In A Nutshell The purpose of the exam is to assess your knowledge and understanding of media concepts, contexts and critical debates, through your understanding of one contemporary media issue and your ability to evaluate your own practical work in reflective and theoretical ways.
Logistics The examination is two hours.
You will be required to answer two compulsory questions on your own production work, and one question from a choice of six topic areas.
The unit is marked out of a total of 100, with the two questions on production work marked out of 25 each, and the media theory question marked out of 50.
Section A : Theoretical Evaluation of production Section B : Contemporary Media Issues (Media and Collective Identity)
Completion of Work Your first task is to create your A2 Exam Blog.
Your blog will be your place of work. This will be a vital part of your preparation for the exam and essential for future revision. Take pride in it. Be proud and keep up to date.
What Is Collective Identity?
Collective Identity is constructed for different social groups as a result of the ways in which they are represented in the media.
We will be focussing on the ways in which the media represent the identity of British Youth.
The representation of British Youth in the media helps to construct a Collective Identity for this social group.
How Will We Prepare For The Exam?
We will explore the representation of 'British Youth' across at least 2 different mediums of communication and will develop a critically informed point of view on how a collective identity for British Youth is constructed.
In order to be fully prepared for the specific requirements of the question, we must cover these three elements:
Historical – the development of collective identity of British Youth.
Contemporary – examples from no more than five years before the examination. That is, in our case, from no earlier than 2010.
Future – personal engagement with debates about the future of the media forms / issues in relation to the concept of 'British Youth'.
Rules For The Exam
The majority of examples you refer to in the exam should be contemporary. However, theories and approaches may be drawn from any time period.
If you refer to only one media area in your answer, the mark scheme clearly indicates that marks will be restricted to a maximum of the top of level 1.
If you fail to provide or infer historical references and / or future projections, marks will be restricted to a maximum of the top of level 3 for use of examples only.
The collective identity of young people is always affected by the ways in which audiences respond to information that is presented to them. This is a key concept in media studies called Audience Theory. Here are some videos explaining different Audience Theories that have been put forward over time. Hypodermic Needle Theory
Let's go back in time to 1961, just 3 years before the media in Britain represented its youth as being violence driven hooligans who were a threat to the very fabric of society.
1961 saw the release of the film 'The Young Ones' starring, amongst others, Cliff Richard.
The story is about the youth club member and aspiring singer Nicky (Cliff Richard) and his friends, who try to save their club in western London from the unscrupulous millionaire property developer Hamilton Black, who plans to tear it down to make room for a large office block.
The members decide to put on a show to raise the money needed to buy a lease renewal. The twist in the story is that Nicky in reality is Hamilton Black's son, something he keeps keeps secret from his friends until some of them try to kidnap Black senior to prevent him from stopping the show.
Although he is fighting his father over the future of the youth club, Nicky can't allow them to harm him, so he attacks the attackers and frees his father. In the meantime, Black senior has realised that his son is the mystery singer that all of London is talking about, after the youth club members have done some pirate broadcasts to promote their show.
So, although he's just bought the theatre where the show is to take place, in order to be able to stop it, the proud father decides that the show must go one. At the end, he joins the youth club members on stage, dancing and singing, after having promised to build them a new youth club.
TASK
Here is the trailer for the film.
How is the representation of British Youth different here to what you have previously seen?
The difference of the representation between the two different times are that the Youth in " " are very troublesome and violent causing fear and havoc to everyone, although the youth in the 1960's are seen as more friendly, welcoming and extremeley happy. The youth in 1961 seem like they are a healthy community that get along very well and do not bother anyone.
We are starting our exam preparation by considering a historical perspective in relation to the construction of a collective identity for British youth. This will be based around the ways in which the media reported on events on the South coast of England in 1964.
We will read through and watch the text(s) below and then answer the question that follows in bold print....
Historical Context The 1960s saw the birth of the teenager and life was never the same again. It was the start of a social and sexual revolution in Britain. This revolution was partly a reaction to the austerity of the post war years, increased prosperity and spending power, and advances in technology and science. Young people woke up to the idea that that they could have an identity and lifestyle different from their parents. Teenagers started to break free from the traditions and rules of previous generations in fashion, lifestyle and sexual behaviour. They wanted their own music, clothes and freedom to do their own thing. The Teenage Boom In the early 19th century teenagers were treated as 'big children' or 'little adults' but this was to change from the 1950s and 60s.
The 1960s saw young people liberated from Victorian and post-war taboos, limitations and inhibitions. It was the age of the contraceptive pill, drug culture and the permissive society. Music provided the soundtrack for a generation with groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks topping the charts. Fashion Revolution The fashion revolution had its roots in the 1950s when Mary Quant opened her first shop, Bazaar, on Kings Road Chelsea in 1955. But it was the Sixties that were to be the fashion decade with models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton hitting the headlines. London's Carnaby Street was the height of fashion whilst boutiques sprung up across the country selling affordable versions of the latest fashion gear. Even the boys weren't left out with the new mods and rockers snapping up fashions to create their own tribes.
Hemlines went up and down with the mini, the midi and maxi skirt enjoying success with trendy shoppers. Then there were hot pants which caused a fashion sensation in the late 60s and early 70s. Mods vs Rockers : 1964
One weekend in 1964 residents and holiday-makers in the seaside towns of Brighton, Bournemouth and Margate, were rocked by a sudden influx of young, cool gangs. They were Mods and Rockers, and the culture clash that occurred that weekend, described in the articles below in The Daily Sketch, Daily Mirror and others, has become iconic in the history of youth culture.
Mods and Rockers were easily identifiable by their distinctive clothing styles: the Mods wore Fred Perry and Ben Sherman clothing covered by a Parka jacket; while the Rockers wore leather biker jackets and jeans. Mods also rode European scooters like Lambrettas and Vespas and listened to a mix of Motown and Ska.
The Rockers favoured motorbikes and listened to American rock and roll such as Eddie Cochrane and Elvis.
The violent clashes between the two gangs were seized on by the media and used by moralists to exemplify the outrageous liberties enjoyed by British youth.
CLICK HERE to read journalist Jon Savahe's account of the fighting that took place in 1964 on the south coast of England.
Here is an interesting section from the full article: "On the Whitsun weekend of the 16-18 May 1964, the youth of Britain went mad. If you believed the newspapers, that is, who went with screaming headlines like ‘Battle of Brighton’, and ‘Wild Ones 'Beat Up' Margate’ . Editorials fulminated with predictions of national collapse, referring to the youths as 'those vermin' and 'mutated locusts wreaking untold havoc on the land'. Whitsun 1964 has become famous as the peak of the Mods and Rockers riots, as large groups of teenagers committed mayhem on the rain-swept streets of southern resorts like Margate, Brighton, Clacton and Bournemouth. Extensively photographed and publicised at the time, these disturbances have entered pop folklore: proudly emblazoned on sites about Mod culture and expensively recreated in the 1979 film Quadrophenia. Yet, as ever when you're dealing with tabloid newspapers, things are not quite what they seemed. What was trumpeted as a vicious exercise in national degeneration was to some extent, pre-hyped by the press. It was also not as all-encompassing as the headlines suggested: although an estimated 1,000 youths were involved in the Brighton disturbances, there were only 76 arrests. In Margate, there were an estimated 400 youths involved, with 64 arrests. While unpleasant and oppressive, this was hardly a teen take-over." The Media's Response The main conduit for 'news' in the early 1960s was newspapers - these had a much higher circulation than today and were, effectively, the dominant media of the time. Why do you think this was the case? Let's take a look at some of the newspaper reports relating to these events.
The video below shows how the media in the 1960s reported the clashes between mods and rockers and considers whether or not the media coverage exaggerated the scale of events leading to a 'moral panic' in relation to the behaviour of these youth subcultures.
This is evidence of historical creation of collective identity for British youth cultures.
Question
In what ways do the media texts referenced above create a representation of young people as being a danger to society?
The ways that media texts create a representation of the young people as a danger to society is by using military language in the papers to accentuate the level of peril and jeopardy these kids put on the population of England in that generation. Quotes such as "Beach crowds take cover from battling Mods and Rockers" and "invade seaside", for these words to be used about the youth only 20 years after the first World War, it left several people in panic as they perceived the teenagers as a very big threat. Based on how the papers talk about the youth, it shows that the teenagers were a big threat to everyone and created a lot of negative perceptions of people that were in this particular age group. Another way that the media represents as the young people being a danger to society is by the use of repetition to further convey how troublesome these people were. The phrase "Wild Ones" is used heavily in almost every paper repeatedly to assist the view that people had on the youth. The adjective "wild" is a powerful term in this time as it means to be untamed, reckless, a thread and cultivated, so for the people to read that all these young people are wild is very threatening. The phrase "Wild Ones" is also a reference to the movie which was seen as very dangerous teenagers to everyone that watched it, and for them to frequently refer to the young generation as the "Wild Ones" further puts fear on the population.
