Youth in Television have been portrayed in many different lights, anywhere from the criminal to the young at heart. With their resistance to the dominant culture, many studies have been done concerning the meaning of the political challenges to the social formation involving investigating cultural objects and media artifacts. Historically young people have fallen into distinct but dependent categories: youth-as-fun and youth-as-trouble. One might ask why any of this is pertinent to the study of television. However in the 1950’s consumer boom, youth-as-fun became a major advertising strategy.
Once advertisers identified teenagers as a valuable consumer, more and more positive images of youth became evident on TV. Photography of youth has been historically produced out of ideological interests, constructed by new markets in an attempt to gain financial resources young people had gained access to. Even still today it is amazing to view how television views and portrays youth for the benefit of making a sale. Youth-as-trouble have been seen in most aspects of the factual media such as the nightly news.
These shows have the major impact of building images, which in turn are taken as examples of how young working- class people generally behave. This leads to an ideological regime of images, which serve to naturalize the media construction of youth-as-trouble (51). Images of youth-as-trouble are not only limited to news media, but can be seen in soap operas. British soap operas serve as a forum for raising important issues about social problems featuring teenagers with common problems. As keepers of normalcy and common sense, these programs serve ideological interests by bringing forms of power, i. e. e adult, to support the interests of the teenager’s bodies to be against teenage sex or acting out of control. By bringing power on the problem situations, adults on the programs are able to control the dominant ideas of the ruling class by controlling teenager’s actions and thoughts into acting the right way. Deviant youth are represented as answerable to institutionally sanctioned ideas, which fit the ideas of the nuclear family. Youth-as-fun are most likely to be found in advertising. Knowing that young people are most adept at reading complex visual signs, advertising aimed at young people is also the most textually sophisticated.
Success in leisure circles is contingent upon the spending of teenagers, therefor the advert attempts to transcend the difference of class, race or gender in order to make its appeal to the homogeneous category of youth. In masking these categories the advert is able to play on the most important myth within capitalism, that any individual can achieve prosperity and success with hard work, and the right attitude to financial investment (53). There is also another category that many advertisers use, combining the fun and troublesome aspects, creating youth-as-trouble-as-fun.
A good deal of fashion advertising is aimed at this category to attract the average teenager that has the tendencies to act out at times. This conventional representation of patriarchal, heterosexual masculinity that is portrayed in advertising is evident in television and film. Famous Hollywood heroes and action stars have had roles that meant defending society against its undesirable elements. These images aimed at youth may seem new and imaginatively presented; but are actually predicated on very conventional and conservative ideas about men and women. After reading about the representation of youth, I decided to put it my own test.
While baby-sitting the other night, I watched the children become enthralled in the commercials, conclusive that they must have these products in order to be popular and to fit in. By presenting commercials and teenagers in a positive light, or at least in a way that teenagers and youth relate to, advertisers are able to pass along the dominant ideas of the upper class (hegemony) while at the same time making an extra dollar. This hegemonic approach accounts for why representations of youth groups appear as they are, by linking the representations back to the social structure, which frames and produces them.