Media does not construct collective identity but merely reflects it.

“Media does not construct collective identity but merely reflects it.” The relationship between collective identity and media representation is a complicated one. First let us consider what collective identity is; collective identity is defined to be an individual sense of belonging to a certain group, enabling that person to be form his personal identity, to construct a form of togetherness.

Marxist however would argue that through media  an individual will achieve collective identity due to the ideology that media provides to people in the day to day life, in order to shape their way of thinking. Therefore it will lead people to become more of a passive audience, this means that the users of media have no choice to what they watch and how they interpret it, leading them to develop a stereotypical mindset.

But then you can argue that collective identity is not just being represented by mainstream media but self-construction by users of the media and communities formed from shared identity i.e. age, gender, sex.

Therefore the way people interact with media influences them in the way they have an interaction with others, leading to a development of identity. Richard Jenkins alluded to, “We need to interact in order to form our identity …. with other people or with media.” Therefore partaking in an event (in reality or virtually) with people with whom we feel affinity helps us to form our collective identity.

But does this mean media in some form or way is the foundation to all personality and identity today?

Postmodernism is said to describe the emergence of social order where the importance of the power mass media and popular culture has to govern and shape all forms of social relationships. Meaning that media has dominated people’s way of thinking throughout the years.

An example of this would be the way media represents youths in general. The media is often giving a negative representation on youths therefore building a stereotype of how youths are. For example the recent London riots, a newspaper report quotes that the youngsters today are villains, hooligans and criminals, instilling  a stereotypical view in modern society to fear youths.

Therefore due to the gross mass of negative representation of youths on the news it leads that generation being labeled, and because of this many youngster accept it fulfill the lf fulfilling prophecy. This means that they live up to the label given to them, therefore they from their collective identity.

However you can argue that media perhaps is just reflecting something that was already there because youths in the modern society continuously behave in a negative way e.g. rioting, binge drinking, stealing, attacking etc.. So the media is just constructing a moral panic to alert society of the realities of life.

Stuart hall argues that media seem to reflect reality but really they actually construct it. This is done through encoding and decoding. For example an adult might see the film one day and automatically presume that youths nowadays are associated with drugs, theft and violence, from this encoding of the message through media, the adult may now identify groups of teenagers as thieves or trouble makers, as the adult decoded the message in that negative term.

So youths are reflected in a collective identity in negative terms.

But then maybe youths only behave like that to make a point. The news article produced by the guardian entitled “Young people don’t like us. Who can blame them?” takes into account the pressures that young people have today and how easy it is for them to fall into the stereotype especially those who live in a deprived area and then with all that pressure, the newspapers and media writes: “spiteful, biased, inaccurate factoid journalism that portrays youths as a hateful, terrifying, anti-social and a petty criminal that society would be better without”; All the while believing that youths will never read those types of articles, so they think it’s right to continue writing these harmful things.

All the while not considering the portion of youths that actually behave well and are a force of good to society, these youths barely get coverage on the news and if they do, it will only be for a brief moment of time.  Therefore, the media can be said to construct this negative collective identity towards youths. As adults have a respectable collective identity, they start get influenced by the media and see youths with negative collective identities.

But largely the media uses binary opposition. Where the media stereotype youths of ethnic backgrounds, for example the many articles and news nights that focuses on young black youths who are involved in gang culture and stabbings.

To conclude, after considering many arguments I believe that media does construct collective identity rather than reflecting it. Because of the huge influence it has on society it is inevitable for it not to construct collective identity.