Media Essay

Analyse the way in which the media represents youths

Media appears to reflect reality but rather they construct it. - Stuart Hall, encoding and decoding is a example of how media does this in regards to youths. The media put across a message which is never transparent therefore leading to an ideology being infiltrated into the hearts of the passive audiences. For example the film kidult hood portrays youths negatively, therefore giving it a negative representation to society, as the film constructs a stereotypical view on youths, creating the ideological view for audiences. Kidult hood portrays youths to be violent, sexual, loud, “druggies”, angry and carefree; this creates the stereotypical subculture that youths have in society.

But historical representation of youths have not always been so radical for example rebel without a cause was more of a subtle representation of youth, where they have mixed feelings and uncertainty leading them to be less violent, so therefore contemporary and historical representations differ completely as they are dichotomous.

Therefore leading the media to supposedly put across “common sense” to their audiences, David Buckingham researched how media and technologies are used in everyday life and the consequences that occur, take for example the recent London riots; a newspaper article said “This brazen Facebook user posted a picture of himself with suspected goods”.  This created a moral panic to occur and due to the involvement of web 2.0 which is usually associated with youths. The online newspapers showed videos and pictures of youths only stealing and pictures of youths taking photos with what they stole, during the London riots the police tried to stop the use of web 2.0 in order to stop youths interacting and communicating with each other. “Teens are constantly updating and customizing their profiles “(Richard Jenkins).Through web2.0 youths were able to communicate with each other about the riots and as web2.0 has no regulations they had no limitations on what they said.

 it resulted in negative stereotypes being formed even the way youths are described are always in reference to the media for example the daily mail newspaper; mentioned that a group of youths had “A sense of glee pervaded these accounts – youths were often grinning while describing their experience – a delight that the normal order of things was turned upside down.” This statement from a tabloid clearly exaggerated forces new modes of regulation, meaning for us to pay closer attention to diverse ways in which media is represented , in comparison to broadsheets which present more of a factual and resourceful way presenting the media. Because the guardian a broadsheet in fact represents youths differently from that of a tabloid sheet, it mentioned “just imagine for a moment that you’re a British teenage boy. You’re struggling to grow up, to find out who you really are?” which is in fact true as youths today are trying to find their identity. Jacques Lacan argued that audiences are able to form and develop their identity and change the way in which they see or recognise themselves. The media sends out a huge number of messages about identity and acceptable forms of self-expression, gender, sexuality and lifestyle.

Due to us being bombarded by these messages we are positioned as a subject rather than an individual according to Althusser’s theory therefore these messages construct or define our identity in some part.

Therefore in conclusion the way media represent youths is negative and it will continually display a hegemonic and ideological status to society.