LESSON 50: TEENAGE KICKS

This lesson is a landmark - not just our 50th lesson but the start of your case-study. Today we are going to take our prior learning and use it to explore a modelled case-study that will serve as the basis for the mock exam in january and also an exemplar for your own case-study development for the real thing in May.

Objectives:

Application of previous learning

understanding of key concepts

Apply understanding to explore how media products construct meaning

In lesson 49 we explored issues around this Reebok advert from 2005. we considered how some saw it as 'glamourising a deviant life style' whilst Reebok saw it as a celebration of individuality, freedom and authenticity.

In lesson 50 we explore why representations are so important - that people 'understand' themselves, others and the culture we live in largely from the way the media represents the world to us. that such images are repeated [saturated] and that human beings act on our developed constructed reality.

Our exemplar case-study is Youth and the ways that the media represents Youth to us.

We begin by considering a range of representations in media products as to what youth is. Each representation conveys the idea that each generation constructs its own representations but that there are consistent ideas that run through all of these.

Great work today - some very informative and insightful analysis. so many of you contributed to the work and to moving the ideas forwards that it's hard to focus on any individuals but some real sense of understanding from Manny, Kai, Eliott, Jacob, Steven. Solid and imaginative ideas from Imaani, Ravi, Rachel.

The underlying ideas focused on the sense of group for each image - the idea of 'belonging' - often signified by shared fashion style and postures struck by those in the image. We explored ideas of gender and racial/ethnic inclusion [and exclusion] before coming to focus on the ideology of power. The youth were all reflecting a sense of being 'rebels'; outsiders from mainstream [older] society and the street locations suggested that power for them lay in the streets.

We ended up at the original image we began with - that the reason why 85% of young boys were most scared of other young boys was, in part, the product of media representations which for every generation seemed to offer similar ideas about such a group.