Essay Question

How are young people represented in contemporary media?

Young people are represented in a negative view within the media. Young people are usually represented as having no respect, who usually spend their time drinking alcohol, taking drugs and generally causing mayhem. This can be linked to Cohen’s theory who depicts young people as being a threat to societal values and interests. The nature of young people is stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media. Young people are represented in various different media. Within films young people are represented as ‘hoodies’ in ‘Eden Lake’ and ‘Harry Brown’, causing havoc in their community. Within newspapers young people are represented as in a negative view through various studies. Similarly in television, young people are represented as rude and ignorant through programmes such as ‘Young, Dumb and Living with Mum’ and the issue of social class in ‘Misfits’.

Within newspapers a study, named ‘Hoodies and Altar Boys’ (2009), was conducted to explore how young boys were portrayed in newspapers. The research findings found that 85% of teen boys said newspapers portray them in a bad light. It also found that media stories about ‘yobs’ and ‘hoodies’ are the main reason why teen boys are wary of other teenagers. 80% of teen boys think adults are more wary of them now than they were a year ago, this reflects Cohen’s theory of moral panic, as society mimicking that panic enforced by newspapers. Terms used in newspaper stories about teen boys included; thugs, yobs, hoodies, feral, evil, lout, monsters, brutes, scum, menace, heartless, sick, menacing and inhuman, notably all negative words used to describe young boys. Over the past year, there were more newspaper stories about teens and crime (as victims or offenders) than about teens and all other subjects put together, suggesting young people do no good at all, they are incapable of being good human beings. Even on subjects other than crime, few newspaper stories show teen boys in a good light: only 24% of stories about teens and sport were positive about teenage boys; only 16% of stories about teens and entertainment were positive.

This reflects Gerbner’s cultivation theory where the media shapes the way our society thinks and relates. Newspapers, primarily conservative newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, enforce a very negative view of young people to the public. They believe all young people are bad. Therefore, as seen in the ‘Hoodies and Altar Boys’study, adults are much more wary of teenage boys and teenage boys are wary of other teenage boys.

Article

'Hoodies Strike Fear in British Cinema'

1. How does the article suggest young people are restricted in Britsih Cinema?

the middle classes had a fear of those who could undermine their security, once the images of hoodies were implanted in the publics imagination, British film makers used this to create films such as Harry Brown and Eden Lake.

2. What links are made to the horror genre?

The hoodies seen in films such as Harry Brown and Eden Lake often have similar qualities to those in horror films as vampires nd zombies. Hoodies are also increasingly populating British horros and thrillers.

3. According to the article what is the significance of social class in these movies?

the hoodies are seen as 'an excluded class', not needed in society.

4. What are the implications of these represenations according to the writer?

The represenations can create a one-to-one engagement between the viewer and the hoodie, the audience can empathise with the hcracters or they can also create fear among them.

Symbol of a bright future vs symbol of a world going to hell

Women in Journalism reports

'Am I Bovvered?'

• researched images in the media and surveyed real teenage girls
• concern over sexualised images in all media
• encouraged a morbid preoccupation with beauty and appearance

'Hoodies or Altar Boys'

• 4374 out of 829 stories in national and regional papers were about youth crime
• 'yobs' 591 times
• 'thugs' 591 times
• 'sick' 119 times
• 'feral' 96 times
• this has gone ups since the summer riots

• positive phrases- angel, high-achiever, model student, talented sportsman
• only used the describe dead boys and usually the victims of violent crimes
• 85% of boys surveyed said negative images in media had made them afraid of other teenage boys

Internationalised stereotypes

• youthful search for collective identity could result in these representations being internationalised and accepted: a self fulfilling prophecy?
• Kidulthood
• Harry Brown
• Eden Lake
• Anti-youth films? Accurate to actual experiences of teenagers
• or conforming to stereotypes circulated by news, media?

Alternatively

• 9-14 year olds spend $300 million per year in USA
• companies are very keen to target the youth: indication of what tastes of the future will be
• Morgan Stanley: Youth are the 'vanguard of the digital revolution'

Why do adults idealise youth?

• Nostalgia- never appreciated youth when they were that age
• Empathy- adults frustrated with their lives, want to be rebels again
• Envy- teenagers don't have a career, relationship and financial burdens
• envious of adolescent sexual drive (in a sexualised culture)

Accurate or idealised?

• 'Juno'- do kids really talk like this?
• 'Misfits/skins'- do kids really have these lifestyles?
• aimed at teenagers?
• or at adults?
• e.g 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'

Digital youth

How do youth trends spread?

Traditional Model

• Global youth was ‘atomised’
• Trend begins, usually led by a celebrity, in one country (USA or UK)
• Media would then spread this trend
• Other nations’ youth would spot the trend, adopt it as an easy route to solidarity with other teens
• Popularity (and media coverage) would increase in intensity and get a wider spread of distribution

How has digital technology changed this?

• Young people have grown up taking the internet, mobiles, mp3 for granted
• Interactivity- opportunity to manipulate the media experience
• Instantaneity- ability to access (and experience) media texts ‘on-demand’
• ‘Cloud Culture’- information (including media texts and experiences) ‘float’ above us, we can ‘reach up’ and ‘grab’ it whenever we want.

How do youth trends spread?

21^st Century Model

• Youth creates their own style, their own media;
• They tell others about it using social networking sites, blogs etc; quality content downloaded and spread by viral.
• Global reach of the internet means newly invented trends are ‘instantaneously’ spread across the world where they develop or decline according to how many people decide to follow them.
• Then mainstream media become involved.

Teenage Riot! Youth, Media and Collective Identity.

Richard Jenkins

• We need to interact in order to form our identity
• With other people or with other people or with the media
• Partaking in an event (in reality or virtually) with people whom we feel affinity helps us to form collective identity
• Identification
• Solidarity (around media texts)

Constructing the Teenager

• Creating and targeting a youth audience
• And what the youth did next
• 19th Century America 'Bowery Boys' 'Soaplocks' - own slang, dress code, music
• First time fashion ha targeting the youth.

1900-1940

• 400% rise in high school enrolment in USA
• peer culture
• magazines targeted adolescent girls
• 1940s WW2 demand for labour=young people with disposable income

1945-60

•  economic potential
• first negative stereotypes
• 'culture of moral decline'
• first sign of adult cultures dichotomous image of teenagers
• e.g 'The Wild Ones'

1950s RocknRoll Culture

• not trying to fit in to adult mainstream
• happy to rebel against it- first indication of a 'geneartion gap' in values and lifestyles

Adult Hegemony

• Hegemony= a dominant social group keeps oppressed group in their subservient position by making them feel this position is normal or desirable
• adult mainstream exploited the image of the 'rebel teen'
• solid teenagers as aspiration

Antonio gramsci

• 1891-1937
• cultural hegemony
• diverse culture can be ruled/dominated by one group or class
• everyday practises shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination
• advanced industrial societies hegemony cultural innovations such as compulsory schooling, mass media, and popular culture have indoctrinated workers to a false consciousness

Stereotypes

• characters in a media text who are 'types' rather than complete people
• 'nice old lady', 'bad cop'
• children's media text often use stereotypes so a young audiences can identify quickly with the characters

Extension/restriction of our experience of reality

• by giving audiences information, media text extend experience of reality
• every time you see a media text you extend your experience of life ina a second ahd way (vicarious)
• producers of the media text have selected and constructed the information we receive, then our ecoerience is restricted

CASE STUDY. James Dean- an accurate portrayal

• first celebrity to represent youth? Capture the dissonance of youth
• 'rebel without a casue'- lots of delinquent behaviour
• adults/teenagers could empathise with him
• 'live fast due young'= the start of adults fetishing youth?

1960s-70 subculture to counter culture

• next generation of teens very cynical about commercial exploitation of youth
• rebellion chimes with social upheaval
• young people support civil rights, feminism, anti-Vietnam, the rebels now have a cause
• resistant to marketing and consumerism, wanted to make the world better
• e.g 'easy rider'

Punk & Hip-Hop

• punk= reaction against optimism of the hippies, cynical of mainstream
• rebellious, anti-consumerist, punk was anti-establishment
• punk= aesthetic and political rebellion
• hip hop= dealing with reality of poverty and racist oppression
• e.g scratch

Key Theorists Condensed

Althusser (1970)

Ideological state apparatus- institutions such as education, the churches, family, media, trade unions and law, which were formally outside state control but which served to transmit the values of the state. In contempory capatalist societies education has replaced the church as the principal ideoogical stte apparatus. Among marxits, the term is constrasted with the so-called 'repressive state apparatus' of the armed forces and police, and is allotted a major role in securing compliance within developed capatalist societies.

Gramscic (1971)

Cultural hegemony; a culturally diverse society can be ruled or dominated by one of its social classes. It is the dominace of the social group over another, e.g the ruling class over all other classes. The theory claims that the ideas of the ruling class come to be seen as the norm; they are seen as universal ideologies, pecieved to benefit everyone whilst only really benefiting the ruling class.

Cohen (1972)

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or groups of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values ad interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media.

Gerbner (1986)

The repetitive pattern of television mass-produced message and imageges inflkuenced people's understandng of the world.
Cultivation Theory.
Mean world Syndrome.

Acland (1995)

Order has a key function: to reproduce itself. Youth in crisis, youth gone wild,m is a central site in which this activity of reproducing order takjes place. It involves the constitution of the normal adult, the normal youth, and the relatoion between the two. The deviant youth is thus a crucial trope of this relationship; it helps patrol the boundaries.

Giroux (1997)

Representations of youth and in popular culture have a long and complex history and habitually serve as signposts through which American society registers its own crisis of meaning, vision and community. Youth becomes an empoty category inhabited by the deisres, fantasies and interests of the adult world.

McRobbie (2004)

Symbolic violence against the working class is a from of social reproduction.

Media and Collective Identity

‘Identity is complicated- everybody thinks they’ve got one.’ David Gauntlett

‘A focus on identity requires us to pay closer attention to the way in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social groups.’ David Buckingham

Collective identity is a representation of the way reality is ‘mediated’ or ‘re-presented’ to us as a society. It is the individual’s sense of belonging to a group.

Contemporary media focuses dominantly on young people, giving a diverse representation of this group, including fiction, non-fiction and self-representation.

The contemporary representation of collective groups has changed with those of the past. Today, young people are dominantly represented on TV programmes as well as online and in contemporary films.

However, these media representations cause social implications on this group of people. People begin to stereotype young people.

Films

Fishtank-Andrea Arnold

This is England- Shane Meadows

Goodbye Cha- Nick love

If- Lindsay Anderson

Clockwork orange- Stanley Kubrick

TV

Misfits

The Inbetweeners

Skins

My Family (Janey, Nick, Michael)

‘Folk Devils and moral panics’- Stanley Cohen

News Coverage- representations of young people

• News coverage and moral panics: dual concerns
• Youth as ‘deviant threat’
• Childhood ‘innocence destroyed’ by media

The media has created a moral panic: ‘a condition, episode person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.’ These ‘folk devils’ constituted a threat to the prevailing social order.

Stanley Cohen, who are ‘nameless folk devils’?

• Trade unionist
• Punks
• Black muggers
• Football hooligans
• Ravers Goths
• Young muslims
• ‘NEDS’

Contemporary moral panics:

• The hoodie and youth as a threat
• Hip hop/gangsta
• Islamic terrorists’
• Video game violence
• Sexualisation of children

British youth & Collective Identity

For our exam in June we are learning how British youth are represented in media.

How are images of the ‘British’ used to market films?

• ‘a green and pleasant land’- idealised visions of Britain
• ‘heritage’ cinema
• Literary adaptations
• ‘urban fairytale’

UK films are used to reinforce patriotism for domestic audiences, whilst UK films are used as a tourist marketing strategy for foreign audiences.

Heritage cinema

• This is the term used to describe a particular style of costume drama.
• Heritage cinema presents the past as a ‘spectacle’, ‘museum aesthetic’, where the past is displayed for visual please.
• The past ad our relationship with it, is not questioned or criticised
• The films are ‘half in love with fancy frocks and immaculate cutlery’ for instance, mise-en-scene becomes more important than the narrative or the characters
• Presents a very patriotic vision of Britain
• The films are usually set in Victorian, Edwardian or inter-war years, focussed on upper middle classes
• They are often and adaptation of literary works
• Romanticised view of the past ‘bygone golden age’
• Popular when British national identity is questioned in WW11 and 1980s

Urban Fairytale

• This is the term used to describe romantic comedies of the 1990s
• Typical love story conventions; mismatched couple who don’t immediately get on, obstacles in the relationship that are eventually overcome (often with a close nit group of friends)
• Set in contemporary London, lots of tourist landmarks, middle class neighbourhood, and ‘sanitised’ vision of urban life.

Case study: Four weddings and a funeral (1994)

·        Made $4.4million in US, made $245 million worldwide

·        Made Hugh Grant a star

·        Idealised images, conforms to US markets of the stereotype of the British- ‘Anglophilia’

·        Reinforces nostalgic vision of Britain and British values to a domestic audience due to the escapist/positive representation of modern Britain

Gritty Realism

• Opposite of Heritage Cinema- critical of British life, not reinforcing patriotic values
• Challenging to audience’s comfort zone; inflicting portrait of harsh reality of modern Britain
• Often shocking examination of the dark side of human behaviour: explicit sex, violence, drugs etc
• Deals with social problems (drugs, poverty, violence, child abuse) explicitly but with complexity
• Often focuses on working or ‘underclass’ characters

Why are these images of Britain successful?

They rival to ‘saccharine’ sentimentality of Hollywood films due to their daring and shocking nature. They enforce Liberal Art, which are the house audiences who like cinema to challenge their preconceptions and comfort zones. The images also make middle class audiences feel secure by contrasting characters lives. Critically, the films are more ‘serious’ enjoyed by more ‘intelligent’ audiences.

Post Heritage Cinema

• Claire Monks’ phrase for historical dramas that don’t just ‘display’ the past, but ‘interrogates’ the past and our relationship to it
• Questions how the past is represented
• Explores contemporary themes in historical setting