Representation of youth and youth culture

Starter task

• How many media texts minimum do you need to refer to in your exam?

• To create a balanced argument what 3 areas do you need to refer to in your exam?

• How many questions do you answer in your exam overall?

• What must you apply to your argument to demonstrate you are a media student debating from an academic point of view?

Task• how is youth culture represented in the media?• How youth culture is represented in TV programs?• how is youth culture represented in the news?• how youth culture is represented in films?• How youth culture is represented in social media?• With a different coloured pen go back and fill in

any blank spaces from yesterday knowing that youth perceptions depend on a multitude of different things such as age, the form its presented in, ethnicity, social class etc.

Why has ‘that’ representation been created?

• If you were to describe yourself or your friends in 5 words would it include the majority of words that you have put in your answers?

• Which two categories are the most positive and why do you feel this is the case?

• Why do you think youth/teenagers are represented so negatively in society? Why do you feel the media as a whole creates this perception?

Task

• What is ‘collective identity’ and what does it mean?• The concept of a collective identity refers to a set of

individuals and the sense of belonging to a group. For the individual, the identity derived from the collective group shapes a part of his or her personal identity. Making them feel accepted and integrated in society.

• Collective Identity is the idea that through participating in social activities, individuals can gain a sense of belonging and in essence an "identity" that shape the individual.

David Gauntlett

• ‘identity is complicated everybody thinks they have one’

• What does Gauntlett mean by this?

These identities create society as we know it, making us relate to media

Having an identity helps us understand our purpose. We like to watch and follow media for a reassurance of self worth. Collective identity makes us feel needed and wanted. However these identities we create for ourselves are not always positive.

The big bang theory The office

Girls The last tango in Halifax

Youth representations in the media

The top 5 search results in Google relating to teenagers, how may this influence how people perceive young people? How is this creating an identity for teenagers?

TV representations of youth

-Are any of these representations real/true? Explain your answer.

-Which is the most realistic representation and why?

Representations in the news

• Research of six UK newspapers over the past 10 years found that the words most commonly associated with "teenagers", "youth" and "young people" were "binge-drinking", "yobs" and "crime".

• Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors said, if teenagers looked at media coverage more widely they would see "a much more balanced picture" with prominent positive reporting of high-achieving young people including A-level students, Olympic athletes and footballers, as well as young soldiers who had served the UK abroad. (Source BBC news)

• The portrayal of teenage boys as "yobs" in the media has made boys wary of other teenagers, according to new research.

• Figures show more than half of the stories about teenage boys in national and regional newspapers in the past year (4,374 out of 8,629) were about crime. The word most commonly used to describe them was "yobs" (591 times), followed by "thugs" (254 times), "sick" (119 times) and "feral" (96 times).

• Other terms often used included "hoodie", "louts", "heartless", "evil" "frightening", "scum", "monsters", "inhuman" and "threatening”. (independent.co.uk )

• The best chance a teenager had of receiving sympathetic coverage was if they died.

• "We found some news coverage where teen boys were described in glowing terms – 'model student', 'angel', 'altar boy' or 'every mother's perfect son'," the research concluded, "but sadly these were reserved for teenage boys who met a violent and untimely death.”

• according to the research, many boys were now more wary of boys of their own age. "It seems the endless diet of media reports about 'yobs' and 'feral' youths is making them fearful of other teens," it said. "Nearly a third said they are 'always' or 'often' wary of teenage boys they don't know.

Social media

• We are aware that what we see on social media is not real so why do we choose to believe it?

• If young people are the main consumers and producers of of this form of representation why do they choose to present themselves in a fake modified way?

• Does social media create a fake identity of teenagers to the world?

• Does social media encourage negative or positive representations of youth?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFrylnU1dDw

Moral panics

Starter task

• What is a moral? • concerned with the principles of right and wrong behaviour.

• What is a panic? • sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly

unthinking behaviour.

• What is a moral panic? • The intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an

issue that appears to threaten the social order.

Aims

• To understand what the mods and rockers are and how they were reported/represented in the press after the Brighton beach fight in the 60s

• To understand what a moral panic is

• To understand Cohen's theory of moral panics and folk devils

Mods V Rockersclash of ideologies

Rockers -leather jackets-Motorbikes-tattoos -studs-rings

Mods-suits-Scooters-smart-clean-neat

Mods V Rockers

• These two different groups of people had different ideologies.

• They did not like each other.• As all teenaged youths they caused trouble to an

extent however one event that took place on Brighton beach 1964 changed how the media reported and perceived these two groups of teens and how the rest of society understood the representation of teenagers…….forever……..??

Images used by the press

The press and their message

• What actually happened in comparison to how the press reported the stories is very interesting.

• The press over exaggerated the events and demonised the teens and made them out to be worse and much more violent and aggressive. They folk deviled teenagers and made other members of society scared of them.

• The press encouraged young people to fight so they could create stories in the media to manipulate how society viewed teenagers.

• The press over exaggerated the events of the famous fight.

How the press report a moral panic

1 exaggeration & distortion- ‘over reporting’, using emotive language and repetition of false stories2 prediction- if it has happened once before it is bound to happen again.3 symbolisation- signs represent a moral panic for e.g. interviews that are dramatised and over exaggerated to let the audience hear what they want

Stan Cohen

• Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972)

• ‘A Moral Panic occurs when a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.’

What does a moral panic consist of?

1 Concern– Awareness of a negative impact on society 2 Hostility- Towards the group to separate them from

society and to ‘folk devil’ “them” from “us”3 Consensus- A wide group of society accept the threat

of the group in question4 Disproportionality- The action taken is

disproportionate to the actual threat posed (exaggeration of the crime in the media)

5 Volatility- They can easily disappear as soon as they came and move on to a new topic

What other moral panics can you think of?

• Jimmie Savile and the entertainers of the 80s • Social workers and lack of capability ‘Baby P’

• Drug culture

• London riots

• Video games and violent behavior

• Trolling

Summary

• Cohen states teenages are seen as ‘folk devils’• Moral panics are a snap shot of time in which the

majority of society place a blame.• The mods and rockers were seen a moral panic as

teenagers were ‘out of control’• A moral panic consists of 5 key elements to be

believable and impact on society • The press manipulate messages to create moral panics • The way the press report a story is not always true or

fair, we live in a blame culture society so we accept this for of reporting.

Starter task

• What is a moral panic?

• What is a folk devil

• Why do we have moral panics?

• To what extent did the mods and rockers create an ideology for future/contemporary representations of youth?

The real ‘Quadrophenia’

• The Mods V Rockers

• You will now watch a short documentary about the mods and the rockers giving you a brief summery of their ideologies, how the groups formed, the riots on the beach and how the press reported the events of the bank holiday weekend.

• Please make notes.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng8-4DFaFEo

Summary

• How do you feel the press have shaped the identity of young people from the 60s to the present day?

• Do you feel if the way the press reported the riots perceptions of youth would be different today?

Further reading

• http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/marsh_melville_moral_panics_and_the_british_media_march_2011.pdf

Belonging

• The pressure of growing up and being part of a group is an experience most of us go through. To feel ‘normal’ and accepted we need to fit in with a group of people we collectively share the same thoughts and opinions with.

• Teenagers are at a venerable age in their lives, is this why the media targets them in a negative way?

• Are teenagers scapegoats so when other groups of society make mistakes teens are always looked down on and used to escape blame?