Collective identity essay

Media representations are interesting because there are a lot of contrasting views and theories, from lots of different groups of people. I am going to be writing about the representation of teens in the media by looking at historical texts, recent ones and the future, through the use of film, articles and videos. This question if the representation of teens is a true representation is commonly debated. The hypodermic syringe is the theory that people believe everything which they see in the media, and therefore this can affect the representation of teens through the media.

Stanley Cowens theory is named the Moral Panic, this means that the media will create a bad image of certain groups of people, which will make the general public scared or nervous of those people, so they will get a reputation. A negative reputation for teenagers has been created in the film Ill Manors (2012) by the use of ‘hoody horrors’ and the film depicts that it is very common for young teens living in the London area to be involved in drugs and violence. At the beginning of the film we meet the character Callum who is an innocent teen, then towards the end of the film we see him once again dealing drugs. This shows that any teens living in that area cannot get away from drugs, but however I think this is a false representation as I do not believe this to be true, and I think it a very small proportion of teens who do deal drugs, rather than the large amount shown in this film. This created a moral panic because it made people scared of teenagers, and made parents worried that this would happen to their own children.

However, in contrast to this point, in the film Kids in Love (2016) the teens shown are filmed in a completely different way. The film is a lot more realistic because it is more of a positive view of teens and is about the main character finding his path in life, whether he wants to go to university or not. The bright lighting and pop music, makes the film feel upbeat and I think it is more of a realistic representation. Rather than seeing the dirty streets of London, like it is viewed in Ill Manors, in Kids in Love you see the countryside and houses looking luxurious. However, this film is more showing the upper class of London, rather than the lower class, so therefore this may only be a true representation for a small amount of the teens.

In the documentary In Real Life it follows the lives of several teens and the problems which they are going through. You can see in this documentary that all of the teens interviewed do have major problems, I especially found it shocking when listening to Paige, who was addicted to her Blackberry. She said that it wasn’t about the people behind the phone, and therefore just texted and used her phone because she was addicted to it. This fits in well with when the Independent wrote an article saying Teenagers are ‘Replacing Drugs with smartphones’ which makes them seem lonely and addicted to their phones and social media.

Looking at historical texts you can see De Zengotitas theory to be true which is when people believe everything which is in the media, from when looking into an article written around the time of the London Riots. In the article you can see a man standing outside a burning car, linked to the riots, which was made out to be a teenager boy. Later on Channel 4 revealed that in fact the man wasn’t a teenager and was a full grown adult. This shows that people just assume that it is a teenager because they see it in the news, even without any proof. This also fits along with moral panic because people were nervous of teenagers and therefore would believe that they were captured in the photograph.

In the future I expect to see teenagers having more of a voice, this is because of liberal pluralism with lots of people having lots of voices. As well as this there are lots of up and coming stars, from YouTube and other celebrities who are young and have a voice on the country. I think Stormzy is a great example of this because he has been portrayed as badly by the police, when he got accused of breaking into his own house in London, because his neighbours didn’t believe that he lived there, because of him being a young teen. He tweeted about this to make people aware of what was going on, to hopefully make it stop. As well as this he recently gave out £9,000 to pay a young girls tuition fees so she was able to study in America in university. I think that Stormzy is a really positive representation for a teenager and could hopefully improve the representation of teenagers in the future.

In conclusion I believe that there are positive representations of teens out there, however I still think that the majority of people believe the negative representations rather than positive. I do not believe that representations of teens are reflections and in fact I think they are definitely distortions to how teenagers actually are. This is because teenagers have a very bad reputation through the media and mainly because of the moral panic.