Are today’s teenagers totally at the mercy of the corporate messages that everywhere lie in wait for them? “By sheer virtue of their population numbers, buying power and savvy, teens are not merely in vogue. Entire carpeted auditoriums of middle-age movie, TV, retail and Internet executives devote themselves to tracking the spending habits of these juniors, decoding their preferences, catering to their every mass hiccup.” A new book suggests that today’s teens are a “sad, hollow, cheated generation, thoroughly saturated by artful product placement, co-opted by viral marketing, oppressed by the trickle-down effect of the (now rather pockmarked) “contemporary luxury economy.”