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1. Representation of youth and
youth culture

2. Starter task
• How many media texts minimum do you need to refer to in
your exam?
• To create a balanced argument what 3 areas do you need
to refer to in your exam?
• How many questions do you answer in your exam overall?
• What must you apply to your argument to demonstrate you
are a media student debating from an academic point of
view?

3. Task
• how is youth culture represented in the media?
• How youth culture is represented in TV programs?
• how is youth culture represented in the news?
• how youth culture is represented in films?
• How youth culture is represented in social media?
• With a different coloured pen go back and fill in any
blank spaces from yesterday knowing that youth
perceptions depend on a multitude of different
things such as age, the form its presented in,
ethnicity, social class etc.

4. Why has ‘that’ representation been
created?
• If you were to describe yourself or your friends in
5 words would it include the majority of words
that you have put in your answers?
• Which two categories are the most positive and
why do you feel this is the case?
• Why do you think youth/teenagers are
represented so negatively in society? Why do you
feel the media as a whole creates this
perception?

5. Task
• What is ‘collective identity’ and what does it
mean?
• The concept of a collective identity refers to a set
of individuals and the sense of belonging to a
group. For the individual, the identity derived from
the collective group shapes a part of his or her
personal identity. Making them feel accepted and
integrated in society.
• Collective Identity is the idea that through
participating in social activities, individuals can
gain a sense of belonging and in essence an
"identity" that shape the individual.

6. David Gauntlett
• ‘identity is complicated everybody thinks they
have one’
• What does Gauntlett mean by this?

7. These identities create society as we
know it, making us relate to media
Having an
identity helps us
understand our
purpose. We like
to watch and
follow media for
a reassurance of
self worth.
Collective
identity makes
us feel needed
and wanted.
However these
identities we
create for
ourselves are
not always
positive.
The big bang theory
The office
Girls The last tango in Halifax

8. Youth representations in the media
The top 5 search results in Google relating to teenagers, how
may this influence how people perceive young people? How is
this creating an identity for teenagers?

9. TV representations of youth
-Are any of
these
representations
real/true?
Explain your
answer.
-Which is the
most realistic
representation
and why?

10. Representations in the news
• Research of six UK newspapers over the past 10
years found that the words most commonly
associated with "teenagers", "youth" and "young
people" were "binge-drinking", "yobs" and
"crime".
• Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of
Editors said, if teenagers looked at media coverage
more widely they would see "a much more
balanced picture" with prominent positive
reporting of high-achieving young people including
A-level students, Olympic athletes and footballers,
as well as young soldiers who had served the UK
abroad. (Source BBC news)

11. • The portrayal of teenage boys as "yobs" in the media has
made boys wary of other teenagers, according to new
research.
• Figures show more than half of the stories about teenage
boys in national and regional newspapers in the past year
(4,374 out of 8,629) were about crime. The word most
commonly used to describe them was "yobs" (591 times),
followed by "thugs" (254 times), "sick" (119 times) and
"feral" (96 times).
• Other terms often used included "hoodie", "louts",
"heartless", "evil" "frightening", "scum", "monsters",
"inhuman" and "threatening”. (independent.co.uk )

12. • The best chance a teenager had of receiving
sympathetic coverage was if they died.
• "We found some news coverage where teen boys
were described in glowing terms – 'model student',
'angel', 'altar boy' or 'every mother's perfect son',"
the research concluded, "but sadly these were
reserved for teenage boys who met a violent and
untimely death.”
• according to the research, many boys were now
more wary of boys of their own age. "It seems the
endless diet of media reports about 'yobs' and
'feral' youths is making them fearful of other
teens," it said. "Nearly a third said they are 'always'
or 'often' wary of teenage boys they don't know.

13. Social media
• We are aware that what we see on social media is not
real so why do we choose to believe it?
• If young people are the main consumers and producers
of of this form of representation why do they choose to
present themselves in a fake modified way?
• Does social media create a fake identity of teenagers
to the world?
• Does social media encourage negative or positive
representations of youth?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFrylnU1dDw

14. Moral panics

15. Starter task
• What is a moral?
• concerned with the principles of right and wrong behaviour.
• What is a panic?
• sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly
unthinking behaviour.
• What is a moral panic?
• The intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an
issue that appears to threaten the social order.

16. Aims
• To understand what the mods and rockers are
and how they were reported/represented in
the press after the Brighton beach fight in the
60s
• To understand what a moral panic is
• To understand Cohen's theory of moral panics
and folk devils

17. Mods V Rockers
clash of ideologies
Rockers
-leather jackets
-Motorbikes
-tattoos
-studs
-rings
Mods
-suits
-Scooters
-smart
-clean
-neat

18. Mods V Rockers
• These two different groups of people had
different ideologies.
• They did not like each other.
• As all teenaged youths they caused trouble to an
extent however one event that took place on
Brighton beach 1964 changed how the media
reported and perceived these two groups of
teens and how the rest of society understood the
representation of teenagers…….forever……..??

19. Images used
by the press

20. The press and their message
• What actually happened in comparison to how the
press reported the stories is very interesting.
• The press over exaggerated the events and
demonised the teens and made them out to be
worse and much more violent and aggressive. They
folk deviled teenagers and made other members of
society scared of them.
• The press encouraged young people to fight so they
could create stories in the media to manipulate how
society viewed teenagers.
• The press over exaggerated the events of the
famous fight.

22. How the press report a moral panic
1 exaggeration & distortion- ‘over reporting’,
using emotive language and repetition of false
stories
2 prediction- if it has happened once before it is
bound to happen again.
3 symbolisation- signs represent a moral panic
for e.g. interviews that are dramatised and over
exaggerated to let the audience hear what they
want

23. Stan Cohen
• Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972)
• ‘A Moral Panic occurs when a condition,
episode, person or group of persons emerges
to become defined as a threat to societal
values and interests.’

24. What does a moral panic consist of?
1 Concern– Awareness of a negative impact on
society
2 Hostility- Towards the group to separate them
from society and to ‘folk devil’ “them” from “us”
3 Consensus- A wide group of society accept the
threat of the group in question
4 Disproportionality- The action taken is
disproportionate to the actual threat posed
(exaggeration of the crime in the media)
5 Volatility- They can easily disappear as soon as
they came and move on to a new topic

25. What other moral panics can you think
of?
• Jimmie Savile and the entertainers of the 80s
• Social workers and lack of capability ‘Baby P’
• Drug culture
• London riots
• Video games and violent behavior
• Trolling

26. Summary
• Cohen states teenages are seen as ‘folk devils’
• Moral panics are a snap shot of time in which the
majority of society place a blame.
• The mods and rockers were seen a moral panic as
teenagers were ‘out of control’
• A moral panic consists of 5 key elements to be
believable and impact on society
• The press manipulate messages to create moral
panics
• The way the press report a story is not always true
or fair, we live in a blame culture society so we
accept this for of reporting.

27. Starter task
• What is a moral panic?
• What is a folk devil
• Why do we have moral panics?
• To what extent did the mods and rockers create
an ideology for future/contemporary
representations of youth?

28. The real ‘Quadrophenia’
• The Mods V Rockers
• You will now watch a short documentary about the
mods and the rockers giving you a brief summery of
their ideologies, how the groups formed, the riots on
the beach and how the press reported the events of
the bank holiday weekend.
• Please make notes.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng8-4DFaFEo

29. Summary
• How do you feel the press have shaped the
identity of young people from the 60s to the
present day?
• Do you feel if the way the press reported the
riots perceptions of youth would be different
today?

30. Further reading
• http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com
/marsh_melville_moral_panics_and_the_briti
sh_media_march_2011.pdf

31. Belonging
• The pressure of growing up and being part of a
group is an experience most of us go through. To
feel ‘normal’ and accepted we need to fit in with
a group of people we collectively share the same
thoughts and opinions with.
• Teenagers are at a venerable age in their lives, is
this why the media targets them in a negative
way?
• Are teenagers scapegoats so when other groups
of society make mistakes teens are always looked
down on and used to escape blame?