90s Popular Culture and Effects on American Self Identity Formation

90s American Popular Culture and Self-Identity Formation

Popular culture is the main force in America; it reaches our classrooms, cars and, even homes and influences what people think, watch, listen to, wear, and buy. Popular culture can be quite addictive, annoying, offensive, controversial, and pleasurable. It can also be difficult and almost impossible to avoid. In many cases it is challenging for us to differentiate between popular culture and the rest of our lives, because it is so entrenched in our day-to-day patterns. Given the significant role of popular culture in the American society, I propose in this paper that it should be looked at as a cultural practice, with its own power to bring about social change -- to transform social factors, and the foundations themselves of people's lives. This essay particularly discusses the manner in which popular culture can help youth to make a society more democratic, in other words to make our societies more fair, just, and equitable. It is quite difficult to avoid popular culture, because it is at the very core of the United States (U.S.) public sphere. It is true that popular culture can be quite influenced by corporate interests, which are private and driven by profit; nonetheless, popular culture is an arena where people have a stake, a voice, and an interest (Dolby, 2003).

At social occasions, at work or school, popular culture is one of the most frequently used conversation starters. It usually serves both as a social divider and glue; not being inside the currents of what is 'popular' can lead to one's social isolation, while one the other hand friendships can grow stronger around the shared love of a television show, band, or music video. Popular structure also plays a very strong role in the public arena: political pundits on late night shows and other television programs produce episodes meant to address foreign policy, terrorism, or other topical items. This popular culture cannot be dismissed as insignificant or irrelevant; on the contrary, it has the power to influence the public even on the most divisive civic issues and also has the capacity to shape public opinion (Dolby, 2003).

Contemporary societies offer more options for the youth both culturally and educationally, and with regards to lifestyle choices. The youths of today can make their own decisions and they are less bound by traditions, parental control, religion, or gender patterns of the past. This phenomenon is referred to as cultural emancipation; it offers newer and more possibilities for the youth. However, despite this phenomenon, individual choices have to be justified. Young people have a duty and a responsibility to choose their own life course; in other words they have a "choice biography" contrary to tradition. The changing gender roles, family relations, and the dissolution of tradition may somewhat imply a loosening of the social fabric. Some researchers have warned about the emergence of a 'risk' society (one example is the increase in criminal activity, and the increased use of drugs among young women in the last two decades) (Skoe & von der Lippe, 2005).

1.1. Conceptual framework

According to France (2007: 158), one of the disadvantages of the post-structuralist approach was that it overemphasized and over-read the importance of 'agency' over structure, and focused more on dress and style. This particular study gives equal emphasis to the role of institutions (the state and the media), and authorities such as parents, religion, teachers, peers, home life, and ethnic tradition, all of which are somewhat entrenched in the lives of fourth year university students. Thus this study, in its investigation of the media consumption, globalisation, and most importantly self-identity, will look at how different ethnicities identify themselves with the national culture (popular culture), via the local media compared to the international media. The study also investigates the links between national cultures, religion, ethnicity, diaspora, and globalisation, in terms of media consumption practices.

1.2. Theoretical framework

The idea of media consumption and the way it has helped users to form their own identities is demonstrated through reviewing the users' day-to-day use. A better comprehension of the users' consumption enables more understanding of the reasons behind their consumption (Karim, 2010). All these activities or studies cannot be determined through the use of questionnaires, especially if the researcher is keen to analyse the similarities and differences across different age groups and ethnicities. Unlike the many studies done on the youth's media consumption, this one does not seek to make a causal association between media consumption and moral values, because that method is considered too simplistic in theorising the youth and their media consumption (Dearn, 2013). Instead this study is concerned with the question of the manner in which youths of different religious and ethnic backgrounds can utilize the media to form their own identities. More crucially, the study investigates the new identities being formed as a result of the current trends of media consumption, and the manner in which these new identities vary between different age groups and ethnicities. The answers to these investigations will better explain the changes in moral values and self-identity in this new age of globalisation (Karim, 2010).

1.3. Research questions

This study looks into how young fourth year university students use the media to form their own identities. It also aims to investigate whether there are any similarities or differences between ethnicities in this trend with regards to their attitudes towards ethnic culture. The study also looks into the assumption the youth are more entertainment-oriented in terms of their media consumption. The study further investigates media consumption by seeking to determine what the media means to young university students, in addition to how their media consumption is positioned within their cultures.

1. To what extent is the media consumption of a fourth year college student leaning towards entertainment and what are the reasons?

2. Are there any differences with regards to age and ethnicity, and why?

3. What are the similarities among these youth, and why?

4. Are there any differences with regards to media consumption among the young people of different ages and ethnicities?

5. What are the limitations to their media consumption?

6. What are the ways in which different ethnicities consume local and international media content, and what are the reasons?

7. What are the differences and similarities with regards to local and foreign media content among different age and ethnic groups?

8. What are the causes of the differences? Is this due to a pattern, or is it related to globalisation?

9. To what degree are religion, culture and tradition no longer major factors in fourth-year student lives, as shown by their media consumption trends?

10. Do students use the media as a means to break away from authorities, institutions, and/or other conventional forms of constraint, such as culture and religion? Is there a common trend among all age and ethnic groups?

11. Is there any difference between the way the youth from different ethnicities use the media to negotiate between their culture, religion and ethnicity?

12. How do young people form alternative forms of self-identity through the media? And are there any differences in terms of age and ethnicity?

13. What kinds of self identities result from the use of media? Is it different between different age groups and ethnicities?

14. What are the differences in cultural values in the way they are perceived in the cultures and lives depicted in foreign in contrast to local media, and are these differences perceived differently between different ethnic groups and age groups? (Karim, 2010; France, 2007; Dearn, 2013)

2. Literature review

Scholars and researchers have first had to struggle with the challenge of defining what is 'popular culture', and thus by extension what isn't. Definitions are obviously culturally and historically bound phenomena, and the answer of "what is" with regards to popular culture has changed dramatically in the last five decades. From the year 1860 up until 1950, Mathew Arnold's idea of culture, which later helped define popular culture, was the most influential and the most significant concept. According to him culture is the best of what is not only thought but said in the world. His definition combined with his beliefs that the British middle class and aristocracy were above the working class, and were also quite a distance ahead in the evolutionary path. This led to the emergence of the term high-culture as opposed to the culture of the working class or the common. Of course, in his beliefs and concepts Arnold was declaring his own class as the bearers of what is civilized, good and right - and by extension what the common people thought of this was none of his concern. Thus Arnold played a significant role in shaping the paradigm that dominated and influenced popular culture for almost a century -- a paradigm that is accepted as commonsense and natural -- the division between low (or popular) and high culture (Dolby, 2003).

According to John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, there is an intimate link between persons and selves: in any case a man finds what he refers to as himself; another person may say this is the same person (Locke, 1975, 346). However there are two different ways of looking at this assertion in the context of Locke's wider view. In one perspective, according to Locke, persons and selves are equivalent, in other words they are the 3rd personal and 1st personal sides of the same coin. In the second perspective, being a self is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient in itself for being a person -- where there is an individual, its limits must match the limits of the pre-existing self; however self-hood is much more essential than personhood. These two different perspectives of self and its link to personhood have emerged one more time in the current philosophical discussion; with the self being represented in narrative and personhood in minimalist views (Speight, 2015).

John Locke's discussion of personal identity is particularly interesting. Little attention has been given by scholars to his understanding of self and its links to personhood. Despite this fact, Locke has pretty interesting things to say about the subject. To understand the subject from Locke's perspective, it is important that we define terms the way he did. First, he defines self as that conscious thinking portion of a human that senses pain or pleasure, and is capable of happiness or misery (Locke, 1975, 341; Speight, 2015).

Utilizing his own approach, McMahan arrived at his "embodied mind" narrative which he offered as an alternative to existing narratives with regards to personal identity. According to him, our intuitions about egoistic concern show us that what matters or provides a reason for the egoistic concern about the future is the sameness of consciousness (McMahan, 2002, 67). However, McMahan rejects Locke's narrative that sameness of consciousness requires higher-level connections between the various elements of consciousness from time to time. McMahan uses the fact that illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease show that the said connections are not necessary, and neither are they enough for egoistic concern. The idea of the sameness of consciousness, McMahan argues is the same as the notion of the same mind; a single mind can only exist in cases whereby enough of the brain in which it occurs continues to exist in a functional state (McMahan, 2002, 67). He therefore suggests that the reason for logical egoistic concern is the functional continuity of a sufficient amount of those areas in the person's brain in which consciousness is located to preserve the capacity to support mental activity (McMahan, 2002, 67-8; Speight, 2015).

Modernity encompasses new options for youth and creates new trends and patterns in young people's transition to adulthood, particularly for young women. However, this also suggests increased differences between young women in terms of their social position, ways of living and economic status. Increased enrolment of women in educational institutions tends to decrease culturally-determined gender gaps, and it also increases the potential for women's participation in politics. Research based on the analysis of data provided by the Euro-Barometer shows that formal education is associated with the removal of the gender gap in politics. The gender difference is largest among those who have the least formal education and reduces almost to nothing among those who are highly educated (Skoe & von der Lippe, 2005).

2.1. From Popular Culture to Youth Culture

The "Birmingham School," which was significantly influenced by the work of Raymond Williams in social science analysis, turned into one of the most important sites for the publication of research on youth culture in the 20th century. Based at University of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), in the United Kingdom (UK), the school probed the link between youth and popular culture. Unlike other popular culture researchers, those based at the Birmingham school tended to begin with the youth instead of popular culture itself. They focused on the lives of the youths and their experiences. They also emphasized popular culture as an area of struggle and resistance for the youth. Prior to Raymond William's work being released, youth research was almost always only found in works done with regards to sociology of deviance, which portrayed some young people as criminals who were determined to undermine the society (Bucholz, 2002; Lutzker, 2002).

CCCS researchers were interested in the link between form and ideology, as detailed in the books: "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" by Dick Hebdige, and 'Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain', by Tony Jefferson and Stuart Hall. Instead of studying deviance like most of the other researchers, the Birmingham researchers looked into youth subcultures in the U.K. -- Skinheads, Punks, Teddy Boys, Rockers, and others -- as types of working class resistance (Bucholz, 2002; Barker & Galasi-ski, 2001). All of sudden, music, make-up, hair, and clothes were not signs or reflections of criminal behaviour or adolescent rebellion, but of resistance to a class hierarchy that determined the young people's lives and futures. As Christine Griffin notes, the psychology-popularized "storm-and-stress" model depicts youth as a time of unavoidable social psychological turmoil that is between childhood's dependency and the mature stability of adulthood (Barker & Galasi-ski, 2001).

In this model, the youth's outrageous preference for "bizarre" music simply reflects a transitional stage. However, CCCS researchers rejected the "storm-and-stress" model, arguing that their forms or signs did not simply reflect resistance but were actually forms of resistance. More importantly, they were not signs of resistance to society in particular, but to the entrenched class structures and hierarchies of the hugely stratified British society. The CCCS researchers gave examples such as the Teddy Boys' style, which they argued exaggerated and therefore mocked the stuffy manners and dress styles of the British aristocrats. In turn, this mocking changed the cultural meaning of dress styles that were preferred by the British upper classes, thus altering the naturalized power structures. In this manner, the style of the youth became a site for political struggle, as the idea of "politics" had expanded beyond the parliament, courts, and street protests. The first youth subculture researchers focused mostly on class analysis; those who followed later quickly expanded the field to encompass race and gender (Lee & Vaught, 2003; Dyson, 2003).

By the late seventies, researchers were also starting to expand beyond the narrow confines of youth subcultures into more detailed and thorough analysis of other youth cultural practices, and how these practices challenged or perpetuated existing social formations. One of the most significant studies in this new arena was an ethnographic study titled 'Learning to Labour' by Willis. The study was about working class youths in a high school located near an industrial centre in Britain (McAdams, Josselson & Lieblich, 2006). Willis shows how the boys in his study are actively resisting schooling; however their resistance of the institution of schooling also means that they will end up in working class like their parents. Willis notes the fact that young people have a role to play in the society and are legitimate political actors. As he, however, shows in his study - this agency is not automatically freeing for the boys. The boys are exercising agency in resisting the hierarchies and structures of schooling, but this resistance only results in the boys following their fathers to doing manual labour jobs. However, other researchers such as Angela McRobbie later critiqued the study done by Willis, by arguing that it failed to analyze the boys' resistance within models that also considered different genders. As McRobbie and other commentators argued, the boys' actions had implications / consequences for race and gender as well besides class relations (Lee & Vaught, 2003; Dolby, 2003).

Willis' study brought about fresh interest in youth cultures studies; soon enough researchers were looking into young people's cultural agency in different areas and along different lines such as ability, age, sexual orientation, gender, race, and class. The tradition of youth culture not only coincided with that of popular culture, but it also shifted the conventional foci of its cultural analysis. Since youth culture research primarily focuses on the lives of youths, it is able to investigate the details of actions and examine how these actions are agents of change in the society. Willis' study revealed that resistant acts don't necessarily result in liberation; they only have the potential to liberate. However, Willis also reminds us that we must take seriously the world of the youth, their priorities, affective pleasures and interests, for these are at the centre, educationally. Making (or not receiving) meanings or messages in an individual's context, and from the material they have been given is, basically, a form of education in its widest context. It is an education about "the self" and the relations of the self to others and to the world (Dolby, 2003; McAdams et al., 2006).

In spite of the importance of this type of research for understanding youth, democratic change, political struggle, and education, this line of research has been sidelined in a field of research that is largely dominated by rather mainstream research that may not always have a critical perspective. As Griffin noted, the emergence and subsequent rise of the "new right" in the United States and Britain in the 1980s, marginalized radical voices and made it quite challenging to get funding on topics of ethnographic work. Other challenges emerged within the academy itself, such questioning of the legitimacy of ethnography by emergent theoretical concepts such as post-colonialism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism (Dolby, 2003). In spite of these challenges, critical research pertaining to youth culture is a crucial path for researchers who seek to understand the link between young people and popular culture, and in repositioning young people as active agents in the ongoing process of re-engineering democracy (Barker & Galasi-ski, 2001; Lutzker, 2002).

3. Research methodology

3.1. Research design

The different studies of identity formation, media consumption, and youth have used different theoretical methods and approaches. Based on the aims of this present study, the research questions were examined using an ethnographic approach, drawing on diary methods and focus group interviews. The methods used were for the purposes of helping the researcher to investigate the identities of fourth year students both as individuals and as a group, so that a broader picture of their identities would be seen (Speight, 2015; Karim, 2010). Therefore, this study involves several multi-qualitative methods. Audience reception studies were done though focus group interviews, while the diary methods were utilized to investigate media consumption trends. So as to clarify any discrepancies from the data collected in the above two methods, in-depths interviews were also conducted. These methods helped to give as much insight as possible on the process and the context of a multiethnic respondents' media consumption.

Qualitative approaches were used because they are able to highlight the lives of the respondents and also make inferences about the reasons behind why they behave in certain ways (Bryman, 2004). Qualitative studies are contextual and answer the "why" and thus have a greater explanatory power. Such studies can also study the process of how a given phenomenon occurs.

3.1.1. Focus Group

A focus group interview is one in which there is a group discussion on a specific issue. The discussion is guided by a facilitator or moderator (Tonkiss, 2004). The utilization of focus groups in this study helped provide a better understanding of the workings of the young fourth year university students identity as a group. The rationale of using a study group in this research was based on what Tonkiss (2004) had argued, that they were helpful in investigating the group norms for a specific issue. Thus study groups were important for this research since they examined the attitudes and values of a group of people (fourth year students) regarding a specific issue.

3.1.2. In-depth Interviews

If there is a need for clarification of focus group data or information from the diaries, the participants were called in for in-depth interviews. Thus participants were always asked to submit their contact details in the diary in case there was a need for follow up. This study required all the respondents to come back for further interviews (Lewis, 2006).

3.2. Sampling

Most studies that have utilized focus group interviews identify respondents via their participation in the research issues. To focus upon the research objectives of this study, it was important to sample research participants based on ethnicity and age. Thus purposive sampling was chosen for this study, because in this kind of sampling participants are chosen strictly for the purpose of the study (Tonkins, 2004). The key function of sampling in this case was to cut sample bias (Karim, 2010). The use of purposive sampling is done in the hopes of resulting in a dynamic discussion. Questions were also worded in such a way that they were not leading, and the interviews conducted in a semi-official and open manner that allowed the participants to air their views freely.