Looking at two types of Media, describe the ways in which a particular group of people are collectively represented or provided for, using specific examples to support your response.

Caroline Howarth believed that people develop collective identities through representations that they are bombarded with. Take for example her study on Brixton youths, she created focus groups of local children in Brixton and asked them a series of question, for them to basically describe the life style of Brixton for them and how they think people outside views Brixton. The participants of the focus group all came to same conclusion that Brixton was a very dangerous and relatively a stereotypical place to live. Making the media texts to portray an accurate account however is this only evidence of how media influences us? Caroline Howarth said that “identity is co-constructed through dialectic of self-other relations. Child has to take on the social representations of her communities and learn to see herself as others do.”

Therefore if the community is stigmatised then the person identity is also stigmatised.  Danielle said: “Yeah, it is actually, cos when you say ‘I’m from Brixton’, and then they all start saying ‘Is it?’ ‘Gosh, she’s from Brixton!’ ‘She’s got a knife, she is carrying a gun, she got drugs, and she got everything!’”

Althusser’s interpellation theory says, “We become bombarded with messages and become a subject rather than an individual as soon as we engage them, they control us (Post modernism).”These messages can con come in two ways, texts and visual. Take for example the messages portrayed in Noel Clarke kidlthood, where youths were given the collectively identity of something to be feared and bad. Noel Clarke himself says he was trying to give an accurate representation of youths in London; given to the recent events of the London riots it hard to dispute that such a representation is wrong.

When even considering the historical evidence of youths like rebel without a cause, you still can see youths being stigmatised as being rebellious. Today though youths try to build their own collective identities through the use of web 2.0, social networks such as Facebook and twitter, with the ability to update statuses, upload pictures and share information, youths tend to use this to begin developing their collective identities, which was alluded to by henry Jenkins. All of this results in youths having a sense of belonging, however due to the riots in particular adults have tried to enforce regulation and censorship on web 2.0 in order it might restrict what youths can do on it.

During the riots it’s argued that some riots were actually planned through social networks like twitter and blackberry messenger. Rioters used this as a way to communicate and even post pictures of their stolen goods as trophies.  Due to this faced access to communication it made it increasingly difficult to put regulation on it. Twitter and blackberry was even asked to be shut down.

The press also has a huge influence in how society views youth, in particular tabloids. When they input their messages for the audience to decode and deconstruct it for their own lives and situations. Stuart hall decoding/encoding theory talks about this, for example the sun would deliberately show youths in a negative light and exaggerate it to create a moral panic among their readers.

By using buzz words like yobs, hoddies it contributes to hegemonic view of controlling youths in general.  By grouping them together as bad collective identity this makes it hard for some youths to be recognised as individuals who achieve a good standing among society, because to media bad news is good news. This overshadowing can often lead them to be frustrated and because they have no way having their opinions being put into the press they have another means to vent out their emotions, sometimes this can be through violence.

The future representations of youths doesn’t seem to be any better, in fact worse,  a film directed by Mo Ali shank, portrayed youths to be left by society as a whole to defend for themselves. Maybe this is a bleak outlook into the future for them.

In conclusion youths can use web 2.0 to create their own collective identities but at the end due to mass media influence on society through text and visual, they will continually be negatively labelled and due to this youths will just continue to be rebels.