The media do not construct collective identity; they merely reflect it.

The media do not construct collective identity; they merely reflect it. The relationship between collective identity and its representation with the media is very complex. Collective identity is a sense of ‘one-ness, a membership in social group that is collective and has a sense of togetherness. In this essay I will discuss and explain the different ways media represents the collective identity of youths and young adults in society through films, news, newspaper articles etc... I will also juxtapose youth representation with adult representation in the media and the significant differences that show between the different age groups.

Postmodernism is said to describe the emergence of social order in which the importance and power of the mass media and popular culture means that they govern and shape all other forms of social relationships. This is therefore explaining that media has dominate throughout the years and has now had a big influence on society. The media often gives a negative representation on youths and therefore, making a stereotype out of them. For example, media has given youths such a bad representation that when society sees a group of teenagers they stereotype them by calling them gangs or hooligans. Modern societies have this constant stereotypical view of young youths due to the influences of media. They fail to understand that through these large groups, young youths form their collective identity and create social groups and subcultures.

However, it could be argued that media identify youths in a negative representation because youths in the modern society continuously behave in a negative way e.g. rioting, binge drinking, stealing, attacking etc.. Therefore, the media would want to cause a moral panic to alert society, so that they can act upon the modern teenagers causing this negative representation as society may appear to be threatened by this. Thus, it can be said that the media construct the youth’s collective identity through newspaper articles and news clips to show how harmful modern youths have become.

Stuart Hall argued that the media appear to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it. Halls encoding/decoding challenges long held assumptions on how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication. He suggests that media messages in encoding/decoding become a common-sense status in part through their performative nature. For example, an adult may read or see a group of teenagers steal from a sweet shop in a film or on the news, and from this encoding of the message through media, this adult may now identify groups of teenagers as thieves or trouble makers, as the adult decoded the message in that negative term. Therefore, it shows that the media is reflecting the youth’s collective identity in a negative impact on society.

However, it could be said that youths act this way to make a point. For example, ‘Young people don’t like us. Who can blame them? This article posted by ‘The Guardian’ newspaper written by John Naughton explains why youths today behave the way they do and how media has influenced this. In the article it overviews on how young youths are always under pressure and how easy it is for youths that live in a deprived area to get into drugs and stealing through peer pressure and how the media write ‘spiteful, biased, inaccurate factoid journalism that portrays youths as a hateful, terrifying, anti social and a petty criminal that society would be better without’.  As newspapers know that young youths don’t really read the news articles, they believe it is acceptable to write such harmful words that may describe young people. It also explains how the media don’t really represent youths in a positive representation to society, as there are many young people who have been raised respectably and are currently studying for their GCSE, A-Levels or Degree.  Therefore, the media can be said to construct this negative collective identity towards youths. As adults have a respectable collective identity of hard working class citizens, they start get influenced by the media and see youths with negative collective identities. So the media is affecting the whole society by constructing young people’s collective identity by stereotyping them and constantly creating negative articles about them, so that adults get influenced by it.

However, the media also segregates young people’s negative identity through binary oppositions. The media often stereotype youths that are deprived and are a certain race, so they tend to write articles about how a young black teenager from a deprived background stabbed another youth. There have been many articles about how young black people are stabbing or shooting other youths, and this has cause a major moral panic and has caused the society to stereotype every young black youth with a ‘hoody’ on and in a group of people to be young thugs or gang members. Therefore, through binary oppositions the media has stereotyped individual races in society and thus constructed their collective identity to be negative and dangerous.

To conclude this essay, I believe that the media construct collective identities as the media increasingly dominate our sense of reality and they way we define ourselves in the world around us. Therefore, it is stating that the media has such a big influence on society that it can construct a collective identity and stereotype young people.