Teenagers in the Media the Modern Media

Teenagers in the Media

The modern media portrays the average teenager as a stereotype. Instead of portraying teenagers as individual people, the media tends to depict a stereotypical entity without unique idiosyncrasies or differing preferences. Teens in the media, such as in advertising, in movies, or in television programs are usually written by adults and therefore the representations depicted are caricatures rather than honest reflections of real people. There are typically three different stereotypes of teenagers which the media exploits and reinforces: teens who are obsessed or at the very least highly concerned with brands and physical image, teens who use drugs or alcohol prevalently and whose concern is more to do with parties and other debauchery rather than schooling and planning for their future, and that all teens engage in behaviors such as premarital sex as minors.

Some of the images that are seen in advertising which features products aimed at teens, the focus is on the brand of the product. In one example of an advertisement for Levi's brand jeans, a young man appears to be in flight (Let the average). The understanding from this picture is that anyone who purchases this pair of jeans will be elevated to a god-like position. The words themselves promise that the pants will make the wearer "divine." Such hyperbole is the norm for advertising which is targeted at teens. Within the school system, fads are an important thing and the need to have the right shoe or the right jacket is put upon the teenagers by their peers. Advertisers know this and exploit the need for brand acquisition by creating images such as these which further the difference between the brand name and the item itself.

Another stereotype of teenagers according to modern media is their likelihood to engage in drinking and drug use. They are also shown to be interested in partying on the weekends and engaging in other "fun" activities outside of the school. A recent film entitled Project X, portrays just this tendency. Three teenage boys throw a raucous party when the teens' parents are out of town. Even the tag line of the film's poster pledges that this is to be "the party you've only dreamed about" (Phillips 2012). Without adult supervision to hinder them, teenagers turn on music, dance erotically, drink copious amounts of alcohol, and perpetrate other behaviors which they do not want their parents to know about. This is far from the first film to showcase this type of behavior. Nearly every film featuring teenagers will feature some scene of the proverbial raging party. For many students, if not most teens, this is not reality. They may in fact be invited to parties at some point in their high school careers, but few will go to the kinds of no holds barred affairs of the filmmakers' imaginations. However, the fact that these such parties are shown so frequently increases their importance to teens because they come to believe that this is how they should behave.

Teenagers are also shown in modern media to be engaging in promiscuous sexual behaviors. Sometimes the characters in film or television will be shown to have multiple partners, pregnancies, or abortions despite the fact that the characters are all under the legal age of consent. Television programs like Glee claim to be representative of real teens (Murphy 2009). It is true that many teens have sex and many get pregnant but there are usually far more consequences for their actions than are shown on television. Real-life people who have sex frequently get sexually-transmitted diseases or are forced to deal with a lifelong financial responsibility. This is rarely seen on programs; instead only the more salacious side of sexual relationships are shown creating an unreal impression of what happens when someone takes part in risky behaviors.