Media and Its Grip on Youth Culture

Introduction
As Stuart Hall shows, media representations are powerful. The problem is that the often present stereotypical images and characters that perpetuate and propagate biased beliefs. Because so much media is directed at and consumed by young people, youth culture itself becomes inundated with prefabricated ideas that are developed by the Culture Industry for their consumption. The Frankfurt School argued that the reason people in America never rose up against the owners of the means of production was because the Culture Industry had pacified them by way of the media—films, TV shows, musicals, music albums and so on—all of it had depleted the working class people of whatever impulse they might have had to rise up and take control of their own destiny, like Marx said they would. One of the most powerful companies within the Culture Industry is Disney, and as Giroux points out, it is all about hooking the kids while they are young and turning them into good little life-long consumers and brand loyalists. Today’s media companies are preying upon the young because they know that if they want to be in business in ten or twenty years, they have to hook the next generation of consumers before they are even old enough to earn a paycheck. The media in this sense is like a drug, and the high being chased is consumerism. The media put out by the Culture Industry is thus interested in one thing and one thing only: turning kids into consumers and keeping them that way. They are not in the business of educating, teaching principles or of reflecting the truth or reality. They are in the business of selling—selling merchandise, selling advertising, selling tickets, and selling data (that is collected on each individual consumer) to other companies that aim to sell as well. This paper will show how the media has such a strong grip on youth culture and what it does to maintain that grip.
Legitimizing the Prevailing Political Economy
As Marger notes, the mass media’s purpose is to depict “reality” in such a way that the depiction legitimizes the prevailing political order or economy. In other words, the mass media is a tool of the state and its purpose is to prop up the state, i.e., the power structure. The political system, the economic system, and the mass media are all tied together and are in effect all departments or divisions of the same entity—the same organization, the same club. The members of that club are simply the ruling class. The workers’ lives are spent in service of the ruling class; their livelihood is dependent upon the ruling class paying them a fair wage and providing them with the kind of state in which they can pursue “happiness”—i.e., the American Dream, as propagated by the state, the politics and the media.
Marx predicted the workers would one day rise up against the ruling class, but this never really happened, and the cultural Marxists who followed known as the Frankfurt School wondered why. They argued that the Culture Industry had prevailed upon them in such a way that they would never ever question their place in society vis-à-vis the ruling class. They would be content with their computer games, the entertainment shows put out by Disney, their music, and so on. This would be their happiness and they would be good consumers from the cradle to the grave, making Disney richer and richer all the while and cementing the rule of the ruling class, whose political views they would imbibe from the TV and Internet like milk from their mother’s breast. As Horkeimer would say, mankind had once been but an appendage of the machine and now he was simply an appendage—not even a whole person or attached to anything of any significance at all. The Culture Industry had succeeded in turning mankind into willing corporate slaves, addicted to the drug of media consumption (Drake).
The Drug of Media Consumption
Consuming is the high that the media-addicted seek. The TV programs, films, music, sports, advertisements—all of it is meant to get people to consume. It is meant to attach them to the world created for them by the corporations. The media is their marketing division. It sends messages that make the individual want to consume what the corporations want them to consume, vote the way the corporations want them to vote, and live the way the corporations want them to live (Marger). They are addicted to the media the corporate world delivers to them.
Giroux shows that it is purposefully done by the corporations. Disney is, after all, more than just into media. Media is just one aspect of what it does. It has amusement theme parks, merchandise, toys—in short, a lifestyle. It has a corporate vision, mission and values statement. It supports and promotes an ideology. And it does all of this because at the end of the day it relies upon hooking people like fish on a fisherman’s hook. As Giroux notes, Disney is especially interested in learning how to hook the children because then it does not have to chase them as adults when there is greater risk that they might be independently minded by that point, thinking on their own, and resisting the media representations meant for their consumption and indoctrination. To succeed in its goal, Disney “has enlisted the help of educators, anthropologists and a former researcher with ‘a background in the casino industry’ to not only study all aspects of the culture and intimate lives of young boys, but to do so in a way that allows Disney to produce ‘emotional hooks’ that lure young boys into the wonderful world of corporate Disney in order to turn them into enthusiastic consumers” (Giroux). The childhood of the young is shaped by the corporate vision of Disney: the company uses the media to manipulate the thoughts and desires of the young who grow up watching the Disney shows, become lifelong Taylor Swift fans, and embrace the political ideology the company wants them to embrace.
With Disney’s purchase of Star Wars from Lucas Films, the company has bought another piece of media history (this added to its recent purchase of 20th Century Fox properties). It now controls so much of the content that is viewed by millions of young people all over the world that whatever messages Disney wants to propagate will be propagated and observed by young viewers. As Giroux points out, “Disney exercises a highly disproportionate concentration of control over the means of producing, circulating and exchanging information, especially to kids.” It is by far one of the biggest media companies in the world and its presence in the lives of kids is unrivaled thanks to its memorable characters that it owns and uses to lure children to its channels, films, music and more. Once lured and hooked, they are Disney’s: their education at the feet of Disney the Teacher begins. Thus, as Giroux notes, “by spreading its ideology all over the globe through film, television, satellite broadcasting technologies, the Internet, posters, magazines, billboards, newspapers, videos, and other media forms and technologies, Disney has transformed culture into a pivotal educational force.” What are they taught? They are taught whatever the prevailing politically correct doctrine is—just as Marger said. And they are taught to consume—to live to spend, and that through consumption of the products manufactured for them they will find peace and happiness, fulfillment through consumption.
The Shaping of Youth Culture
Thus directing the lives of youth from a young age, the media and the companies that work with it shape the youth culture to their purposes. The representations they put on their screens, in their music, on their magazines, on their websites, that they put on the channels of their Social Media Influencers—all of that is for the purpose of conveying meaning. As Stuart Hall puts it, “the process of representation has entered into the event itself. In a way, it doesn’t exist meaningfully until it has been represented” (7). Or, in other words, the children do not know what to think about anything until they see it represented for them on the screen by Disney or by their favorite Marvel superheroes (also owned by Disney) or by their favorite Star Wars characters (also Disney) or by their favorite (corporate sponsored) Social Media Influencers on YouTube. The media is the new church, the new school, the new family, the new social circle, the new source of all ideology. Through the media, the youths learn about gender identity, social justice, and working in a collective—all before they even know what any of these things actually are or what they mean for adults.
The media is creating the culture of the youth. Stuart Hall states that “culture is a way in which we make sense of or give meaning to things of one sort or another” (9)—and the children are handed off by the parents to the iPad with the Disney or Nickelodeon apps, the Amazon TV, the Netflix app, the Disney stream. The children are sponges absorbing what they see and hear through the images and sounds. They are repositories of ideas, receiving the instruction programmed for them by the media corporations of the Culture Industry. They are formed in a way that works for the corporations. The meaning is what they want it to be and the children receive it without question. But because the media does not exist in a vacuum, its meaning and its messages are reinforced in the classrooms where the socio-political indoctrination is provided in more explicit terms—through history, literature, sociology, and so on.
Then the children grow and they get jobs and become good and loyal consumers, evaluating their life’s worth by the extent to which they are able to meet their goals—going to Disney World for celebrations, collecting Star Wars figurines, watching the latest iteration of whatever drama is being produced by one of the major streaming services. And because they must enjoy their media somewhere they must think about what to do for a dwelling—rent or buy, live with the parents or move out? And because they do not want to be alone, they must think about whether to have a roommate or whether to pursue a romantic relationship with a significant other. The decisions all feed in to one another—but they all start with the meaning fed to them in their childhood. Their youth culture is not just about action heroes and super villains. It is also about preparing them for the world that the corporations have prepared for them to enter into. Youth culture is like prep school for the real world of adulthood. They will not be taught to question the culture that they are given. Instead, they will be taught why the culture they have been given is so good. Of course, the reason it is good is not the reason they are told: it is good because it means lifelong service to consuming the products of the corporate world. They are told, however, that it is good because of democracy, freedom, the American Dream, equality, social justice, gender identity, and so on. They hear “sweet nothings,” and because the “sweet nothings” leave them feeling empty they go back to what they know will at least distract them from their emptiness: the products and entertainments offered them by their family of corporations, always ready to entertainment them with the latest media drug of choice.
As Stuart Hall states, “the production of meaning means that there is a kind of symbolic work, an activity, a practice, which has to go on in giving meaning to things and in communicating that meaning to someone else” (14). For corporations like Disney, that practice involves hooking its audience while they are young and retaining them for life—the same as a pusher hooks a junkie. The meaning has to keep changing as the child grows to adolescence and then to adulthood, and the media is there to facilitate that change. The meaning communicate to the child is not going to be the same for the adult, but the Culture Industry has a finely laid track, a process of meaning making, that can veritably last a lifetime. Giroux contends that “as one of the most influential corporations in the world, Disney does more than provide entertainment, it also shapes in very powerful ways how young people understand themselves, relate to others and experience the larger society.” But it is not just young people—it is adults, too. Youth Culture inevitably gives way to adult culture, and the adult continues to look to media for inspiration, guidance and fulfillment. The media keeps the person filled with enough entertainment that no questions are ever asked. Giroux recognizes it as a tragedy, but only for those who actually suffer out in the real world from real problems. In homes where Disney is provided, all necessities are provided.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, media shapes society by providing it with a sense of meaning. That meaning is not static but rather is predicated on the legitimization of the political economy. The media is part and parcel with the government, the corporations, and the institutions. They are not separate entities except to lower level individuals who are on the outside of the club looking in—if not already looking at one of the screens the ruling class has erected for their amusement.


Works Cited
Drake, Jennifer, et al. Growing up postmodern: Neoliberalism and the war on the young.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002.
Giroux, Henry. “Disney, Casino Capitalism and the Exploitation of Young Boys:
Beyond the Politics of Innocence.” TruthOut, 2009. https://truthout.org/articles/disney-casino-capitalism-and-the-exploitation-of-young-boys-beyond-the-politics-of-innocence/
Hall, Stuart. “Representation & the Media.” Media Education Foundation, 1997.
https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Representation-and-the-Media-Transcript.pdf
Marger, Martin N. \\\"The mass media as a power institution.\\\" Power in modern societies (1993): 238-249.