You’re walking around at a mall or maybe a concert. You’re happy-go-lucky, you have your favorite outfit on and you know you look good. Suddenly, a woman approaches you with a digital camera, asking to take your picture.

“Sure!” you say, flattered that some stranger thinks you’re cool enough to be photographed for posterity.

You just became the kill in the hunt. The cool hunt.

“Cool hunting” is a term used by marketers to describe the search for future trends, scoping out teenagers and young adults who have a fashionable edge on the rest of us. As a market segment worth $300 billion a year, we are the proverbial goose, and the chase is permanently on for our golden egg, or at least our tattered dollar bills.

Dee Dee Lee, co-founder of the Look-Look research company, is a cool hunter specializing in youth culture. In a “Frontline” special, which you can read at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool, Lee describes how a trend spreads:

“Actually it’s a triangle. At the top of the triangle there’s the innovator, which is like two to three percent of the population. Underneath them is the trend-setter, which we would say is about 17 percent. And what they do is they pick up on ideas that the innovators are doing, and they kind of claim them as their own. Underneath them is an early adopter, which is questionable exactly what their percentage is, but they kind of are the layer above mainstream, which is about 80 percent. And what they do is they take what the trend-setter is doing, and they make it palatable for mass consumption. They take it, they tweak it, they make it more acceptable and that’s when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it, and then it actually kills it.”

So now do you think your style is unique? Do your clothes define you? What about your blue hair? Piercings?

America’s youth is so heavily-researched and focus-grouped that personal identity is a lost notion. Unless you live under a rock, or even if you do, you probably have no physical individuality.

That wouldn’t be so bad, except we seem to be so dead-set on defining our internal selves by our appearances and our possessions. It’s really hard to avoid, even if you’re conscious of it and want to have some semblance of actual self.

There are five major multimedia conglomerates that help feed us most of the 3,000-plus advertisements we see each day: Viacom, Disney, News Corporation, Vivendi Universal and AOL Time Warner. That means a handful of people at each of these media giants dictate what we want and need, and you can’t escape their influence. There isn’t enough print space to go into the details of their domination, but you can (and should) read about them at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/themes/mediagiants.html.

For the younger TRL crowd, the prospects are pretty scary. Ann Powers, a New York Times music critic, likened MTV’s “Total Request Live” to the world’s biggest focus group.

“It’s just a public version of what happens when they put 20 people in a room and give ‘em a new flavor of chewing gum and say, “Do you like this?” she said. “The chewing gum is called Christina Aguilera. That’s really what happens.”

MTV, which is owned by Satan, er, Viacom, seduces teen spenders behind the guise of a democratic “you choose the videos” format, furthering commercial interests in an orgy of intertwined advertising.

Media critic Mark Crispin Miller further describes MTV’s frightening formula.

“The MTV machine does listen very carefully to children,” Miller said. “When corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve, you have to listen, you have to know exactly what they want and exactly what they’re thinking so that you can give them what you want them to have.

“The MTV machine doesn’t listen to the young so that it can make the young happier,” he added. “It doesn’t listen to the young so it can come up with startling new kinds of music, for example. The MTV machine tunes in so it can figure out how to pitch what Viacom has to sell to those kids … It closely studies the young, keeps them under very tight surveillance, to figure out what will push their buttons. Then it takes that and blares it back at them relentlessly and everywhere.”

Sure, MTV isn’t the end-all, be-all of youth culture. It’s just the most bold-faced example of the “feedback loop,” in which cool hunters target what’s “cool,” feed it to the public and wait for the public to feed it back until it’s used up and dead. Then it hunts for a new victim. So much for personal creativity.

Maybe most of us have outgrown MTV and TRL (one can only hope), but unfortunately we’ve been fed our own supposed identities throughout our formative years, by the Big Five. Whether we like it or not, it’s strongly affected the way we perceive ourselves and each other.

It seems like we feel so much better when other people approve of our appearance or possessions, as if it validates us or makes us feel like better human beings.

When “it’s what’s inside that counts” sounds like a joke, how do you know what really does count? What makes you feel whole? Is it your car or your knowledge? Is it your hairstyle or your heart?

Ideally, these are easy questions to answer. But saying, “I know what’s really important,” and actually living as if you do, are two very different things.

If we could just remove all the mental and emotional clutter created by the “need” for what really is worthless, we might just be able to dig out our buried souls.