Collective Identity G325

http://m.vice.com/en_uk/read/neknominations-are-the-last-subculture

+

http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/

How do media representations influence collective identity?

This is slightly different to the prompt question of ‘how is human identity increasingly mediated’, as it asks how media influences a collective rather than individual identity. The medias influence on individual identity can of course be included in this but you have to be sure to answer the specific question.

This question has also appeared in the exam in the following form:

'The media do not construct identity; they merely reflect it'. Discuss.

Here you to weigh up how influential the media is in constructing identity, with this quote suggesting it isn’t influential at all – a position that you should argue for and against. Here is doesn’t specific collective or personal identity – so both could be used.

Here is a structure you could use for the question in the header
How do media representations influence collective identity?

Remember that to answer any question you need a combination of theory, quotes, references from case studies from TWO forms of media (TV, film, adverts, pop videos), reference to past representations.

Define collective identity.
‘A collective identity may have been first constructed by outsiders who may still enforce it, but depends on some acceptance by those to whom it is applied.’ Poletta & Jasper

Taking this is as start point we can assess the influence of the media of the two main participants in the construction of collective identity:
a) The outsider: the adult world
b) The collective: UK youth

a) What sort of representations do the adult world receive?
Demonisation (give an example – news, Harry Brown, Eden Lake)
Popular notions of adolescence (forming identity, storm and stress – specific examples, Inbetweeners, Youngers)

Just how influential are these representations:
Louis Althusser - the power of the mass media is in its ability to present a subject in a particular way and have the their representation of that subject become a reality.

You could mention that the adult world has historical been fed very similar representations (demonisation – mods and rockers hysteria, popular notions – Billy Liar). This brings in the idea that the media perpetuates existing ideas and representations.

b) What sort of representations do UK Youth receive about themselves?
Bombarded with messages of what youth and growing up should be about that fall in line with the popular notions of adolescence:

Young and reckless, having fun: Tulisa, Samsung Jet advert
Identity formation/coming of age: Away Days, Submarine
Experimentation and partying: Inbetweeners, Skins

Just how influential are these representations:
Judith Butler - Identity is a performance (that includes the daily behaviour of individuals) which is based on social norms or habits. You are what you do.
The media informs these social norms and therefore influence identity.

AND the popular notions of adolescence can be seen as the ‘real or imagined shared attributes and experience’ that David Snow argues are needed to create a collective identity. So UK youth become aware of these shared experiences due to the media and therefore understand they belong to a collective identity because of the media.

At this point you could reflect and see that using this argument that the media is very influential in constructing an identity.

COUNTER ARGUMENT

David Gauntlett 

‘The power relationship between the media and the audience involves - a lot of both. The media sends out a lot of messages about identity and acceptable forms of self-expression, gender sexuality and lifestyle. At the same time, the public have their own, even more robust, set of diverse feelings on the subject. The media’s suggestions may be seductive, but can never overpower contrary feelings in the audience.’

“The role model remains an important concept, although it should not be taken to mean someone that a person wants to copy. Instead, role models serve as navigation points as individuals steer their own personal routes through life.'

This is the idea that individuals use media and representations to help inform the construction of our identity (and collective identity), but the media is not all powerful, we use it selectively.

How collective identities explicitly used the media to construct identity
Youth - Sub Cultures
The significance of subcultures for their participants is that they offer a solution to structural dislocations through the establishment of an achieved identity - the selection of certain elements of style outside of those associated with the ascribed identity offered by work, home, or school. - Michael Brake

Brake argues that subcultures form as youth have a desire to control their collective identity beyond what has already shaped them (class, education), and construct this identity with ‘selection of certain elements of style’. This selection include music, fashion and film. (E.g Mods (Italian culture, R’n’B Tamla), Rockers (Marlon Brando/James Dean, rock’n’roll).

There is an argument that is the media has hampered the development of youth sub-cultures as new movements have no time to grow organically before the culture is marketed, commoditised and sold back to the youth:

Children and Youth are a distinct social group and want to be treated as such. A successful example of this is the TV Channel Nickelodeon where it’s all about kids; their views, interests, not being adults, about being fun and innovative. It gives children a sense of empowerment. But we must remember that adults have sold this empowerment to them. So this idea of independence is not true it is more about enabling children to be independent consumers but masquerading it as social rights. - David Buckingham


Young people’s use of digital and social Media
‘Convergence does not occur through media appliances, however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.’ – Henry Jenkins

How could this be applied to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr usuage.

Conclusion
Sum up what you’ve just said and evaluate which of the arguments you believe is stronger.

Analyse the ways in which the media represent groups of people.

This is one of the prompt questions and has appeared in the exam MOST years in different forms:

Analyse the ways in which the media represent one group of people you have studied.

With reference to any one group of people that you have studied, discuss how their identity has been 'mediated'.

Discuss how one or more groups of people are represented through the media.

Analyse the ways in which at least one group of people is 'mediated'.

If the word MEDIATED comes up here’s a few ideas about it to include in an introduction which then allows you go on to talk about your case studies.

"Mediation is the process of the representation of events/people through the media." Gurevitch & Roberts
 
Mediated experiences make us reflect upon and rethink our own self-narrative in relation to others - Gary Giddens (1991)

Almost everything we see comes to us through the media prism which in turn colours not just our view of this life but our own self-definition.
Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: The Hidden Effect of the Media on You and Your World (2005)

The word mediated is another way of talking how the media represents things, but a word that emphasises the idea that representation is a CONSTRUCTION of reality – fore-grounding, selecting, filtering reality.

Also in your introduction mention what collective identity you have studied (UK youth) and maybe what media types you have looked at (film, news, TV, advertising, music video).

Use the following headers to structure a response to the above question – what YOU must do is look for SPECIFIC examples (key scenes/characters) from the texts we have studied and explain why they are appropriate. Ensure they are CONTEMPORARY examples (from the last 5 years).

You can mention past representations (Billy Liar, Press Gang, Kids Rule OK) but ONLY in comparison with the contemporary ones to highlight a certain point.

E.g. Jay in Youngers, while a very contemporary representation in terms of issues (gang violence, multi-culturalism) and mise-en-scene (urban street culture, South London), has many similarities with the lead character from the 1963 film Billy Liar… (multiple girlfriends, aspirations of fame, conflict with family).

 You can also discuss the future of representation of UK youth and if you believe it will develop or will it continue in similar way. What factors could change this?

1) Youth are often represented in accordance with popular or hegemonic notions of adolescence

a) ‘A period of ‘storm and stress’ characterised by intergenerational conflicts, mood swings and an enthusiasm for risky behaviour.’
G. Stanley Hall (1906)

b) ‘Adolescence is conflict between identity and ‘role confusion’. Resolving this conflict involves finding a settled role in life. If unsuccessful this results in ‘maladaption’ in the form of fanaticism or the rejection of adult responsibility.’
Erik Erikson  (1968)

c) Adolescence is a critical period of identity formation in which individuals over uncertainty, become more self-aware of their strengths and weaknesses.
Erik Erikson  (1968)

d) Adolescence is primarily a state of transition, a matter of becoming rather than being. 

e) Continuing ‘confusion’ about one’s identity is a mark of incomplete development and may result in deviant or antisocial behaviour.
Erik Erikson  (1968)

2. Youth are often ‘demonised’ the mass media.
To demonise: to represent as diabolically evil.
‘Demonisation can only come about if there is some collective identity to point at.’ – Stanley Cohen (Folk Devils and Moral Panics)

a) ‘We found some news coverage where teen boys were described in glowing terms – 'model student', 'angel', 'altar boy' or 'every mother's perfect son', but sadly these were reserved for teenage boys who met a violent and untimely death."
‘Hoodies or Altar Boys’

b) ‘the true horrors we fear day to day are not supernatural bogeymen or monsters created by scientists. They're our own youth. 
Daily Mail review of Eden Lake

c) ‘I was reminded of something that the late Alexander Walker, film critic of the London Evening Standard, once wrote about Kubrick's Clockwork Orange: we hate and fear our children - because they are going to kill us.’
Peter Bradshaw- Guardian – review of Eden Lake

3. Youth are represented as being let down by adults

a) ‘Parents aren't always around to help socialize their children — or even just to show them affection. Compared to other cultures, British kids are less integrated into the adult world and spend more time with peers. 
Britain’s Mean Streets, Time Magazine

 
b) “Young people want to make healthy and informed decisions… but until now, too many have been let down by the education system. “Katrina Mather, 16, Member of Youth Parliament

4. Youth are represented as part of a subculture

‘The role of youth culture involves offering symbolic elements that are used by youth to construct an identity outside the restraints of class and education.’
Michael Brake

c) ‘Youth re-appropriate artefacts which creates group identity and promotes mutual recognition by members.’
Jonathan Epstein

5. Alienation – youth are represented as being estranged from parts of society

a) “The Youth are prohibited from speaking as moral and political agents.” Henry A. Giroux

 
b) ‘Adolescence is a growth period conducive to alienation due the ‘betwixt & between’ nature of the this particular position in life-course.’ Calabrese

c) Young people do not trust older generations.

6. Youth are product of the society they were born into, and often embody the faults and fears of adult society. 

“Prohibited from speaking as moral and political agents, youth become an empty category inhabited by the desires, fantasies, and interests of the adult world.” Henry A. Giroux

7. Representations of UK Youth are often nostalgic and romanticized

a) ‘Adolescence is the most intense of life-stages. Amidst its swirling emotions, raging hormones and many-fronted conflicts, we shape the identity that will stay with us into adulthood. Few of us emerge from this ordeal with our self-regard unscathed. Perhaps, though, we want to believe we did. - Submarine shows us how… flattering those who are safely beyond the torments of their youth.’
David Cox (Guardian)

b) ‘Recent research has pointed to the dangers of romanticising youthful resistance and the tendency to overstate the political dimensions of youth culture – these days youth cultures are increasingly diverse and fragmented as “scenes” or “lifestyles” to which young people may be only temporarily attached.
David Buckingham, Introducing Identity

How dare we be so beautiful?!

On the teenager portraits of Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier.
http://tacohiddebakker.com/texts/how-dare-we-be-so-beautiful/

An androgynous character dressed in white shoes, jeans, and a nearly half-open black shirt sits relaxed and slightly leaning forward by a tiny pond in a garden, posing for a photograph. (S)he is looking downwards at his/her mirror image, reflected from the surface of the water. This image, in its general composition not quite unlike Caravaggio’s painting depicting an actively forward-leaning Narcissus, offers some clues about a giant photographic enterprise which resulted in a multimedia installation named Double Extension Beauty Tubes, combining still and moving images with a soundtrack, and a hefty paper volume called Neue Menschen (New People).

Collaborating with teenagers over the course of almost three years from 2008 until early 2011, Swiss photographer duo Rico Scagliola (1985) and Michael Meier (1982) had accumulated a vast archive of about 8,000 photographs, showing a cross-section of some of the more extravagant stylish expressions of teens’ subcultures of the day. According to Rico & Michael, henceforth colloquially calling them like they call themselves via their web site, in an introductory video they produced for the book, it shall be a testimony to the love affair of today’s teenagers’ real and virtual lives. Their cultural life is very much colored by pop and underground music, film, fashion, and the internet. Glimpses of the backgrounds and stages of their daily lives can be seen in some of the photographs; IKEA-styled suburban middle-class homes and poster-ridden bedrooms.

Feeling that somehow they had missed out on their own youth, Rico & Michael started making friends with teenagers and photograph them the way they would like to see themselves and want to be seen. Through film and photography, clearly. Starting to photograph Emos who were hanging out at and around the main railway station of Zurich every night, other youngsters belonging to neighbouring subcultures (Goths, Punks, Indies, Metalheads et cet) were soon to follow. The different groups were blending easily together, and some people would change styles as if changing clothes. Youth subcultures are not as clearly distinct anymore like they were in pre-internet times.

Rico & Michael sensed that the newest generation of teenagers was being dismissed as not having a proper voice of their own. But do people in the midst of the transformation from children to adults ever really have a voice of their own? Adolescence is one of the most formative stages in the lives of human beings for the discovery and development of a voice of one’s own. However, in the technologically advanced world, today’s young generations (often called “digital natives”) are being born into fast-paced digital times, in which developing a vision on the creation and dissemination of images of one’s own is equally important to – if not more important than – the formation of a unique and opinionated voice on real life and public events. Many of the adolescents who were portrayed by Rico & Michael are astoundingly mature in their skills of posing for cameras. In their virtual universes they are masters of masquerade and disguise. They have an almost inborn talent for staging and for compository framing. The boundaries demarcating what is real and what is fictitious are more fluid than ever before. This perhaps being one of the reasons for the disavowal of the new people by older generations (the “analog natives”). Today’s children and teenagers demand to be seen rather than to be heard. Visual style is everything.

Whereas the mythological Narcissus was not aware that he was merely gazing at his mirrored self-portrait, today’s image-saturated youth is very well aware of the carefully constructed artificiality of their reflected myriad selves. The iGeneration falls in love (or tries to do so) with their transformed selves inspired by the appearances of fashionable pop stars (Lady Gaga to whom Neue Menschen is dedicated being the most important), or with their new selves collaged together from bits and pieces found within the gargantuan digital image junk heap. Unlike Narcissus, they fall in love with faces that they recognize as theirs although they have been consciously transformed into other temporary identities. For many of the teenagers who are maturing during the times of facebook and flickr playful metamorphosis and sharing photographs thereof becomes a proof of their existence. This encompasses a self-consciousness that is literally a form of ex-istence – a being out of oneself.

Modern life is one of the best subjects for photography, according to photo-critic Gerry Badger, albeit being a subject that quickly fades into history.(1) Rather than playing the snake biting its tail (photography reacting on other art or photography), photographers make more interesting work when they turn their lenses outward. And what subject could be more intriguing and ambiguous than the teenagers of the image-saturated online age. Photographing teenagers with such a keen visual aptitude means both an inward and an outward turning of the lens. It is a focus on real people as they imagine themselves based on images of other real people.

As quickly as an actual subject may fade into history, it fades into nothing if there is no history to be made through imaginative documentation. A sensitive, imaginative, and collaborative documentary approach is one of the strengths of Rico & Michael’s portrayal of the teenagers. The photographers wanted to blur any clear distinction between their roles as authors and their subject’s roles as models. The kids were as much involved in the image-making process as the photographers, and when they had not yet conceived of how exactly they wanted to be photographed, Rico & Michael would stage and picture them in ways they deemed fitting to their respective self-perceptions. The series is not a documentary about teenage subcultures per se. Most importantly it is about today’s teenagers’ visual awareness, their fashions as an essence of their self-consciousness and their aptitude of cultivating self-images. In Rico & Michael’s words their project is a documentation of “the construction of [the teenagers’] pictured identity.”(2) It is a photographic document of the new generation’s inborn talent for mise-en-scène, for their talents for the staging of oneself as another.

The subversive somewhat provocative undertone of the otherwise tautological title Neue Menschen (the youngest generation is new per definition, physically at least) suggests that teenagers nowadays are somehow radically different in comparison to earlier generations. Is it the hypermedial online world basically informing them from birth on which accounts for this difference? Every change in technology changes the way people behave and interact with each other, and faster changes in technology tend to provoke quicker generation shifts. But in digital wonderland we are all too young still to already come to serious conclusions on this matter. Rico & Michael want to have their book title sound like a big and bold statement and at the same time clarifying that it deals with a contemporary subject. Its actual actuality may be part of history soon, the fantasized photo-selves in Neue Menschen will be forever young. Photographs don’t age any longer and fashion styles are part of an eternal cycle of renewal.

When asked about the importance of documenting the cultures of today’s teenagers, Lauren A. Wright, who in 2011 curated a large exhibition on twentieth-century youth cultures, had an admirable answer: “I think it’s always important to recognize the huge influence of teenagers on our culture past and present, particularly in light of the ambivalent place they occupy. We really do both love and loathe them.”(3) Young people can teach us as much as older generations can teach them. As long as we stay open and never forget about our younger selves within our older selves. In the end, all that Rico & Michael ask from us is to love the kids they portrayed with careful attention and love themselves. If we can’t embrace every teenager around for real, the least we can do is to immerse ourselves for a moment in the fantastic though often dark imagery in which teens show off their roles and their uncertain identities. A praise stronger and more concise than the following comment on a picture that’s up at one of the photographer’s facebook-pages is hardly possible: Luv it pic!

Young people’s use of digital and social Media

‘Convergence does not occur through media appliances, however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.’ – Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture)

‘We interact with others to create an identity. This is called identity negotiation. This develops a consistent set of behaviours that reinforce the identity of the person or group. These behaviours then become social expectations”. - Stella Ting-Toomey

How do you think we could use these quotes to understand how identity is formed online both individually and as part of a collective?

Look at forums, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter – have young people constructed a collective identity by ‘developing a consistent set of behaviours’?

What are these behaviours?

What are the conventions of use of social media? How do you think they developed?

‘Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.’ Jenkins. Can you identify examples of this use of media on your social media or others?

http://www.ymresourcer.com/model/subcult1.htm

http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/03/youth-representations-in-media?cat=commentisfree&type=article

http://culturelag.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/youth-subcultures-and-delinquency/

http://tacohiddebakker.com/texts/how-dare-we-be-so-beautiful/

http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/teenage_sexuality.htm

http://www.academia.edu/156134/The_Death_and_Life_of_Punk_The_Last_Subculture

http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/cigdemkalem/prompt-4/1

http://www.bethinking.org/who-am-i/advanced/postmodernism-and-the-question-of-identity.htm

http://cinesthesiac.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/that-sinking-feeling-submarine.html

"None of this will matter when I'm 38," our hero tells himself - yet the audience, who may well be some distance ahead of him, will surely be aware that, in love, you often encounter the same damn problems over and over again, no matter your age, however smart you think you are.