A2 Media Studies

Media and Collective Identity

Media Representations of Youth and Youth Cultures

Key Theorists

Media Effects:

 Theodor Adorno
 John Fiske
 Stuart Hall

Theodor Adorno – argued that the power of the mass media over the population was
enormous and damaging.
Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School of German academics working in the
1920s and 1930s. Their hostility to the mass media was probably influenced by Hitler’s
use of propaganda.
Adorno describes the mass media as the ‘culture industry’ to emphasise the purpose of
 the media is to make a profit.
Adorno argued that all products of the culture industry are ‘exactly the same’ in the sense
that they all reflect the values of the established system. Each product may give the
impression of being individual, but this is an illusion. The purpose of popular culture
products is to maintain the established social order.

John Fiske – argues it is the audience, not the media, which has most of the power.

‘Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the
culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the
various formations of the people to use or reject in the on-going process of producing
their popular culture.’

The power of the audience to interpret texts and determine their popularity is much
greater than that of media institutions to send a particular message or ideology within
their texts.

Fiske also points out that we cannot talk about ‘the audience’, because a singular mass of
consumers does not exist: there is only a range of different individuals with their own
changing tastes and beliefs.

Fiske argues that ‘Culture is a living, active process: it can be developed only from
within, it cannot be imposed from without or above’. Culture is only created in the act of
the (potentially different) interpretation by the audience.

Stuart Hall – Encoding/Decoding

Hall argues that the ‘preferred reading’ (the meaning the producers want to create) is
encoded in media texts through technological codes and conventions. However
audiences decode media texts in different ways. Hall identified three possible responses
from the audience:
 dominant – the reader shares the text’s code and accepts its preferred reading
 negotiated – understands the text’s code, generally accepts the preferred reading but
modifies it according to their social position and experiences
 oppositional – understands the code but rejects the preferred reading. The audience
member will be reading the text from an oppositional position (e.g. a feminist reading)

Identity Theorists

 David Gauntlett
 Anthony Giddens
  Judith Butler

David Gauntlett

‘it is highly unlikely that the media would have no impact on our own sense of our
identity. At the same time…it’s just as unlikely that the media has a direct and
straightforward effect on its audiences. It’s unsatisfactory to just assume that people
somehow copy or borrow their identities from the media.’

‘Identities are complex constructions…axes of identity include gender, ethnicity, class,

age, disability, and sexuality. In addition a range of other factors may contribute to a
sense of identity.’

Identity is today seen as more fluid and transformable than ever before. Gauntlett argues
that the mass media is, within limits, a force for change.

Identity is now consciously constructed, and the media provides some of the tools to help
us construct our identities. The media contains a huge number of messages about
identity and acceptable lifestyles. At the same time the public have their own diverse set
of feelings. The media and media consumers are engaged in a dialogue in which neither
overpowers the other.

‘popular media has a significant but not entirely straightforward relationship with
people’s sense of identity. Media messages are diverse, diffuse and contradictory.
Rather than being zapped straight into people’s brains, ideas about lifestyle and identity
that appear in the media are resources which individuals use to think through their sense
of self and modes of expression.’

Anthony Giddens

Structuration – Giddens explores the extent to which society is shaped by social structure
or individual. He argues that individual human agency and social structure are in a
relationship with each other, and it is the repetition of acts by individuals which
reinforces the structure. There is a social structure which shapes our lives (traditions,
institutions, moral codes, established ways of doing things), but it relies on individuals
following these structures. When they act differently the social structure can change.
Structuration is the process in which human agency and social structure are in a constant
relationship – the social structure is reproduced by the repetition of acts by individual
people (and can therefore change).

Social Order and Social Reproduction – Giddens argues that the ‘rules’ of the social order
may only be in our heads but people are often shocked when seemingly minor social
 expectations are not adhered to.
People’s everyday actions reinforce and reproduce a set of expectations – and it is this set
of other people’s expectations which make up the social forces that maintain the social
order.

Post-traditional society – Giddens argues that in traditional societies individual actions

and identities do not have to be thought about as much as choices are determined by
tradition and custom. In post-traditional times we are less concerned about following
tradition. As a result we have to think more about how to behave in society. In modern
societies (‘societies where modernity is well-developed’) self-identity becomes an issue
we are all aware of. Earlier societies with a social order based firmly in tradition would
provide individuals with more clearly defined roles. In post-traditional society we have
to work out our roles for ourselves.

‘What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in
circumstances of late modernity – and ones which, on some level or another, all of us
answer’.

The reflexive project of the self – Giddens argues that the self is ‘made’ by the
individual, self-identity becomes a reflexive project (something we are actively aware
of). Self-identity is a person’s own reflexive understanding of their biography, but is not
an objective description of that person. The self is not something we are born with, and it
is not fixed. The self is reflexively made – thoughtfully constructed by the individual.
We all choose a lifestyle – consumerism is one of the ways in which project and develop
our lifestyle. Just as the self has become changeable, so too has the body.

Judith Butler

Butler focused particularly on gender, but her ideas can be applied more broadly to
identity generally. Butler argues that there is no essential gender identity, i.e. no essential
male or female identity. Instead she suggests that gender is a performance. People
unconsciously mimic gendered behaviours. Butler argues that gender is ‘performative’ –
a compulsory performance. We must behave in line with expectations of ‘normal’ male
or female identity/behaviour. These ideas can be related more generally to identity. To
what extent are all identities based on behaving in a recognisable/conventional way? To
what extent is identity learned behaviour (and what role may the media have in ‘teaching’
identity?)? Can you see examples of people ‘performing’ identity?

Youth Culture Theorists

 Dick Hebdige
 Henry A. Giroux
 Charles Acland
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Hebdige defines representations of youth culture as ‘youth as fun’ or ‘youth as trouble’.

He argues that subcultures abandon whatever becomes part of the mainstream.

Hebdige focused on the importance of style for subcultures to demonstrate their

resistance to mainstream culture.
‘the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the
surfaces of subculture – in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double
meaning.’
‘subcultures are a form of resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections
to this ruling ideology are represented in style.’
For Hebdige subcultures resisted dominant society through style (costume, language,
behaviour). Hebdige suggests subcultures resist hegemony (a situation in which one
social class dominates society by making their way of life appear to be the normal/natural
way of living). Subcultures call into question the validity of hegemonic values.

Henry A. Giroux
Giroux argues ‘Representations of youth in popular culture have a long and complex
history and habitually serve as signposts through which American society registers its
own crises of meaning, vision, and community…youth becomes an empty category
inhabited by the desires, fantasies, and interests of the adult world.’

Giroux argues youth is now demonised in popular culture and shown to be in need of
adult surveillance and control.

Charles Acland – Youth as Spectacle

Acland argues youth is constructed in popular culture as ‘that which is watched’ by the
adult gaze.
‘with few exceptions it is always the case with youth films that the point of view is adult;
the films concern an adult perception of the lives of the young.’

‘Order has a key function: to reproduce itself. Youth in crisis, youth gone wild, is a
central site in which this activity of reproducing order takes place. It involves the
constitution of the normal, adult, the normal youth, and the relation between the two.
The deviant youth is thus a crucial trope of this relationship; it helps patrol the
boundaries.’

‘Youth is a time of substantial surveillance exactly because it is a time when the culture is
learned. Whilst youth are permitted to play with the transgressive, they are being
checked and marked. The ideology of protection facilitates strategic interventions by the
state and other, the purpose of which…is to guarantee the smooth reproduction of social
relations. With this comes the smooth reproduction of racial and ethnic, gender, and
class relations…at stake here is the reconstitution of particular ideas about social
stability’.