Lesson Planning

Theme: Media and Collective Identity

What we need to explain: 

- What is collective identity?

- What collective we will be focusing on and why - BRITISH YOUTH

- Examples of each media area we are focusing on - PRESS AND TV

- History - EG Grange Hill...

- What theorists we know about 

- How these theorists explain collective identity

Activity Ideas:

Watch a scene from a TV show - make notes

Handouts of Newspaper examples from London Riots - feedback

Mind map of instant opinions about representation of british of youth - what are the reasons?

Something to do with the future of representation... Game? Worksheet?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDR1hqKSHUI

RIOTERS ATTACKING POLICE

Judith Butler - Performativity

Performativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and language in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to perform a type of being. It is a forum, a performative act, a ritual, a social action that is omnipresent and without restriction; it extends socially, beyond constraints of system or structure. It is the construction of identity or position through active expression. The term derives from the work in speech act theory originated by the analytic philosopher J. L. Austin, who did not use the word "performativity," but did give the name performative utterances to situations where saying something was doing something, rather than simply reporting on or describing reality. A "performative utterance," Austin argued in How to Do Things With Words, cannot be said to be either true or false, as a constative utterance might be. It can only be judged either "happy" or "infelicitous" depending upon whether the conditions required for it to succeed have been met. In this sense performativity can be said to investigate the pragmatics of language. Judith Butler, as mentioned above, has done much research and writing on performance theory, and has focused much of this work on gender performativity. Butler sees gender as an act that has been rehearsed, much like a script, and we, as the actors make this script a reality over and over again by performing these actions. “For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies.”

Emile Durkheim - Collective Conciousness

Collective consciousness was a term coined in Psychology by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim collective conscience as a superior translation of Durkheim's concept, in part due to the busy association of the word "consciousness" with both Marxist and Freudian thought, but also as "a conscience for Durkheim is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations; it is not the rational organ that the term conciousness would imply." The term collective consciousness refers to the condition of the subject within the whole of society and how any given indivdual comes to view herself as a part of any given group.  

Script

Footballers... Teenagers... Old People... Chavs... Ethnic Minorities... - these are all examples of collective identities. In fact, the list is endless.
Media and collective identity means how the media interprets different groups of people But what is Human identity? It's the set of behavioral or personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable as a member of a group.
Identities are represented through contemporary media in a number of ways, whether it be through TV, Radio, Press, Film or Internet. The most topical representation at the moment is of British youths. With the rise of Teen dramas such as Skins, Misfits and The Inbetweeners, teenagers are constantly being represented negatively and positively. We have to also consider the coverage of the London riots, which sparked a huge negative representation of these adolescents. Newspapers had pages full of rampaging teens, creating explosions and battering police cars, aswell as bold headlines to create a massive negative representation of the specific group. Obviously the representation was subsequently generalized throughout the whole of the collective.

So where did this representation come from? The British TV Drama Skins hit TV was screened in 2007 and created a stir amongst critics, parents and young people themselves. The show, which is written with help of youths, focus' on controversial story-lines such as drug abuse, mental illness, sexuality and death. The program highlights what youths get up to when at Sixth Form College and many viewers find the representation very realistic and believable. For example one show started with scenes of clubs full of underage teens drinking heavily and taking class A drugs - the result was a death of a girl on ecstasy. This instantly gave teenagers a negative representation just from this scene. Throughout the episode it was also made apparent that characters skipped lessons, got into fights and slept around. One scene showed a couple having sex in a hospital - was this showing the collective group as irresponsible and inconsiderate. Skins did have its positives too. The end of the episode showed a character bonding with his family after using his religion to understand his feelings and thoughts. This representation seems to show that teenagers are just curious and will eventually come to their senses.

But the nature of the show isn't the first of its kind. 80's BBC drama Grange Hill was primarily a tamed version of Skins. Relationships, sexuality and drug abuse was spotlighted throughout series' and at one point the show was asked to be "toned" down due to such controversial publicity.

Newspapers also represent teenagers negatively, particularly during the London riots in 2011. We observed that the majority of the negative representation was coming from 'Redtops' (e.g The Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star). We noticed that the more sophisticated newspapers (e.g The Guardian, The Times and Daily Telegraph) focussed on the incident itself rather than targeting the groups responsible. The 'Redtops' headlines' purpose was to shock the reader, for example: "Rioters aged 7" and "Olympics girl, 18 'Trashed Cop Car'. whereas the more sophisticated newspapers purpose was more intended to inform, rather than to make judgements, for example, "The Anarchy Spreads". The more intellectual newspapers accepted the incident and tried to figure out why it had happened. Emile Durkheim tries to explain crime by arguing that when collective conscious and values are unclear it can cause 'anomie'. Anomie is defined as a state of norm-lessness - where society doesn't understand or share the same clear goals anymore. Emile Durkheim's arguments can be clearly seen within the riots, society didn't feel they shared the same goal as the government.

You could argue that teen TV drama's has had an affect on the on the way that young people learn the values of society, and are partly responsible for anti-social behaviour within teens. For example: in the pilot of the hit teen TV drama, Misfits, aggression is a constant theme throughout the episode, particularly against their probation worker. From the start of the episode the main characters are seen not listening to and swearing at their probation worker, implementing an anti-authority value into the audience. Judith Butler argues that people take on different forms of their personality whilst around different types of people - she calls this Performativity. For example: people act cocky and aim to impress when around their friends, but around authority people act sensible and try hard not to offend. However, when the values of acting in an acceptable way around authority (e.g police) break down when influenced by shows such as Misfits - which follow a group of young offenders - and Skins. A video which was highlighted in the Press, shows how this transfers into real life. You can see a group of police officers attempting to fight off a number of youths in London, before a whole mob comes out of nowhere and attacks them. This could be used as an example of how teenagers are influenced by these shows and also how the press used performativity to show the riots.

To conclude it seems very obvious that the representation of teenagers throughout the press and television is usually negative - with violence, sex and drugs always being associated with the collective identity. Obviously this is partly because it makes great television and draws in customers, yet it does not seem right that media business' should do this at all teenager's expense. So where next? It seems that constant negative coverage across the media will only make things worse. Teenagers will probably adhere to the negative things associated with them because of the stereotype being created. It seems simple, but the only way out of this situation is to give teenagers some good representation and a voice to disprove the stereotype. The likes of the British Youth Council and UK Youth Parliament are attempting to help, but without the aid of TV and Press, it is unlikely anything will change. Perhaps in the future we will see a variety of positive representations of the teenage collective in all media forms, which should remove the likelihood of more violence and improve the stereotype of youths all together.

These couple of videos show the live coverage of riots and the implications of the riots and press coverage. The Question Time video brings up very interesting points about the reasons for the outbreak of riots and unrest of British Youths. It seems that some feel that its not the medias fault for the riots, but the way that parenting has changed and many lack respect for their parents and in consequence the police. Obviously the reasons behind teenagers showing no respect could come from the TV shows we looked at such as Skins or Misfits. You see characters ignoring parents, leaving home and arguing with them, which could transfer over into real life. Misfits makes the audience seem like the characters are not interested paying back to the community through community service, and it may stereotype british youth as not caring about law or the police.
The other video shows the a different side to the implications of the London Riots coverage and TV dramas about youths. You can see that many "older" people stereotype any British youth that they are causing trouble even if they are justing taking the bus to college. This has probably come from constant media attention of the small amount of trouble makers throughout the country.
A great phrase used in a video watched was "Teenagers are like a plane, you only hear about them when they crash".

David Gauntlet

DAVID GAUNTLET
Professor of Media and Communications at University of Westminster

Gauntlet is a theorist who believes that you can't just generally show identities generally for a community of people. He basically feels that there are a lot of different implications that create someone's identity - obviously this is probably mainly through the media, however others around you, how you were brought up etc have an impact too.

He researched into different people expressing their identites using Lego, as he felt it was a more creative way of showing an identity and people would possibly think more in depth when using this method. They would have to use metaphors to show parts of their identity, EG a fence would show they we protective of their belongings or a window would show that feelings are very obvious and can be seen by others easily.

There were many findings from the variety of people used. Some include the fact that people want to have an individual identity, but also want to feel part of a collective. The fact that identities are very complex is also notified, although this might seem obvious, it seems that the media may generalise identities rather than show the complexity. It was also touched upon that people don't think they are influenced by the media, however the media helps people think about their identity because it gives them stories and ideas to relate to.



The findings are interesting and definitely can be related to our investigation into the collective media identity issue.
One example that I can think of is the Skins episode we watched. The character was shown having a complex identity, with the idea that he was grouped with a perhaps bad group of people at college and was torn between them and his religious family. This definitely does show the complexity of identities as well as feelings, however it could be said that the collective identity of teenagers in it is generalised throughout the series.