Modern-day children are immersed in cultures of consumption such that every aspect of their lives is touched by a buy-and-consume modality. In particular, children in North America are increasingly experiencing the effects of consumer culture at unprecedented levels of involvement. It becomes necessary, therefore, to examine the impact of consumerism in order to assess identity formation and development in youth. Young people are receiving an endless barrage of material messages encouraging purchasing behavior and consumption that impacts the self-image. Indeed, children from the ages of 4 to 12 have increasingly been defined and viewed by their spending capacity. Girls especially are targeted by marketers to sell them a whole line of products they ‘need’ to emulate a feminine ideal. There is mounting evidence to suggest that the structure of childhood is eroding and children are suffering from serious physical, emotional and social deficits directly related to consumerism.

Changes in the information society, especially the rise of blogs, have refocused attention on
questions of media modality, source identification, and motivation in online environments.
We manipulate the structure of a blogger’s critique on a news story (global vs. interspersed)
and the partisan target of the blogger (Democrats vs. Republicans) in an experiment
embedded in an online survey. Our results support our expectations: The more difficult
story format decreases the ability of less motivated readers to correctly identify the source
of their information, without affecting the motivated. These effects of structure on source
identification are democratically consequential when people rely on blogs for facts about
public affairs without the proper cautionary caveats regarding the credibility of the source.