To what extent do audiences use media to construct their own sense of collective identity?

“Collective identity is a sense of oneness, where you are a member in a social group that has a sense of togetherness”. So for example, subcultures amplify the term collective identity very well that many young youths are in; this could be through MODs, EMOs, etc. However is media to blame for the construction of these groups?

David Buckingham says that “A focus on identity requires us to pay closer attention to the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences” and this is well accomplished by the analysis of web 2.0. The term refers to the web applications that facilitate participating information, sharing and user centred design. A good example of this would be the use of facebook where teens are constructing the collective identity by “constantly updating and customizing their profile online, adding photos and songs and posting to each other’s virtual walls. Whilst this could be interpreted as just playing around these activities can be a means for teens to construct and experiment with their identity.”-Henry Jenkins. Doing so allows them to find others with the same interest and disinterests as them, thereby building their collective identity.

Further due to new technologies and the media the world has become a global village, meaning the world has become so ‘small’ it is far easier to interact with one another. Richard Jenkins explains that we need to interact with each other in order to form our identity; does this just have to be through reality?, because according to postmodernism, what is reality?, are we really being social though it’s being produced on the web? ” in my opinion I would say yes because there is no difference from someone voicing out their opinion in a public setting, resulting in a interaction to the audience, from a person voicing out their opinion on a news article on the internet .

Take for example the London riots, previously the media the portrayal of youths have always been negative but when it came to the London riots this was the outcome of the news article’s at that time: “this brazen facebook user posted a picture of himself with suspected stolen goods” another says “the Tottenham riots were a grim reminder if any were needed of the level of anarchy that exists barely below the surface in some of our worst urban estates”. Here we see that a moral panic is formed, and that those reading the articles will build up a stereotype of youths and lower class, and we know this by such highlighted words as “Brazen facebook user”, “ worst urban estates” .

Strinati (1995) talked about this, how the mass media through popular culture can influence society to think a certain way and that they govern and shape all other forms of social relationships. Media images increasingly dominate or sense of reality, and the way we define ourselves in the world around us, a typical example of this is the stereotypical image of youth’s dressed up in hoodie, bandanna’s and bikes. Now reality can only be defined by surface reflections in a mirror.

Youths therefore through media is being formed a negative collective identity and they conform to this labelling because they see no other way of approaching the matter. For the example of the news article written by John Naughton- “Young people don’t like us. Who can blame them?”  He says: “just imagine for a moment that you are a British teenage boy. You’re struggling to grow up. To find out who you really are. Your parent’s marriage has broken up. Your dad’s long gone. You’re either under pressure to perform in school..... You get banned from shopping centres because you wear a hoodie. You carry a knife not because your violent, but because you’re scared witless. You find one of our newspapers on the pavement of that street and you start to read it, what do you find? You are likely to read spiteful, biased inaccurate factoid-based journalism that portrays you as hateful, terrifying anti-social, petty criminal that society would be better without.”  Therefore we can argue that because of the hypodermic needle model of a huge number of negative coverage of youths they have no choice but to follow the message and join that collective identity, because according to the quote above we doubt would find other’s going through the same problem.

Jacques Lacan mirror stage theory can support this because a person can form their collective identity through reflection, so a youth can see the reflection of other youths and follow suit, for the theory says audiences are able to form and develop their identity and change the way they see or recognise themselves according to the media portrayal.

Therefore to conclude I would say that audiences use the media to the fullest extent in order to form their collective identity.

-          By Graham Oddoye