Analyse the ways in which the media represent one group of people that you have studied

PLAN British Youth and Youth Culture

Guided questions: 1. How do the contemporary media represent British Youth and Youth Culture in different ways? 2. How does contemporary representation compare to previous time periods? 3. What are the social implications of different media representations of British Youth and Youth Culture? 4. To what extent is human identity increasingly 'mediated'? 1. Introduction - Quote - 'Stuart Hall' - What is representation? 2. Historical - Quadrophenia - Mods & Rockers and newspapers = moral panic (Cohen) - Specific examples - Micro impacting on the macro 3. Contemporary - Harry Brown -negative representations - Draw comparisons between HB and Quad - Symbolic violence (McRobbie) - reference to dominance of male British youths being symbolised through violence and gang violence - Fish Tank - dominant female role - individual vs group - Society created thugs - HB - they act this way in order to survival - self-fulfilling prophecies - question why - role of the parents - Attack the Block - challenging society’s views - cultural hegemony - Police representations in HB - newspapers - London Riots - Comparisons between The Sun and The Guardian - Propaganda - Moral panic - ASBOs - Cultural hegemony - all things intertwined to maintain cultural hegemony - Mediation - how youths combat the mediation through Internet and self-representations How are young people are represented? *compared to monsters *misunderstood *comparisons to vampires = non-fiction vs. fiction *breaking through the mediated representations *selfish society - 'me me me' *lower class/underclass - environment and physicality of surroundings their living in - 'fight for survival' *self-fulfilling prophecy *primitive --> Social Implications of these representations *fear - moral panic IPSOS MORI Survey 2005: 40% of articles focus on violence, crime, anti-social behaviour, 71% are negative Brunel University 2007: TV news: violent crime or celebrities; young people are only 1% of sources Women In Journalism 2008: 72% of articles were negative, 3.4% positive 75% about crime, drugs, police Boys: yobs, thugs, sick, feral, hoodies, louts, scum Only positive stories are about boys who died young

British Youth and Youth Culture has always been a sought after topic in mainline media and news coverage all over the country. The media generally portrays British youth in a negative light with constant stories about the high levels of crime and disturbance from young people. However, the way the youth culture is represented in the media completely differs from the reality of how youth actually behave in today’s society. The media can only offer us different perspectives and selected views on the world we live in and as Gerry Connor (2001) states; “they re-present that world to us by constructing images and behaviours for lots of different groups within, and indeed outside, our own society” and therefore, “representation is not just about the way the world is presented to us but also about how we engage with media texts in order to interpret and assimilate such portrayals.”

There are many different aspects of the media that can reach everyone in some way or form. The first one I am focusing on is the use of film. Films can be a realistic or fictional, however, either way, they are extremely significant in the messages they put across and the images they create about different people and groups of people. For example, Quadrophenia (dir. Franc Roddam), from 1979 is solely focused on the subcultures of the Mods and Rockers. The main themes of this film are fashion, music, drugs, sex and language and how the British youth of that specific time period used these things to represent feelings of rebellion and anger. Quadrophenia represents the moral panic which first arose in the early to mid-1960s and consisted of these two conflicting groups which both completely contrasted in their views on the world and each other.This film reinforced moral panic and it continued to be spread throughout society and the news. The theory of ‘moral panic’ was developed by Cohen (1972) who argued that 'folk devils' emerge in a society which reflects anxieties in reality. This causes a moral panic and leads to interventions by higher institutions like the police and politicians. Moral panic allows society to make clear what values it does not accept, therefore, this leads to the reinforcement of hegemony. This then created the idea that youth in the media are just represented as an empty category. This theory was created by Gramsci (1997) and states that representations of youth vary through generations. The way in which representations are chosen is through the current fears of society at that time, what is perceived to be threatening to society. Youth threaten the structures of dominant ideologies and the youth representations are filled through the interests of the adult world which means that as fear in society grew through moral panic, representations of youth continued to be created in this way which in turn creates more moral panic.

Quadrophenia was one of the first films to be created which portrayed British youth culture in this negative way, however, since then; many more contemporary films have been created which continue this idea that British youth are just a reckless group of ‘monsters’.