Essay

I think that the collective identity of youth has changed overtime, I think it has gone worse because of the influence of and media. Collective identity is representation of a group of subject or a group of something which represents either a positive, negative or both opinion. There are more than 1 opinion to this, can be 20 opinions which makes it a collective identity. With my collective identity, I am going to focus on the historical representation which are : polite, clever, gentlemanly, activated/motivated, courteous and friendly. The contemporary representation are : lazy, naughty, dumb, pointless, rude, and selfish.I am going to research some American and British TV programmes and films to investigate which representation it can refer to and if any media text which goes against their representation. The reason why I think this is because TV shows like "The Carrie Diaries", and "Press Gang" represents teenagers as "well behaved" "well mannered".For example:Throughout "the Carrie Diaries" the main character, "Carrie" is an innocent girl who has a dream to work in Manhattan as a writer and although she is rebellious later on, comparing to how teenage girls are represented in contemporary shows such as "90210", "Misfits" and "Skins", girls are seen as "slutty" and "easy" such character like "Naomi" from "90210" who slept with a guy just to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. In "the Carrie Diaries" Carrie does have a boyfriend but waits and plans to when to have sex which presents girls in historical representation that in that time, girls were more responsible, mature and less revealing. Shows which has contemporary representation represents girls in a negative way because of these reasons.This can apply to guys also. In shows such as "Geordie shore", "Ex on the Beach", "The Valleys", these show all represent guys as "non-caring" and only cares about "sex". Also the girls would get with guys that they'd met only 2 hours ago. Their behaviour when drunk is also unacceptable, they will be fighting and also break their loyalty towards one and other. The use of language is different also, there is a lot of swearing and using inappropriate words through out the show however, in shows like the Carrie Diaries, they are well behaved and are less hostile. However, in films like "quadrophenia" and "kids" goes against the representation of historical representation on youths, and in films such as "Disturbia" and "Harry Potter" the youths are portrayed as "Heroic" and "Hard-Working" adolescents. For example:In the film "Kids" (1995) a young boy catches HIV by having sex with uncountable girls at such a young age and continues to do so even after knowing he is carrying an infection, also finding it as a joke how he is spreading the infection. This goes against the historical representation as the way the children acts in "Kids" is worse than the representation that the contemporary carries as-well. In the film "Quadrophenia" (1979) the 2 rival, mods and the rockers fight by the bay on the beach just because they are in a different group, also the mods purpose of travelling to Brighton beach is to buy some drugs. This is obviously the dispute to the historical representation as the behaviour is un-polite or barely legal. To conclude, I do agree that the collective identity of youth has changed over time and also it has gone worse because of the influence of and media as although there were few movies which were against the historical representation,  during the period when Quadrophenia and Kids were produced and exhibited (1970, 1990) majority of men did not act as if they did in the films because they were brought up differently with dicipline and saw the films as only "stories" so it's odd to act as how you would in a fantasy world in real life, but nowadays, young adults or children who aren't even in their teenage years, get in to trouble with the police. Also stupid young people think it is "cool" to be arrested which was something very embarrassing in the 1900's, so not only the media text has changed youths representation over time, I believe that it also has changed the behaviour and how they feel about certain events.