents are among a number of service providers who seek to use the goals and ambitions of youth to pay their bills. This is not at all to say that most or all of these services are provided with malicious intent, as certainly the majority are good-natured. In my experience, however, there is a certain degree of profit-seeking mentality in each of the three professions listed above.

When faced with the task of designing a flag and manifesto for a new social or political movement, I instinctively began browsing the depths of Tumblr, Facebook, and other social media networks in order to review movements I already knew to exist, as well as to discover ones that had flown relatively under the radar in order to examine why exactly they had not received the same amount of attention. As I researched, however, what struck me was not the content that these various attempts at social change presented, but the sheer volume of political and social movements that seemed to have sprung up within the past several years. Instead of choosing to add another social agenda to the already sprawling list in front of me, I wanted to create an organization aimed at using the increase in social awareness fostered by social media sites as a platform off of which to profit, with forward thinking members of the youth generation, brought up entirely on the internet, as its primary clientele. The organization, simply titled YourMovement, is designed to work with a client in  the preparation of a manifesto as well as design and produce for them flags and other visual promotion products. Clients would be encouraged to set up a Tumblr blog with a page for donations. YourMovement would in turn claim ten percent of the donations collected by the client, just a talent agent does in the modeling and acting industries. 

An organization like YourMovement would not necessarily exist solely in order to siphon cash from naive young people, but the purity of its character is not what is important. The fact that it as an organization exists with the promise of helping youth realize their dreams only after their wallets have been emptied is enough of a thinking point, and an often overlooked one at that. YourMovement was not created as an overt statement on the morality of this practice, but rather simply a commentary on its unfailing ability to adapt to a changing social environment.