Approaching youth culture and the media
This book charts the developing relationship between youth and the media, and the different ways this association has been interpreted, represented, and responded to by politicians, social scientists, and the media itself. There is a distinct historical dimension to the discussion, and the book can be seen as contributing to what Christine Feldman-Barrett (2018) sees as a ‘historic turn’ in youth-oriented scholarship, with researchers giving increased attention to both the experiences of young people in the past, and the way these experiences relate to contemporary issues and debates. This trend towards histor-icisation, Feldman-Barrett observes, has seen ‘youth culture, events and activities ... appraised and analysed for how they sit within a timeline and/or how, on a micro-level, they symbolize or relate to greater cultural forces afoot in a particular era’ (Feldman-Barrett, 2018: 741). Such an approach is vital because, as Mary Celeste Kearney (2014) contends, it is only through attention to historical context that we can understand the continuities and discontinuities that characterise the development of youth culture. ‘We must’, Kearney cogently counsels, ‘reflect critically on the cun-ent moment as a specific temporal location that, while unique, is necessarily shaped by, and shaping of, the past’ (Kearney, 2014: 66).
Global themes and issues are also, of course, prominent throughout the book. This, however, does not imply that developments in every region of the world will be examined. Such a task is well beyond the scope of the present volume. Rather, the book considers intemationally-relevant themes and relationships, providing global and local case studies that bring out the geopolitical interconnections and tensions that characterise the fields of youth culture and the media. Consideration, for example, is given to the way digital media technologies have offered new possibilities for transnational connectedness and dialogue, but emphasis is given to the way these new opportunities are framed by profound global inequalities in ternis of power, ownership, and control.
These disparities are particularly pronounced in relationships between the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’ — a distinction increasingly used by social scientists to discuss geopolitical relations of power. The Global North refers broadly to the US, Canada, the UK, the European Union, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, as well as Australia and New Zealand; while the Global South encompasses the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. This book teases out the way relations between the Global North and Global South are played out in the fields of youth culture and the media, and it charts the way such relations have been accounted for by different theories and perspectives. To some extent, however, these theories themselves are constituent in the broader patterns of global inequality. As Adam Cooper and his associates observe, the field of contemporary youth studies is characterised by the poignant paradox that ‘90% of the world’s youth live in Africa, Latin America or developing countries in Asia’, but ‘the overwhelming majority of research occurs at institutions in the global North’ (Cooper, Swartz and Mahali, 2019: 30). Moreover, there is a tendency in some research to make generalisations based solely on the experiences of youngsters in the Global North. As Herman Cuevo and Ana Miranda argue, ideas developed in a particular context have sometimes been carelessly universalised, so that a theory ‘is developed to address young people’s concerns and experiences within a specific place but is afterwards utilised as placeless’ (Cuevo and Miranola, 2019: 6). These oversights and assumptions, however, will be increasingly challenged and rectified with the appearance of more research that works towards what Cooper and his colleagues envisage as a ‘Youth Studies for the global South’ — a shift which, they argue, would contribute to a ‘disentangled, decentred and more democratic field’ (Cooper, Swartz and Mahali, 2019: 31).
Another key theme in this book is attention to what might be termed the ‘political economy’ of youth culture. Political economy is defined, in a very general way, by media theorist Vincent Mosco as the ‘study of the social relations, particularly power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption of resources, including communication resources’ (2009: 2). Put more simply, political economy is a critical approach rooted in the analysis of production, business, and trade. Beyond this, however, the combination of the terms ‘political’ and ‘economy’ underscores the way the organisation of production is invariably seen as embedded in a wider context of political issues and relationships. In these terms, therefore, a political economy of the media focuses on the way media forms are produced, distributed, and consumed, with political economists of the media often giving particular attention to changing patterns of media ownership and control, and their relation to the shifting contours of political life.
Political economy has long been a facet of the study of media and communications. While it has been a presence in these fields, however, Jonathan Hardy observes how its role has often been ‘relatively marginal’, with ‘greater attention devoted to “texts” and “audiences” than either “production” or the wider contexts in which communication takes place’ (Hardy, 2014: 3). Indeed, this is especially true in the case of studies of youth culture and the media, where interest in texts and young people’s use of them has often overshadowed a consideration of the structures of economic organisation that underpin the production, circulation, and consumption of youth-oriented media. This book seeks to go some way to addressing this oversight by examining the economic conditions and commercial dynamics fundamental to the development of media targeted at the young.
The book begins by charting the development of the modern youth market. Chapter 2 outlines the first appearance of a commercial youth culture during the nineteenth century, then shows how young people became a more distinctive consumer group during the mid-twentieth century as shifts in demography and labour markets pushed youth to the centre of a postwar consumer boom in both North America and Western Europe. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries economic recession, industrial restructuring and the global financial crisis of 2007—8 eroded the labour markets that had been the foundation for the explosion of ‘teenage’ consumption during the 1950s and 1960s. Despite this, Chapter 3 shows how young people continued to represent a key consumer group that underpinned the proliferation of new, digitally-based communications and entertainment industries. The chapter surveys these developments, and critically appraises claims they marked the arrival of a new, ‘millennial’ generation of uniquely media-savvy youngsters.
Chapter 4 considers representations of young people. Attention is given to the way media and politicians alike have made recurring use of the themes and images of‘youth’ as a symbol for broader social and political issues. The chapter explores the way representations of ‘youth’ have served as an ‘ideological vehicle’ where understandings of wider social changes are encoded, with young people both celebrated as the exciting precursor to a prosperous future and (sometimes simultaneously) vilified as the most deplorable benchmark of cultural decline.
The heated controversies surrounding the media’s influence on young audiences are examined in Chapter 5. The history of ‘effects’ research is critically surveyed, along with the challenges made by its critics, and the chapter assesses how far fears of ‘violent media’ and ‘video game addiction’ mark meaningful responses to dangerous ‘media effects’, or represent recurring episodes of moral panic.
In Chapter 6 the focus shifts to young audiences’ engagement with popular media, and the different ways this has been understood by social theorists. The chapter surveys the way ‘mass culture’ theories that saw young people as the passive victims of exploitative cultural industries have, since the late twentieth century, given way to accounts that emphasise the capacity of young people to be active agents in the creation of their own identities and cultures. Particular regard is given to the contribution of subcultural theory, together with the range of ‘post-subcultural’ approaches that seek to address what are seen as the former’s shortcomings and misconceptions.
Chapter 7 explores issues of business conglomeration and globalisation in relation to the youth market and young people’s cultures. While recognition must be given to the way processes of internationalisation have delivered vast power to global media corporations, it is argued that crude notions of ‘cultural imperialism’ are unable to capture the complex nature of international media flows, nor the variety of ways young people have integrated ‘global’ media and products within distinctively local youth cultures and identities. These themes are continued in Chapter 8, which examines in more detail the way contemporary youth cultures and their associated media are forged through processes of global interconnection and local transformation. Here, particular attention is given to the way the multifaceted flows of globalisation have generated modern youth cultures characterised by complex mixtures of ethnicity and identity.
Chapter 9 gives attention is to the way young people engage with the media to negotiate their sense of identity, manage their social relationships, and engage in processes of cultural creativity. It begins by considering how the virtual spaces of the Internet may have fed into a wider ‘decentring’ of identity, with individuals articulating an ever-widening range of identities and selves. Attention is also given to the way new technologies such as Web 2.0 and smartphones have impacted on young people’s lives. Youngsters’ use of social media to elaborate identities and relationships is examined, along with the ways they navigate through the complex online realms of public and private life. The chapter concludes by considering how far young people’s wealth of online creativity amounts to a new era of ‘participatory’ media engagement.
The book concludes with an overview of the relationship between youth culture and the media. Particular attention is given to the notion of‘circuits of culture’ and the way the meanings of media texts and cultural artefacts are generated through an intersection of processes of production, identity formation, representation, consumption, and regulation. If young people’s relationship with the media is to be adequately understood, it is argued, attention must be devoted to each of these processes and the ways they interact with the other aspects of the cultural circuit. As Douglas Kellner has cogently emphasised, ‘in order to grasp fully the nature and effects of media culture, one needs to develop methods to analyse the full range of its meanings and effects’ (Kellner, 1997: 109). In these terms, issues of political economy, textuality, and audience reception are not antithetical, but can be constructively combined in a ‘trans-disciplinary’ and ‘multiperspectival’ analysis of young people’s relationships with the modem media.
Notes
- 1 There were, however, important disparities within this group. According to the Common Sense Media survey, teenagers from higher-income homes used screen media much less than those from lower-income households — 6:49 hours per day compared to 8:32 hours per day (Rideout and Robb, 2019: 5). The variation underscores the way young people’s experiences should not be homogenised — recognition must always be given to important social, economic, and cultural differences.
- 2 A detailed account of the evolution of modern conceptions of youth in Western Europe can be found in Mitteraurer (1992), while Chudacoff (1989) and Baxter (2008) both show how the modern system of age stratification in the US emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
- 3 See, for example, the criticisms advanced in Rutter et al. (1976). A critical survey of competing theories of adolescence is provided in Coleman (1992).
- 4 Influenced by developments in US sociology, accounts of a homogeneous ‘culture of youth’ also surfaced in Britain. See, for instance, Rowntree and Rowntree (1968) and Turner (1969).
- 5 A critical account of the development of ‘generation’ as an analytic category' within the social sciences can be found in Jaeger (1985).
