Youth Subcultures And Its Influence On Youth Media Essay

early person Sub nuances And Its Influence On young Media EssayAbout This musical theme intends to go the complex relationship mingled with media and young sub horticulture and argues that subcultures hindquarters reproduced and constructed through the media. It in that respectfore, states that the bailiwick media should take responsibility in the chats that ar mixer occasiond to equal spring chicken groups and youth subcultures as they impact on the activities of broader youth communities sphere entire.The heathen conception of late deal is a complex and dynamic one (White, 1999) and there has always been a tendency among youth researchers to investigate the signifi fuelt kind changes that be being revealed through the experiences of contemporary youth (Leccardi Ruspini, 2006). Some of the earliest sociological researches on youth can be linked to the issuing of impertinent forms of consumptions and distinct youth cultures that began to rise in the late 1950s. The changes in youth at this era were highly visible through medicine and fashion the late creations were consuming. This was viewed both as a return of the improver develop available for leisure and personal resources (Leccardi Ruspini, 2006) as well as an attempt to create some symbolic content for self (White, 1999). In times of high unemployment where youth were caught in between the ideology of dramatic consumption promoted by the mass media and the traditional ideology of capitalism and the meritocratic work led to a proliferation of empirical studies across a wide range of diverse issues from homelessness to unemployment, youth crime to street gang delirium that engages in research relevant to both empirical and theoretical matters in order to stretch the conceptual boundaries in the contemporary party (White, 1993). Youth subcultures can be viewed as a chemical reaction to the interaction between these different areas. This response is seen by some as an identity want reaction between resistance to consumerism created by the production based Puritanism and the new hedonism of post war consumption (White, 1993).This paper looks into the contemporary youth subcultures and the media discourse used in the representation of these subcultures. It is argued that much(prenominal) damaging representations of youth subcultures would result in the popularization and re enforcement of activities alternatively than limiting or absolute such abnormal behaviors and thereby confirming the labeling of a demonized and at run a risk youth groups. Further, reports supports the idea that the media interventions in crime and social line of work areas can lead to misplaced reactive political resources in mythic rather than objective social problem areas resulting in amplified and exacerbated social problems generating moral panics (White, 1999).A culture can be defined as designs for living that micturate peoples way of life (Macionis Plummer, 2008128). The five components of culture identified by Macionis and Plummer (2008 130) hold symbols, language, values, norms and hearty culture. Culture has several, often irrelevant meanings that carries ambiguity that can be traced in its different uses throughout history (Brake, 1985). While the unblemishedal position views culture as a standard of excellence (high culture), some opposites view culture as a way of life which expresses certain meanings and values given over with a particular way of life known as the crushed culture(Williams, 1961, p. 57). It is this conceptualisation of low culture that is rudimentary to the development of subcultures as an uninflected concept (Brake, 1985). Subcultures can be defined as a cultural pattern that set apart some segment of a beau mondes population (Macionis Plummer, 2008 139) or a social group which is perceived to deviate from the prescriptive ideals of adult communities (Thornton, 1995 2). The earliest use of subcultur al theories within sociology can be linked to its application as a subdivision of a national culture (Gordon, 1947). Culture in this context was viewed as learned behaviour with focus on the effects of socialisation within the cultural subgroups of a pluralist society (Brake, 1985).In most of the Western world, studies of youth subcultures permit been dominated by a tradition associated with the 1970s work of the Centre of Contemporary ethnic Studies, University of Birmingham, England (Thornton, 1995). The Birmingham subcultural studies tend to banish media and trade from their definition of authentic culture seen media and commerce as incorporating subcultures into the hegemony and effectively dismantling them (Hedbige, 1978). Chicago School sociologists on the other hand were concerned on researching empirical social groups by victorious precedence over their elaboration of theory and were mainly focused on the shadier recesses of polite society (Thornton, 1995). This report will look at subcultures as cultures that are labelled containly or indirectly by the media with a problematic authenticity and as media and commerce integral to the authentication of its cultural practices. Supporting this, A.K. Cohen states that a major determinant of subcultures among the youth as what people do depending upon the problems they contended with (Cohen, 1955, p.51). Cultural theorists argue that what it means to be young should be seen in the context of its cultural importee indicating that it is the context of cultural significance that makes been young so distinctive and non the structural focus of society (Alan, 2007). That is, the context the youth are exposed to and the issues that their exposures carry play a significant role in the construction of a youths culture.When understanding the conflicts surround young people and the way they use public place, the media plays a central role by constituting and shaping the principal form of the public theatre of operations and by gathering and distributing important public information (Thompson, 1994 in Sercombe, 1999). adept may argue that there is no certain measure of the direct effects of media coverage on the public. However, there are often negative and powerful cultural effects of media produced by the constant flow of its exploit imaginary fictions and stereotypical coverages that sociall(a)y construct a moral and history set of offerings upon which the youth attempt to build their identities on (White, 1993). Not sole(prenominal) in building identities, the youth tend to use these social constructions by the media also as a measure for their achievements and personal worth by merely deriving an identity from a set of meanings emaciated on the basis of media constructed stimulations instead of their local experiences (Baudrillard, 1983). It is important to note that the notion of identities are constructed across and by differences, and the social construction of youth identi ties though historically varied is tightly bound with the media representations make available at the time (White,1999). Therefore, we can argue that media is a critical component of the development and veneration of the representation of young people which often feeds into the fears and negative attitude surround the presence of young people in public space as problematic or threatening (Sercombe, 1999). Moral panics in relation to youth, medicament and subculture are not uncommon in the intelligence service and other contemporary media (Goode Ben-Yehuda, 2008, pp. 124-145 in Journal of Media Culture).Most cities in Australia like some(prenominal) other cities almost the world housed for a large number of subcultural activities ranging from skateboarders occupying the steps and benches in the Melbourne streets to Goths congregating the inner city suburbs (Gelder, 2007). It also has a number of hassock night clubs, gay and lesbian prohibit, a remarkable graffiti subcultur e in which Melbourne has been claimed as a stencil graffiti capital (Smallman Nyman, 2005). Australia has several times witnessed its teenage subcultures clash in the streets like the Mods and Sharpies in August 1966 (Sparrow Sparrow, 2004 73-77).Stan Cohens classic Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1980) and the centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978) both advise how mainstream media contributes to the public anxiety about youth subcultures and youth groups that are deemed to be pervert. Cohen, in his work looks at the development of conflict between mods and shake offers, in a British seaside town, and peculiarly the escalation of conflict that arose as a result of the medias representation of these events. He argues that the media were responsible for amplifying the perception of deviance arising from a few of small- shell disturbances, which ultimately led to an escalated interventions from the police and judiciary, with the demonizatio n and over-typification of young people involved in the mod or rocker styles. in like manner in Australia Cunneen et al. 1989, carried out a study on the disturbances at the Bathurst bike races concluding that it was the over representation of the small disturbances that led to the large scale conflicts and that the press concentrated on sureness opinion while sensationalizing the material published (Cunneen et al., 1989).When analysing the literature published on the media representations of youth and youth subcultures it is unmingled that communications media create subcultures in the process of naming them and drawing boundaries around them in the act of describing them (Thonrton, 1995). The way media is inextricably involved in the meaning making and organization of youth subcultures will be discussed through the psychoanalysis of the representations of many recent incidents cerebrate to youth subcultures, particularly the ravers, Goths and Emo subcultures.The rave subcult ure emerged cosmopolitan in the late 1980s as a musical subculture and was a phenomenon in the area that attempted to invert the traditional rock n roll authenticity by remixing and creating a cutting edge criminal record culture with a warehouse party format and was established in Chicago, Detroit and across Britain (Thornton, 19954). Soon groups of young people were clustered in sites conventionally aligned with musical performance to listen and dancing to electronic dance music played by djs in Sydneys alternative rock burst Unlike other musical subcultures such as alternative rock scene where performances principally took place in formal environments such as pubs and clubs the raves in Australian cities began to use spaces such as old warehouses, factories and insure stations for their activities (Gibson Pagan, 2006). Since the late 1980s rave culture worldwide has change magnitude their members and was diversified and fragmented in many aspects suitable more contradict ory with various subcultures emerging such as the Doofs, Drum and Bass and dexterous hard core. Mean while controversies and public moral panics were starting to cede over the diverged more politicized illegal party culture that were shifting itself from the mainstream (Gibson Pagen, 2006). Associations were made between these part scenes and illegal doses such as ecstasy by the media providing the basis for a moral panic. Ravres were described as new age hippies where their activities summed up to no sex, but drugs and rock roll (Benette, 1999). leaping parties in Sydney eventually became associated with tropes of youth deviance and illegality making the rave space in the public consciousness as a site beyond the domain of mainstream, and thereby causing strong reactions from the public and a study for increased control over their events (Gibson Pagen, 2006). A major shift in the perception of the public of youth subcultures could be related to the ecstasy related close of teenager Anna Woods from Sydney at an Apache party in 1995. Her death was magnified within the media creating an unprecedented wave of media attention and public panic. With headlines such as Ecstasy agony and Ecstasy secret world path on the front pages for nearly two weeks, dramatically altering not completely the rave culture but the perception of youth subcultures as a whole (See Sydney Herald Sun, 4/3/2007). The initial response of sympathy by the public to the incident soon turned into fear and anger that progressed from tension and social anxiety to a full winded social and political crisis (McRobbie, 1994) with scapegoating not only the ravers but creating fear against many youth subcultures (see Daily Telegraph, 27/3/200773). The death of Anna was interpreted as a symptom of the malaise affecting many young Australians (Daily Telegraph, 5/11/19958), with the NSW state government taking actions to close down clubs and bars which gestate promoted drugs in parties (Gibson Pagen, 2006).For a few months in 2007, the dangers of emo and computer use were significant themes in Australian newspaper coverages (Phillipoy, 2009). Emo is an abbreviation of the terms emocore and excited hardcore which is a musical subgenre of punk rock music, characterised by frantic or personal themes. They adopt a look that includes black best jeans, dyed black hair and side-parted long fringes, which might merely have been one of the many tribes (Bennett, 1999) that characterise this contemporary youth culture(Phillipoy, 2009).Following the deaths of Melbourne teenagers, Jodie Gater, Stephanie Gestier and Carly Ryan in 2007, over an approximately five months period the media portrayed the two tell incidents linking the suicide and the murder to the emo subculture and to the social networking site MySpace, presenting both as breakneck and worrying developments in contemporary youth culture (Phillipoy, 2009). These media discourses surrounding the deaths include many fea tures of moral panic uncluding a build-up of concern disproportionate to real risk of harm (see Goode Ben-Yehuda, 2002, pp.33-41). While the emo youth were viewed as straightforward common people devil (Cohen, 1972) or the enemy, the problem of emo was also framed as a product of much broader problems of youth culture (Goode Ben-Yehuda, 2002). The connections between emo and the deaths of these young girls were tenuously published over the mass media and was seen as symptomatic of what John Hartley (1998) describes in the context of reporting on young people more generally as a profound uncertainty in the textual governance of journalism about where the line that defines the boundary of the social should be drawn by the broader groups of non-subculturaly affiliated youth. The result of this according to Phillipoy, is a cultural sentiment out loud (Hartley, 1998) where broader cultural anxiety are expressed and explored that can be described as anxiety about disclosure. The newsp aper coverages on the deaths focused on the dangers of young peoples disclosures that made them inaccessible to adult authority that otherwise could have prevented the tragedies. Though some of these concerns were connected to the specificities of emo subcultural expression, with excessive emotions on display and the enigma associated with subcultural imagery respectively, they were on the whole linked to a broader problem in contemporary youth culture that was seen to apply to all young people, irrespective of any subcultural affiliation. The expressions of anxieties that the private lives of young people were becoming increasingly transcendent to adult authorities, and, hence, that youth culture itself was increasingly unknowable were popular statements made by the media (Phillipoy, 2006). Reportings such as bizarre teenage goth and emo world world constructed both as dangerous (in the nose out that her apparent involvement in subcultural activities was presented as disturbing a nd something that put her at risk of harm) and impenetrable (in the sense that subcultural imagery was understood not simply as harmful but also as bizarre).In conclusion, the representations of young people in the media directly or indirectly depend on the interest of the newspapers and the discourse of its source. Language used by these media allows painting young people in different colors (Sercombe, 1999) and as youth subcultures are prime fare for the news media as in terms of news value they are both exotic and familiar (White, 1993) media and youth subcultures have a complex and symbolic relationship where young people are devoted consumers and producers of media and engage with media in the approval and adaptation of subcultural forms for their own context. Therefore, many of the subcultures can be argued to be reproduced and constructed through the media (White, 1999). The mainstream media however tend to represent youth subcultures mythologically as they often attempts to represent not the real world but the world that suits the advertisers, owners and the government. This leads to the constant stereotyping, reinforcing and exaggerating issues, particularly in relation to the youth (White, 1993). Youth was portrayed within the media as the mindless hedonism of lost youth and were categorized as a careless generation that was only concerned with seeking pleasure and satisfaction from personal risk taking and drug use (Brown, 2005 in Allan 2007).By constructing notions of deviance and illegality, commercial media not only position youth and youth subcultures but are implicated in defining authentic underground activities that further strengthen subcultural practices that are deemed deviant (Gibson Pagan, 2006). Therefore, it is clear that media have been and is today, a major influence in fuelling and reinforcing perceptions of problem youth. Subcultures are constructed and stereotyped by the media as deviant and the media representations linked to th e issues around subcultures have created an image of uncaring, hedonistic and self centered youth (Alan, 2007). Hence, this report suggest that the media is directly or indirectly responsibility for the fuelling and reinforcing of such deviant activities that they have constructed aligned to youth subcultures and that youth subcultures are a social construction mainly influenced by the national mass media. Therefore, the national media, particularly newspapers as the most commonly used news media has a responsibility in the a discourses that are used to represent youth groups and youth subcultures as it carries an impact on the broader youth communities worldwide.