Year 13 Youth Theory

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

Theorists:

Stanley Hall (1904): ‘Adolescence is inherently a time of storm and stress when all young people go through some degree of emotional and behavioural upheaval, before establishing a more stable equilibrium at adulthood.’ Hall also argued that:

·      The common mood for teenagers is a state of depression

·      Criminal activity increases between the age of 12 & 24

·      Young people are extreme and need excitement. ‘Youth must have excitement and if this is not at hand in the form of moral intellectual enthusiasm it is more prone to be sought in: sex, drink, drugs’.

Osgerby (1988): ‘We do not have to search hard to find negative representations of youth in the post-war Britain. Crime, violence and sexual liaisons have been recurring themes in the media’s treatment of youth culture, the degerancy of the youth depiction as indicative of a steady disintegration of the UK’s social fabric’

Hebdige (1998): ‘Youth as fun’ and ‘youth as troublemakers’

Cohen (1972): ‘The media creates an idea of youth as a folk devil which fuels the negative representation of youth but also creates an attractive tribe for disaffected youth to join’

Medhurst (1998): ‘Magnification theory’

·      ‘Awful because they are not like us’