Looking at two types of Media, describe the ways in which a particular group of people are collectively represented or provided for, using specific examples to support your response.

Over the years it is evident that youths have constantly been the target for creating moral panic in society through the use of media products such as press and films.

Stuart Hall mentioned “Media appears to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it”. The relationship between collective identity and media representation is not and will never be straightforward. The statement is indeed true because we see that in today’s society they tend to link youths with a moral panic especially since the London 2011 riots.  

Our opinions are highly saturated by the media and their representation of youths as a collective identity to be bad. Watching films such as Kidulthood, directed by Noel Clarke conveys the messages that youths as a collective identity are not governed are indeed lawless. Audiences may think that Noel Clarke representation of youths was indeed accurate, showing youths actually taking a delight in performing bad deeds, grinning whilst doing so. It is not hard then for people to link youths with moral panic. Stuart hall encoding/decoding states how the media gather information and represents it to their audience. Looking back at 2011 London riots the daily mail newspaper mentioned this of a group of youths “A sense of glee pervaded these accounts – youths were often grinning while describing their experience – a delight that the normal order of things was turned upside down.”

 It does not then come as a surprise that people would believe this to be an accurate portrayal of youths and therefore start to believe further any information regarding youths negatively. The press have a large impact on the views of youths, especially tabloids, where they encode their own message within the media text and the audience will then decode and deconstruct it in their own way according to their lifestyle.

This is linked to Althusser’s interpellation theory, the fact that it represents human subjects in this case youths are constructed by pre-given structures. This has been taken up by the media in a form of television, web 2.0, or tabloids/ broadsheets to impose their ideology on the audiences. Thus if we think about it, were bombarded by messages from the media, messages that make certain assumptions for us, and as soon as we engage with the message we are positioned as a ‘subject’ rather than an individual. The idea is that we are controlled y these messages and go some way to defining our or anyone’s identity. In this case tabloids newspapers often exaggerate to the furthest degree as they class youths as not being govern and carless, using words such as “brazen”, “thieves” and “yob” in their articles to impose their ideology on others that youths need to be controlled or avoided altogether.

By doing this it creates a collective identity and not as individuals. This can result in youths becoming angry and result in further chaos as they cannot control what is said in the press, some may respond back appropriately however others may respond back violently, as they may begin to label themselves lawless and violent and therefore act in that accord.

Through the use of Web 2.0 such as:

·         Facebook

·         Twitter

We have been able to see that youths have been able to use all this to form to that collective identity rather than an individual.

The guardian a broadsheet in fact represents youths differently from that of a tabloid sheet. The guardian mentioned “just imagine for a moment that you’re a British teenage boy. You’re struggling to grow up, to find out who you really are?” which is in fact true as youths today are trying to find their identity.

However because newspapers are generally given out to the majority of lower class/ middle class citizens, who read tabloids rather than broadsheets, youths in Britain are now classified with moral panic.

In conclusion, youths in the future will be labelled as bad and dangerous by the mass media, films such as Shank, adulthood, fish tank and the press will continue to contribute to this fact. Until, they are proven to be viewed as having an identity individually instead of collectively by the media, they will then continue to act the way they are.