Two months after the popular Miley Cyrus’ scandalous Vanity Fair photo-shoot, and nine months after good-girl Vanessa Hudgens was apologizing for her nude pictures, Disney needed some new blood in the child star line up.  Demi Lovato looked like she could be it.  (See Wall Street Journal article.)

You may perhaps be wondering how an intelligent Cornell student like me could be so engrossed in the turnover rate of tween pop stars, and I’ll tell you that the sheer gossip element was not what interested me.  What astonished me was the massive assault Disney was planning on American consumers.  As top executive, Gary Marsh, put it, “Once we find someone, we go all in.”  After deciding to drag Lovato out of the bit-role pool, Disney cast her as the lead in the Disney Channel original movie, Camp Rock (also starring the Jonas Brothers heartthrobs), and in an additional movie.  The soundtrack would be released in stores and on the radio, while promotional merchandise would sweep popular stores like Target.  In addition, Lovato also got her own record deal, lead role in a tv show, and got tacked on as the opener for the Jonas Brothers sold-out summer tour.  The Journal’s Peter Sanders summed it up, calling this Lovato publicity “an multimedia blitz that is aggressive even by Disney’s standards.”  And if this royal treatment was not enough to astonish me, I was even more surprised when a few months later the American tween and tweens’ parent public was lapping it all up.  I could not believe that people were buying into this incredible, monopolizing, clearly calculated marketing maneuver.  How was this possible?

I think the answer boils down to an issue of choice.  Disney has basically cornered the market on wholesome or family-friendly entertainment for tweens, especially for girls.  The teen characters in Disney shows and movies are too mature for Sesame Street but still youthful and silly enough to avoid the dramatics of teen soaps like The O.C. or One Tree Hill.  Disney kids are sexually tame, family-dependent, and innocent, making Disney teen content appealing not only to the younger tween audience who is not yet interested in wildly dramatic throes of passion, but also to their concerned parents.  It is a smart move on Disney’s part: producing content for a huge niche audience that has relatively little competition, and will be supported by adults.

But what does Disney’s exclusive hold on this market mean for the tweens?  It means very little choice.  Albert Bandura’s social learning theory holds that learning occurs through the observation of ‘models,’ whether real people or characters from the media.  Learners, such as children or teenagers, try out the behaviors and attitudes they see their models using, and they are likely to pick models that are similar to them in age, gender, race, and background.  In this sense, ‘models’ from television or film can be extremely influential.  If tween girls (or their parents) are searching for young, fun, middle-class, family-oriented models who can easily escape being labeled promiscuous, they are going to turn to Disney content.  Disney characters are nearly the only source of these types of models; girls have to turn to them.

This exclusivity gives the Disney producers an extreme amount of power whether they realize it or not.  In this day and age, the media plays a huge role in creating children and adolescents’ perceptions of normal social behavior.  As the primary source of tween girl behavioral models, Disney has the unique power to alter the national (and even global) flow of information about what tween girls do and how they should act.  This has prompted concern from developmentalists, teen advocates, feminists, researchers, and concerned parents who question messages encouraging consumerism and materialism, as well as behavioral models who discourage girls from academic or intellectual achievement and independence, and encourage body obsession and dependence on males.  The dilemma is, of course, that the alternatives to Disney content are only more frightening and more toxic.

The other danger of Disney’s power over the tween niche market is how quickly the content gets effused through the population.  Television, film and celebrity knowledge plays a significant role in the tween friendship and activity networks.  A social-affiliation network involving even a small group of friends and the movies they watch together (as an act social bonding) would reveal how easily a girl could find herself consuming a significant amount of media content.

For example, if two friends (A and B) bond over their liking and watching of movies like Enchanted or High School Musical, it is highly likely that at least one of them also enjoys The Princess Diaries or The Lizzie McGuire Movie.  (I am pulling these examples from the related lists at imdb.com.) Both homophily and triadic closure (or technically social influence) predict that over time, friend B will soon be exposed to friend A’s other favorite movies.   A and B are also highly likely to form friendships with others girls who also like these movies.  Structural balance also suggests that the girls will have incentives to like these new movies.  For example, since B has a friendship with A, B has an incentive to like The Princess Diaries to maintain balance in the friendship.  Similarly, if A or B becomes friends with another girl C because they all like High School Musical and wish to maintain a balance friendship with C, they have an incentive to like C’s other favorite movies, The Cheetah Girls and Bring It On.  In this way, tweens consume the media content and messages quickly, and have an incentive to have positive attitudes toward the media they consume.  (Note: even if they are only pretending to like the movies to please their friends, cognitive dissonance predicts that the girls will rationalize an eventual liking for the movie.)

All this may be good for Disney’s profits, but it remains quite potentially dangerous to the behavioral development of tween girls.  With little competing content, the messages provided by the Disney Corporation become the only models the girls have.  In a media world where portrayals of body image as well as achievement goals have become increasingly unrealistic, and due to the dissemination of the gender roles previously mentioned, it would perhaps be in the interest of girls’ mental and developmental health to promote additional, independent tween content to act as a balance to the exclusive hold Disney presently enjoys.