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Youth
culture, the mass media, and democracy
Bradley J Porfilio,
Paul
Carr,
Porfilio, Ph. D., is a Assistant
Professor of Educational Studies, and Carr, Ed.D., is
Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations.
Abstract
Youth culture is poorly understood by the
mass media, and, in many cases, the lack of connection can lead to
disengagement in the educational sector. Media (il)literacy
is important for many reasons, and a light-hearted treatment of the effect of
the mass media in the educational sector can lead to undesirable outcomes. This paper examines how two
teacher-educators use the mass media in their teaching to stimulate reflection
and engagement on the part of present and future teachers.
Introduction
At today’s
historical juncture, media culture has arguably become the most dominant force
defining the sense of self, driving our understanding of the ‘Other,’ and
providing “symbols, myths and resources” for generating a common culture (Kellner,
1995). Western corporate leaders have not only consolidated their power over
the content, production, and distribution of cultural texts in the world of
entertainment but they have also utilized their influence to create a “media
oligarchy,” which allows them to propagate corporate and commercial interests
as well as denigrating or ignoring what cannot fulfill their agendas
(McChesney, 1999, 2008). Specifically, corporate leaders rely heavily “on mass
media and global technologies to disseminate” (Richardson, 2007, p. 790)
ideologies that often trivialize, demonize, or miniaturize the Other, while
concomitantly reifying the socially constructed supremacy of Whiteness,
heterosexism, patriarchy and capitalism (Fleras & Kutz, 2001).
One of the major
areas in which corporate leaders spawn their agendas and perpetuate hegemonic
commercial and social ideologies is via youth culture. Today’s youth, whether
through MTV, the Internet, the gaming world, the Western music industry, or
Hollywood, consume myriad digitized texts and goods to embody the ‘cool’
lifestyles of Western pop icons, which marketers, advertisers and corporations
configure to net the excess of dollars that children and their caregivers have
increasingly spent to amuse themselves through marketed forms of leisure for
the past 20 years (Muehlenberg, 2002; Schor, 2004).
This spate of goods, texts, products, and trends collectively reinscribe to
youth, throughout their childhood and into adulthood, dominant ideologies that
do not represent a challenge to neoliberalism, which ultimately shelters the
existence of racism, sexism, classicism, and homophobia (Kahn & Kellner, 2004).
Yet, despite the
power of corporate elites to infiltrate the lived, experiential worlds of
youth, to sell their goods and services, and perpetuate their ideologies and
practices, some youth have not only used Western cultural products as
reflective tools to critique formations and values ensconced within their own
society but they have also remade themselves out of Western media culture. By
doing so, they have become firmly committed to challenging the structures,
policies, and social actors responsible for denigrating their culture in the
mass media, thus demonizing youths themselves for social and economic problems
emanating, in part, from the mass media, and, importantly, exacerbating pain,
suffering, and oppression across the globe. Mass media corporate giants and
corporate leaders, such as Nike, Disney, Wal-mart,
and Coca-Cola, which are responsible for a shift in media culture and how we
perceive youths, have supported the neoliberal agenda for the past thirty
years, which has facilitated the spread of corporate ideologies, logics, and
arrangements to so-called Third World regions (McLaren, 2007). The latest stage
of global capitalism has left men, women, and children to toil in inhumane
conditions, where they produce goods and services for global consumption,
including staples of goods targeted for today’s corporatized youth (Klein,
2005). Since their labor-power is deemed worthless from the bosses’
prospective, they are often left with the grim prospects of producing products
in unsafe and unsanitary sweatshops, working the plantation or the mines, or
relegated to sell their bodies through prostitution (McLaren, 2005).
We—two teacher
educators who have mentored, supported and educated pre-service and in-service
teachers and administrators from K-12 schools in North America for the past
decade—believe that positioning our current generation of school teachers and
administrators to become media literate citizens is essential to excavating
social inequalities and, significantly, fostering a participatory democracy
during the 21st century. Today’s media kids, along with their
teachers, parents, and guardians, need to understand how knowledge is linked to
power in order to recognize how dominant media representations are partially
responsible for asymmetrical power relationships that exist inside and outside
of mass media outlets. Similarly, they need to learn how to generate
counter-hegemonic media products, which provide more authentic representations
of self and Other as well as to provide voice to those who have been
historically left silenced in social institutions. Therefore, we believe media
literacy must become a key building block for transforming our social and
economic institutions so that they are structured on the ideals of equity,
diversity, justice, and freedom, instead of perpetuating greed, exploitation,
and inequity (Macedo & Steinberg, 2007).
In this paper, we highlight how we guide many of our
students to become media literate through a critical examination of youth
culture within the context of a corporate, presumably neutral and apolitical,
mass media. We also document how we employ the cultural work of some
enlightened youths, who hold the critical capacity along with the courage to
confront the social actors and institutions responsible for exploiting
childhood for their own gain while exacerbating social inequalities, to
position our students to remake themselves and join other transformative
scholar-practitioners, activists, and youths in the struggle to build
egalitarian schools and a more socially just world. In sum, understanding how
media (il)literacy affects the prospects for
transformative education is fundamental to our analysis (Kincheloe, 2008).
Exploring the socially constructed nature
of youth: From labor power to commodities
Our initial
foray into guiding pre-service and in-service teachers, school administrators,
and other school personnel to critically understand the role the mass media
plays in their own identity formation, in cementing unjust power relationships,
and in impacting youths’ social, emotional and intellectual development,
centers on reexamining their assumptions about youth. Rather than viewing youth
as merely individuals whose differences are marked by cultural and personal
factors, students learn that youth is a social creation or construction, which
was developed by manufacturers after World War II, for the purpose of luring
“more young people into Britain’s training programs designed to produce a
workforce conducive to the capitalist imperative” (Malott &
Carroll-Miranda, 2003). With this insight, we call on students to reflect upon
how governments and the business sector have utilized the mass media and other
policies and practices to create a similar vision of youth in the post-World
War II era in the
As was the case
in
The mass media’s
false depiction of urban decline has also helped to convince White suburbanites
to support law and order policies as an antidote to cure problems situated in
racialized communities, such as violence, drug abuse, and poverty. Similarly,
political and economic leaders have utilized television sound-bites and
advertisements to lull White voters to believe that urban social problems are
rooted in the “cultural deficiencies” associated with the Other, which are
thought to be quelled by policies bent on surveillance and control. The elite
leaders conveniently exclude information from media outlets that could force
voters from the dominant (and majority) society to reflect upon supporting
politicians whose raison d’être is to
address the social, economic and historical forces and systemic barriers responsible
for perpetuating social inequalities in urban contexts in the post-World-War II
era (Avila, 2004).
Next, we ask our
students to further question how political and corporate leaders utilize the
mass media at the present time to generate a conception of youth aligned with
their agendas, all the while targeting youths themselves as a site to cement
their wealth and power. Kincheloe and Steinberg’s Kinderculture (1997) has proved instrumental in unveiling
the social conditions and macro-level forces responsible for corporations
altering their relationships with today’s youths. For instance, Kellner’s
(1997) contribution in that book examines the cultural phenomenon of Beavis and Butthead, which highlights
for our students how corporations and the mass media capitalize on the
contemporary social conditions facing youths. Many youths in North America,
especially individuals who are marginalized by their racial and class status,
face the prospect of taking care of themselves and their families, draconian
conditions within schools, and the prospect of working dead-end,
service-oriented jobs (Steinberg & Kincheloe,
2004).
Since
manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to less “developed” countries, and
corporate leaders have instituted the processes of automation, integration and
networking, which have resulted in “massive erosion, deskilling and demeaning
of work,” corporations consider youths more as an outlet to sell products and
services than a pool for garnering loyal workers (Millar, 1998). Corporations
take advantage of the fact that stark social conditions prod many youths to
fill social and emotional voids through many “teaching machines,” such as
computers, television, video games, and music. These are the very sites that
condition youths to become loyal to specific brands and products. (Kellner, 1997). To this end, corporations are now highly
sensitized to their ‘branding’, seeking to shower the market-place with goods,
such as running shoes (Nike, Puma, Adidas, etc.), cell-phones (I-Phone, etc.),
video-games (Play Station, Wii, Nintendo, etc.), and a host of other
commodities that help define the consumer, materialist, individualist nature of
the youth experience (Klein, 2005).
Many of the
contributors of Kinderculture and
several other critical scholars also help us unveil to our students the
cultural pedagogy generated for youths through “the juggernaut of corporate and
media influences” (Peterson, 2004). For
instance, our students learn how White corporate leaders have attracted more
and more boys and men to the world of gaming over the course of the last
decade. Male game designers and corporate marketers sell games and generate
advertisements that are supposedly congruent with boys’ and men’s interests and
worldviews. Most gaming texts are colored with typical masculine visions and
narratives of violence, sex, and power (Cooper & Weaver, 2003). Equally
pernicious, they reinforce to youths false stereotypes of women and minoritized
citizens, as games frequently contain “violently negative portrayals of African
Americans, Latinos and women” (Kilman, 2005). The whole nature of the so-called
technological revolution is considered to be inextricably linked with White
middle-class, Western culture. One of Carr’s African-American students
commented that anonymous internet colleagues with whom he spends hours engaged
in intricate web-based games are always “shocked” to discover that he is not
White when side-bar discussions take place.
We also encourage students to examine additional
segments of media culture, such as professional wrestling, Disney, rap music,
clothing, and cartoons, and come to a rich understanding of how kids are often
pushed by corporate executives to enter the adult world at a younger age
(Peterson, 2004). Young children are often forced to confront adult or teenage
concerns in most aspects of today’s mass media, such as sexuality, violence,
explicit language, and drug use (Macedo &
Steinberg, 2007). For instance, large-scale corporations are marketing images
and products to very young children, which force them to grapple with issues
related to their appearance, weight, and, significantly, with pleasing members
of the opposite sex (Linn, 2008). They also learn that commercial and material
forms of entertainment take precedence over getting involved in spending their
time “working for the public good” or interacting with their peers through
creative forms of play, activities that “develop intellectual freedom and
divergent thinking” (Linn, 2008).
We also nudge
our students to take a step back and reflect upon how youths are represented in
various mass media outlets, such as on newscasts, in magazines, through
advertisements, and in popular culture. Generally, our students find there are
few positive representations of youths in the corporate media. Instead, they
find that corporate executives and politicians use mass media outlets to make
consumers and voters view youth as inherently “violent, dangerous, and
pathological,” and frame them as the “source of most of society’s problems”
(Giroux, 2004). Yet, we find it imperative that our students understand why
there has been such a backlash against youths, and, similarly, recognize who
ultimately benefits from these jaded characterizations. By examining the
scholarship of several transformative intellectuals, seeking to extend the work
of media critics, such as Chomsky (2008), McChesney
(2008) and Macedo (2006), and Macedo
and Steinberg (2007), students unravel how the mainstream political structures
within the neoliberal framework have been on a campaign to scapegoat youths for
social and economic problems, such as poverty, crime, and the alleged decline
of North America’s educational system. From this vantage-point, we both seek to
shed a light on the salience and the role of inequitable power relations in
shaping the social construction of youth identity. Critical pedagogy (Freire, 1973; Kincheloe, 2008;
McLaren & Jaramillo, 2007) offers a means to focus on political literacy,
the lived experience of marginalized groups, the
potential for social justice, and the myriad ways that power becomes a tool to
disenfranchise, disembody and de-structure the human condition. Ultimately, the
foray into critical media literacy is a clarion call for a more robust
democratic experience, one that considers social justice and critical student
engagement (Lund & Carr, 2008). The discussion of youth culture, therefore,
leads to a natural linkage with the nature of democratic participation in
society.
The debilitating
discourses and narratives that numb, mollify and obfuscate youth culture are
designed to help the elite forces gain the public’s consent to implement
policies and practices that concentrate wealth and power. For instance, many
large corporations have continually characterized urban youths as aberrant,
violent, dimwitted, and lazy so as to convince the public that youths are not
deserving of social entitlements, such as health care, public education, and
housing (Giroux, 1998). Rather than having the state provide social support for
our children, most voters in the
Proving hope and inspiration to our
students: Subverting the mass media’s power over life
After our
students have sifted through critical scholarship examining the mass media’s
role in generating and perpetuating social inequalities, have implicated
political and economic leaders in using media outlets to blame youths for
social and economic problems as well as commodifying their childhood and
education, and have interrogated how their own identity is structured by
knowledge they consume in the world of entertainment and in other
corporately-controlled outlets, they often yearn to find ways to eradicate
corporate control over our children, our institutions, and our lives. By
pointing to the cultural work of hip hop and punk pedagogues, students often
see it is possible to confront the social actors who have used the mass media
to corporatize childhood, exploit labor power and resources across the globe,
and vilify the Other for social problems that emanate from their creation of
unjust policies and practices. To take one example, the former lead singer of the punk rock group Dead Kennedy, Jello Biafra, remains active in the struggle to dismantle
the corporate hegemony over the production of knowledge and control of the
world’s resources (“Jello Biafra”, 2007). In 1999, he
organized protests and formed a band (No WTO Combo) to stop the corporate
elite’s ubiquitous quest to reap more profits by moving their organizations and
relationships across the globe through the mass media and institutions, such as
the World Trade Organization (WTO). He speaks regularly to youths across the
The cultural
activism of other socially conscious artists in
Two examples of critical
media work
In
this section, we briefly elucidate two examples of how we attempt to reinforce
and extend our students’ media literacy skills. Porfilio asks students to
examine the commercialized messages youths receive through products and
services within the context of K-12 schools. Through fifteen hours of
fieldwork, students examine corporately-produced examinations and test
preparation materials, critique messages youths receive on commercialized
newscasts, such as the advertisements and banter packaged as “news” by Channel
One, which over 8 million youths and their teachers must watch each day in the
US, and reflect upon the slogans and messages students confront on classroom
walls, on billboards, and on clothing worn by their classmates. They then
present their findings from the fieldwork. Most students state that they were
not aware of the extent of corporate and political influence over the lives of
our youths. They also feel that in-service teachers and their students failed
to problematize what agendas are being promulgated
through instructional materials as well as through corporate slogans and
products. Our discussion ends by sharing strategies to bring awareness to
parents, in-service teachers, and youths about commercial and political
interests hijacking childhood and schooling. Students highlight the work of
progressive organizations that have tried to block corporations from targeting
children through products and services, which have brought awareness to the
insidious nature of corporate involvement in schooling, and which have
generated teaching strategies and materials to help youths think about the
socially-mediated nature of their childhood.
Carr uses the
mainstream nightly news as an example of how the media can shape the context
for teaching and learning. In one activity, he divides students (usually
graduate students who are already teachers but this can work with undergrads as
well) in to five groups of roughly 3-4 persons. Each group is to watch the same
newscast from the angles requested of them through the instructions prepared by
the Instructor. For example, one group watches the news as they normally would,
a second group looks for any evidence of racialization and racism, including
who is delivering the news, a third group dissects the news form the political
vantage-points offered, a fourth group looks for the cadence of the news (when
do things heat up, get excited, or wind down), and the last group evaluates the
news from a more quantitative angle, timing the portions and examining the
content therein. After watching the news during the de-briefing phase, one
group after the other, a robust discussion and analysis takes place. What we
find is fascinating, that the mainstream news, the one that informs us daily of
our reality, our politics, our society and our popular culture, is, generally
speaking, relatively vacuous, if not harmful.
Although people
start the course believing that they are relatively media literate, according
to the entrance survey that Carr gives them, by the end of the course they are
questioning their own media literacy, not to mention that of the schools and
that of their students. As they become more observant of the media, they start
to question why we, as a society, know so much about Britney Spears and Paris
Hilton, and, yet, most Americans are unaware that the
Discussion
This paper has argued for a more vigilant understanding of
youth culture, one that is more diverse, fluid, dynamic and engaged than what
is portrayed in the mass media. At the same time, it is important to note that
the media serves to shape youth identity, which then has a significant effect
on education and the lived experience of youths. Consumerism, materialism and
individualism are values that are uncritically taken up in and through the
media but which serve to mussel debate and critical engagement. More than just
an academic observation, we are concerned that media illiteracy will have a
nefarious effect on democracy, especially in regard to social justice, which
should be the essence of a democratic society. The two activities contained in this paper need not be replicated
in order to challenge media illiteracy; what is important is that educators are
aware of the effects of the mass media, and that appropriate and critical
approaches to teaching and learning to address media misinformation,
manipulation, propaganda and an entrenchment of neoliberalism are
conceptualized.
Many things can
be done to counter the trend of not critically assessing the influence of the
media. Various standards and reforms should include guidelines for media
literacy, and the curriculum should be more focused on the qualitative
experience of understanding and critiquing the media, in addition to producing
and constructing media and technological-based projects that strive to be more
connected to the diversity of youth experiences. Literacy should not be
evaluated and understood in narrow terms but should embrace a more holistic, critical
vantage-point (Freire, 1973; Kincheloe,
2008; Provenzo, 2005). Educators, including in
teacher-education programs, should be resourced, trained and encouraged to
become critically engaged, meaning that alternative vantage-points, methods,
strategies, assessments, and experiences should become part of the educational
journey. Ultimately, a critical examination of democracy, one that extends well
beyond elections (Lund and Carr, 2008), should become a part of the renewed
vision for media literacy, with a sharpened view on the youth experience, one
that challenges subservience, consumerism, and patriotism (Westheminer, 2007).
In sum, we find that there are many variants, angles and manifestations of youth culture today, which renders the teaching and learning of all subjects extremely dynamic and contested. Importantly, we find that the process of public education does not systematically fully incorporate into the formal curriculum the plurality of identities that would best serve to more fully engage students in education. Youths seek authentic and meaningful experiences in and through education, the absence of which can create tension and serve to disengage some groups and individuals. At the same time, a critical pedagogical experience in the classroom as well as within the school culture can be validating and motivational in bringing together diverse student representations that are not always portrayed, or portrayed in a positive light, within the formal learning context. A critical assessment of the mass media can lead to a more enriching and fruitful democratic experience for all of society. Our conclusion, that political literacy needs to be a clearer and more strident focus of the educational process, leads to further questioning of the neo-liberal model of education, which, arguably, has constrained the vastly expanding horizons of youth culture, and, as a consequence, the essence of democracy.
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