Youth and Media

Andy Ruddock, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848600928, 9781848600911
• eBook ISBN: 9781446290781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When societies worry about media effects, why do they focus so much on young people? Is advertising to blame for binge drinking? Do films and video games inspire school shootings? Tackling these kinds of questions, Youth and Media explains why young people are at the centre of how we understand the media.

Exploring key issues in politics, technology, celebrity, advertising, gender and globalization, Andy Ruddock offers a fascinating introduction to how media define the identities and social imaginations of young people. The result is a systematic guide to how the notion of media influence ?works? when daily life compels young people to act out their relationships through media content and technologies.

Complete with helpful chapter guides, summaries and lively case studies drawn from a truly global context, Youth and Media is an engaging and accessible introduction to how the media shape our lives. This book is ideal for students of media studies, communication studies and sociology.

1

WHY YOUTH MEDIA?

WHY MEDIA, WHY YOUTH, WHY RESEARCH?

In 2012, the organisation Invisible Children tried to raise global awareness about child abuse in Africa by releasing the documentary Kony 2012 on YouTube. The video was named after Joseph Kony, leader of a rebel Ugandan-based paramilitary group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Since the late 1980s, the LRA has been responsible for numerous human-rights crimes in several African countries. Many of its victims have been children, including tens of thousands forced into military service (BBC News Africa, 2102). Kony was wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, but until Kony 2012 few people knew about him. Within four days of its YouTube release, 50 million people had seen the documentary, numerous celebrities enthusiastically urged their fans to check it out, and the Obama administration was praising the thousands of Americans who had helped to raise awareness about the warlord and his crimes (Molloy, 2012). The video had been targeted at high-school students (Curtis, 2012), and was most watched by 13–17-year-olds (Shaughnessy, 2012). Young social media users appeared to be on the cusp of making the world a better place.

Kony 2012, it seemed, showed media at their best: depicting the world as it is, making young people care about injustices and encouraging them to do things to ensure that such horrors are never repeated. But many critics urged caution. Kony 2012 was pilloried for oversimplifying the complexities of African history, Invisible Children’s motives were questioned, and young social media users were ridiculed for thinking that sharing and liking online materials could change the world.

Whatever its merits, Kony 2012 provoked an interesting discussion about media influence. What do we want media to do in the world? What are some of the practical problems in making media a force for good? What kinds of effects do media have? Where and when should we look for them? For example, should anyone have expected Kony 2012 to change the world, directly? What if today’s young ‘slactivists’ have at least started to think about their peers in other parts of the world? What outcomes might this sensitivity produce in the future? All of this boils down to three important questions: Why do media matter? Why do young people feature so prominently in contemplations on this issue? What are the different ways that scholars have conceived and researched media influence, as it is experienced among young people? These are the concerns of this book.

MEDIA, YOUTH AND SOCIETY

So, this book is really about conceiving and researching the social influence of media, with a particular focus on how young people experience the world as young people. When one speaks of ‘media influence’, it’s tempting to focus on various ways that media are said to damage our social fabric. The idea that media harm society, and that young audiences are especially vulnerable in this regard, is a familiar refrain. Media are frequently blamed for making young people think and act anti-socially. When South Africa’s murder rate increased by 130 per cent in the decade after the introduction of broadcast television in 1976, critics blamed the nation’s first television generation (Beresin, 1999). In the US, former army psychologist David Grossman apocalyptically warned the lurid capacities of films and video games had become so adept at short-circuiting the natural human aversion to violence in the minds of young audiences that the situation warranted its own science – ‘killology’. In Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A call to action against TV, movie and video game violence (1999), Grossman and Degaetano argued that video games don’t just glamorise violence; they teach teens how to be good at it. Their thesis was inspired by Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old Kentucky high-school student who stole a gun and hit eight peers with eight shots despite, he claimed, having only practised his marksmanship on video games.

The issue of media effects is far more complicated than these studies imagine. This is not to say that media do not affect how young people think about and live in their social worlds. Quite the reverse: a broader understanding of media influence leads to the conclusion that media are far more important than the positions offered by people like Grossman and Degaetano allow. The limitations of their position on effects is explored in Chapter 2, but for now this book proposes an alternative approach to media influence, framing that influence as political, historical and ordinary. The case for a political understanding of media influence, with a youth focus, is introduced through making four points:

• Studying how youth is represented in the media tells us a great deal about the public sentiments and concerns that defined particular historical moments. This is the basis for designating media influence as being political.
• A political take on media influence is supported by the international debate on media literacy, which defines the ability to understand and use media as a precondition for participatory democracy.
• The way that young people use media in everyday settings is an important measure for the depth of social inclusion.
• Studies of youth subcultures (groups of young people who used fashion and music to find their place in the world) have established that ordinary young people have used media resources to communicate political views and identities for a long time.

These studies also show that media influence can only be understood in the context of cultural history. Critiques of these studies have raised important methodological and conceptual questions about how youth and media are studied. Decisions about who to study, how to gather evidence, and how to interpret and present that evidence mean that media studies doesn’t just examine the politics of representation, but also involves the politics of representation. The politics of research is an important practical consideration in research design.

MEDIA, ORDINARY YOUTH AND SOCIAL HISTORY

Good or bad, the way that young people use media, or the way that young people are represented in the media, are both interesting topics to study because they show how media structure the ideas we use to make sense of the world. As an identity, youth is no longer wasted on the young; it is a role that many people play, with the media’s help. British Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, began to build his political persona as a potential national leader by defining himself as a ‘youthful’ politician at the age of 40. We will reflect more on this case study later. For now, the idea is that media influence society when they create and share ideas about what youth is, because people use these ideas when they think about themselves and the societies they live in.

The task is to show how this happens in routine ways that have considerable – and recognisable – political outcomes. This chapter does this by presenting the tale of Ryan Florence, an English teenager who became infamous in 2007 when he was filmed pretending to assassinate Cameron. Florence’s prank became a mediated political event because it was made to encapsulate politicised arguments about youth, as Cameron sought to redefine the public image of the Conservative Party that he led by presenting himself as a person who understood young people. The fact that an unintentional media event, perpetrated by a young man who didn’t mean to make a political statement, became a bellwether for life in Britain in 2007 begins to explain why representations of young people in media tell us a lot about how media bring social reality to life. Exploring this question connects media studies with longer traditions in social history.

THE FLORENCE/CAMERON INCIDENT

A winter’s afternoon in January 2007 found David Cameron strolling through a Manchester housing estate discussing the topic of gun crime with local community leaders. The tyro leader was so engrossed in his conversations that he barely noticed the small group of male teenagers who passed him. Why would he? All were dressed in familiar teen style: training shoes, track pants and, of course, the ‘hoody’ that had become the de facto uniform of British teens. Naturally, then, neither Cameron nor his entourage noticed as one of the boys, Ryan Florence, turned, fashioned his right hand into the shape of a pistol, and, smirking, fired an imaginary round into the unsuspecting politician. Images of the faux assassination were beamed around the world, as clear proof that – as Cameron repeatedly argued – Britain was a ‘broken society’, fractured by ingrained incivility.

For Cameron, the incident was serendipitous. In his 2005 campaign for election as leader of the Conservative Party, Cameron promised that his youth would help reverse a decade of electoral humiliation:

In an age where economic stability and prosperity are increasingly taken for granted, younger generations care just as much about quality of life concerns – the environment, urban space, culture and leisure – as the traditional policy boxes in which we’ve conducted our debates. I know this is how young people feel because this is how I feel. (Cameron, quoted in Sparrow, 2005)

Cameron engineered a series of media events that showed him empathising with young people, for example vignettes that sold his brand of ‘compassionate Conservatism’. Even if it started in happenstance, the Florence incident became one in a series of youth stories, where Cameron variously urged listeners to a London R&B station to ‘keep it real’ (BBC News, 2005), recruited the 19-year-old Olympic silver boxing medallist Amir Khan in his campaign to introduce youth community service (Pascoe-Watson, 2007) and had snot smeared on his back by a teenage prankster (Peterkin, 2008). If these stunts did not always stay on message,¹ Cameron’s run-in with Florence was at least spun in the politician’s favour. Against the charge that the teenager had made a fool of Cameron, or underlined the insincerity of one who could be so engrossed in explaining his commitment to youth that he walked right past a group of the very people he wanted to serve, a Conservative spokesperson said ‘this picture illustrates precisely the sort of problems of anti-social behaviour and the need for positive role models that David was talking about’ (Hoodie pic ‘proves Cameron point’, 2007). Citizens were assured that Cameron understood that social problems were matters for collective action, since they could see him being ridiculed and threatened by young people in pursuit of his beliefs. For a time, an obscure teenager from Manchester became a symbol of everything that was wrong with Britain.

FLORENCE, CAMERON AND SOCIAL HISTORY

There are good reasons why this book should begin with an obscure teenage prank that just happened to be caught on camera. Social historians have made a persuasive case for focusing social commentary on the ordinary people that history normally ignores. Vic Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (1994), for example, starts to explain why English public opinion quickly turned against public executions in the mid-nineteenth century (representing a remarkable change in attitudes toward justice and civilisation) by discussing the 1832 hanging of 14-year-old John Amy Bird Bell. Gatrell argued that Bird’s execution was an unremarkable event that ended up catalysing an astonishing change in attitudes to capital punishment. Provocatively, Gatrell noted that much as the public despatching of a child is repugnant to today’s sensibilities, our ‘obvious’ empathetic response to such a prospect would have been quite alien to the public mind of the early nineteenth century. Today’s natural disgust at the image of a dead teen swinging from the gibbet would have seemed unusual in 1832. Repulsion and pity were impossible emotions until they were enabled by politicians who used newspapers to change the public’s view of how the world was.

The most shocking thing about Bell’s execution is that in the England of 1832 neither his crime nor his punishment was regarded as shocking; at least, not at first. As England’s bloody Capital Laws scythed their way through the peasantry and working classes in the early-modern period, it was simply assumed that poor people would commit crime. So the idea that one child would deliberately stab another to death over a small amount of cash was not especially confronting. It did not violate assumptions about the innocence of youth, because no such assumptions existed (Gatrell, 1994). Despatching poor people like Bell seemed nothing but a sensible means of maintaining social order. Barbaric as it looks today, there was nothing about the life and death of John Amy Bird Bell that contemporaneously demanded that he should become a historical figure. He only became one because writers turned him into an icon of an attitude to justice that had seen its day. So, Gatrell’s treatment of this execution teaches how ordinary events are infused with significance by scholarly work. In doing so, he established a blueprint for selecting case studies that we would do well to follow.

Bell was not the first teenager or child to be hanged in England; indeed, the practice had been relatively common in the eighteenth century (Gatrell, 1994). But his was the first case where an ordinary death stirred impassioned pleas against public executions that, eventually, helped produce a major constitutional change. The politician Edward Gibbon Wakefield wrote a heart-rending account of the boy’s final moments, describing how the child-like Bird had even broken the hangman’s heart as the noose was placed over the condemned’s neck. Wakefield’s account signalled the emergence of melodramatic, popular politics, where stories about the suffering of ordinary people infused political arguments with new emotional registers. Gatrell credited Wakefield with being one of the first politicians to grasp how ‘vividly visualised narrative engagement . . . especially of an obscure boy’s killing, would intensify and communicate emotion’ (1994: 2) with an eye on promoting popular outrage that would lead to change.

Gatrell’s point was that ‘fleeting’ historical incidents show how power becomes power when it happens in ordinary places. In this sense, we can say that Florence was to Cameron as John Amy Bird Bell was to Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the poor young soul who proved how uncivilised life had become. Like Bird, Florence was an unremarkable youth who was pushed into the political limelight by forces beyond his control. Yet things have changed, and media have something to do with that. Unlike Bird, Florence had a sense of the bigger picture he was being painted into, and responded in a way that showed how media literacy is lived by young people who know they are being watched.

So, as a starting point, we can say that societies have long dramatised their fears and aspirations by dealing in images of youth, and these are now processes that many ‘resource-poor’ young people can participate in, should fate allow. For these reasons, the matter of how young people are represented in and use media is integral to the social history of democracy. This is why media influence is political. Florence’s story allows us to define why this is so in three ways. Most obviously, the way he was used, and the way he responded to his infamy, displayed why representations of young people in media are ideological. Less obviously, the fact that he could respond placed the matter of media literacy – what young people know about media, and what they do with this knowledge – on display, where this notion of ‘literacy’ is a key concept that articulates media with democracy. Less obviously still, his story is an opportunity to reflect on the politics of media studies as a discipline. The study of media influence and young people is political in so far as it involves choices about studying certain people and events using certain methods that affect the kinds of young people and the kinds of media experiences that become public through scholarly accounts. That is, when studying young people and the media, it is important to consider how media research has its own effects, because it shapes what societies know about young people and therefore what they do about and for them.

YOUTH AND DEMOCRACY

The Florence story was about how young people cope with situations that confront them with the full force of the media – understanding this can happen far more easily than one might imagine. Random as it was, the Florence incident raised issues that have been the subject of an extended international academic and political debate for the last quarter of a century on how young people manage media-saturated worlds. In these worlds, the matter of how young people understand media, and how they understand themselves as citizens with rights and responsibilities, are closely connected. The presence of this debate shows that the question of how media influence young people is often about the nature of democracy.

Florence was far from the first person to find his idea of fun being subjected to public scrutiny, and the things that young people do with media often place other youths in a similar spotlight. Young gamers, for example, have found themselves at the centre of highly charged constitutional battles. The matter of minor access to violent and sexually explicit games in the US has moved into a legal fight over how First Amendment rights to free speech square with a changing media age (Collier et al., 2008). Media practices like gaming affect social relationships by making people think about what youth is, what it deserves, and how it should be managed by governments and parents (Coleman and Dyer-Witheford, 2007). When parents and their children bargain over games, they are also figuring out how their relationship should work (Nikken et al., 2007). In this sense, gaming is an activity that creates the reality of youth.

Another way to look at this is to say that youth media habits are places where significant ideas about political rights are micro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Youth Media?
• 2 Understanding Media Content Social and cultural approaches to media effects
• 3 Understanding the Influence of Media Technologies Youth, dissent, social media and social history
• 4 Understanding Global Media Industries China, reality television and media governance
• 5 Understanding Media Users Girls, mobile phones and identities
• 6 Understanding Media Violence School shootings, media stories and the framing of social reality
• 7 Understanding Advertising and Marketing Students and alcohol
• 8 Understanding Political Communication Barack Obama, media convergence and mediated intimacy
• 9 Understanding Celebrity Bam Margera and the role of sport in media convergence
• 10 Understanding Critical Media Studies Child soldiers, media business and media education
• Epilogue: Doing youth and media
• References
• Index