Youth Culture

The media has a large impact on society, usually through film and TV. Both film and TV represent youth culture in positive and, mainly, negative ways. Because media influences society on such a large scale, the medias representation of youth culture often changes people’s perception of youth, or different groups of people. Because the media tends to represent youth groups in a more negative manner, this usually creates the idea that ‘youths’ are more violent, rude, dangerous and always misbehaving; even if that is not the case.

For example, the film ‘Quadrophenia’ portrays youths as violent criminals, this is emphasized when the main character is involved in a large riot that is instigated by younger people; this can create further disdain for youth culture. This disdain/fear for youth culture that can be created by films like Quadrophenia can create panic on a fairly large scale; this is Stanley Cohen’s theory of ‘Moral Panic’ which is a feeling of fear that is spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of a society. A Dictionary of Sociology defines a moral panic as ‘the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media’. This is a strong link to films like Quadrophenia as they can create/change people’s opinion of youth culture to the point of creating mass (exaggerated) fear; this links to the theory of moral panic as it was described as the media (film/TV) creating and spreading fear.

The media has a wider affect than just youth culture. For example, the media affects people’s perception of other groups of people, like lower class people. In film and TV, the lower class (and often youths) are usually portrayed as ignorant, violent and uneducated criminals; film and TV usually have the lower class wear similar clothes like hoodies, which has now become a staple of lower class criminals in media.

Film began to portray youths in a negative way during the 1950’s with films such as ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and ‘The Wild One’. This practically created a new genre of film as youth culture films started to become much more popular and mainstream, whereas now they have become the norm in film and TV, especially in British film and TV where there tend to be a lot more youth culture films like ‘My Brother the Devil’ and ‘Kidulthood’. As youth culture films became more of the norm outside of the 50’s, we saw releases like ‘A Taste of Honey’ which is the story of an unmarried plain young girl who becomes pregnant by a black sailor then befriends a homosexual; this was far against the norm during the sixties which was still a very sensitive period as black people and homosexual people were still heavily discriminated against. This film therefore could create a very negative opinion of youth culture because it was so far against what was accepted in society, which could therefore create a very bad perception of youths.