90s American Popular Culture and Youth Identity Formation

Introduction: Popular Culture as a Social Force

Popular culture is a dominant force in America; it reaches into classrooms, cars, and homes, influencing what people think, watch, listen to, wear, and buy. Popular culture can be addictive, annoying, offensive, controversial, and pleasurable all at once. It is also difficult — and in many cases nearly impossible — to avoid. It is often challenging to differentiate between popular culture and the rest of everyday life, because it is so deeply entrenched in daily patterns. Given this significant role in American society, this paper proposes that popular culture should be understood as a cultural practice with its own power to bring about social change — to transform social factors and the very foundations of people's lives. This essay discusses in particular the manner in which popular culture can help youth to make society more democratic: more fair, just, and equitable. Popular culture is difficult to avoid because it lies at the very core of the United States public sphere. While it is true that popular culture can be heavily influenced by corporate interests — which are private and profit-driven — it is nonetheless an arena where people have a stake, a voice, and an interest (Dolby, 2003).

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

Contemporary societies offer more options for young people, both culturally and educationally, and with regard to lifestyle choices. Today's youth can make their own decisions and are less bound by traditions, parental control, religion, or the gender patterns of the past. This phenomenon is referred to as cultural emancipation; it opens up newer and greater possibilities for young people. However, despite this expanded freedom, individual choices still have to be justified. Young people have a duty and a responsibility to choose their own life course — what might be called a "choice biography" — in contrast to the traditions of the past. The changing gender roles, family relations, and dissolution of tradition may imply a loosening of the social fabric. Some researchers have warned about the emergence of a "risk" society, pointing, for example, to increases in criminal activity and the increased use of drugs among young women over the past two decades (Skoe & von der Lippe, 2005).

Conceptual and Theoretical Framework

According to France (2007, p. 158), one disadvantage of the post-structuralist approach was that it overemphasized the importance of "agency" over structure and focused disproportionately on dress and style. This study gives equal emphasis to the role of institutions — the state and the media — and to authorities such as parents, religion, teachers, peers, home life, and ethnic tradition, all of which are embedded in the lives of fourth-year university students. In its investigation of media consumption, globalization, and self-identity, this study examines how different ethnicities identify with national culture (popular culture) via local media compared to international media. The study also investigates the links between national cultures, religion, ethnicity, diaspora, and globalization in terms of media consumption practices.

The idea of media consumption and its role in helping users form their own identities is examined through a review of users' day-to-day practices. A better understanding of consumption patterns enables deeper understanding of the motivations behind them (Karim, 2010). These activities cannot be adequately examined through questionnaires alone, especially when a researcher seeks to analyze similarities and differences across different age groups and ethnicities. Unlike many studies on youth media consumption, this study does not seek to establish a causal relationship between media consumption and moral values, as that approach is considered too simplistic for theorizing youth and their media practices (Dearn, 2013). Instead, this study is concerned with the manner in which youth of different religious and ethnic backgrounds utilize media to form their own identities. More crucially, it investigates the new identities being formed as a result of current media consumption trends, and how these identities vary between different age groups and ethnicities. The answers to these questions will better explain the changes in moral values and self-identity in this new era of globalization (Karim, 2010).

This study examines how fourth-year university students use the media to form their own identities. It also investigates whether there are similarities or differences between ethnic groups in this trend with regard to attitudes toward ethnic culture, and explores the assumption that youth are more entertainment-oriented in their media consumption. The following research questions guide the study:

1. To what extent is the media consumption of a fourth-year college student oriented toward entertainment, and what are the reasons?

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

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

4. Are there differences in media consumption among young people of different ages and ethnicities?

5. What are the limitations to their media consumption?

6. In what ways do different ethnic groups consume local and international media content, and why?

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

8. What are the causes of these differences? Are they due to a consistent pattern, or are they related to globalization?

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

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

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

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

13. What kinds of self-identities result from media use? Do these differ between age groups and ethnicities?

14. What are the differences in cultural values as depicted in foreign versus local media, and are these differences perceived differently by different ethnic and age groups? (Karim, 2010; France, 2007; Dearn, 2013)

Literature Review: From High Culture to Youth Subcultures

Scholars and researchers have had to grapple first with the challenge of defining what "popular culture" is — and by extension what it is not. Definitions are culturally and historically bound, and the answer to the question of what constitutes popular culture has changed dramatically over the last five decades. From 1860 until approximately 1950, Matthew Arnold's idea of culture — which later helped define popular culture — was the most influential concept in circulation. According to Arnold, culture is the best of what is not only thought but said in the world. His definition, combined with his belief that the British middle class and aristocracy were superior to the working class, gave rise to the concept of "high culture" as opposed to the culture of the common people. In declaring his own class as the bearers of what is civilized, good, and right, Arnold shaped a paradigm that dominated popular culture discourse for nearly a century: 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: a person finds what he calls himself, and another person may identify this as the same person (Locke, 1975, p. 346). There are two different ways of reading this assertion within the context of Locke's wider philosophy. In one perspective, persons and selves are equivalent — the third-personal and first-personal sides of the same coin. In the second perspective, being a self is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a person; where there is an individual, its limits must match those of the pre-existing self, but selfhood is more fundamental than personhood. These two perspectives on the self and its relationship to personhood have re-emerged in contemporary philosophical discussion, with the self represented in narrative accounts and personhood in minimalist views (Speight, 2015).

Locke's discussion of personal identity is particularly significant. He defines the self as the conscious, thinking part of a human being that senses pain or pleasure and is capable of happiness or misery (Locke, 1975, p. 341; Speight, 2015). Building on Locke, McMahan developed his "embodied mind" account as an alternative to existing theories of personal identity. According to McMahan, our intuitions about egoistic concern indicate that what matters — and what provides reason for concern about the future — is the sameness of consciousness (McMahan, 2002, p. 67). However, McMahan rejects Locke's view that sameness of consciousness requires higher-level connections between elements of consciousness over time, arguing that illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease demonstrate that such connections are neither necessary nor sufficient for egoistic concern. McMahan equates the sameness of consciousness with the sameness of mind, and argues that a single mind can exist only when enough of the brain in which it is located continues to function. He therefore suggests that the basis for egoistic concern is the functional continuity of a sufficient portion of those brain areas that support mental activity (McMahan, 2002, pp. 67–68; Speight, 2015).

Modernity creates new options for youth and generates new patterns in young people's transition to adulthood, particularly for young women. However, it also increases differences between young women in terms of social position, lifestyle, and economic status. Increased enrollment of women in educational institutions tends to reduce culturally determined gender gaps and to expand the potential for women's participation in politics. Research drawing on Euro-Barometer data shows that formal education is associated with the elimination of the gender gap in political participation: the gender difference is largest among those with the least formal education and diminishes almost entirely among the highly educated (Skoe & von der Lippe, 2005).

The Birmingham School's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), significantly influenced by the work of Raymond Williams, became one of the most important sites for research on youth culture in the twentieth century. Unlike other popular culture researchers, CCCS scholars began with the youth themselves rather than with popular culture as such. They focused on young people's lives and experiences, and emphasized popular culture as an arena of struggle and resistance. Prior to Raymond Williams' work, youth research appeared almost exclusively within the sociology of deviance, which portrayed some young people as criminals intent on undermining society (Bucholz, 2002; Lutzker, 2002).

CCCS researchers were interested in the relationship between form and ideology, as detailed in Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style and in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Tony Jefferson and Stuart Hall. Rather than studying deviance, the Birmingham researchers examined youth subcultures — Skinheads, Punks, Teddy Boys, Rockers, and others — as forms of working-class resistance (Bucholz, 2002; Barker & Galasinski, 2001). Music, makeup, hair, and clothing were reframed not as signs of criminal behavior or adolescent rebellion, but as resistance to the class hierarchies that structured young people's lives and futures. As Christine Griffin noted, the psychology-popularized "storm-and-stress" model depicts youth as a period of unavoidable socio-psychological turmoil between childhood's dependency and the mature stability of adulthood (Barker & Galasinski, 2001).

In this model, young people's outrageous preference for "bizarre" music simply reflects a transitional developmental stage. The CCCS researchers rejected the storm-and-stress model, arguing instead that cultural forms were not merely reflections of resistance but were resistance itself — and specifically, resistance to the entrenched class structures of a highly stratified British society. They offered the Teddy Boys' style as one example: by exaggerating and therefore mocking the manners and dress of the British aristocracy, these young people altered the cultural meaning of upper-class styles and thereby disrupted naturalized power structures. In this way, youth style became a site of political struggle, as "politics" expanded well beyond parliament, courts, and street protests. The first wave of youth subculture researchers focused primarily on class; those who followed quickly expanded the field to include race and gender (Lee & Vaught, 2003; Dyson, 2003).

Conclusion

In the dialogue-based approach to identity, conversation is regarded as the basic metaphor for the self. From this perspective, narrative identity is less a single unified voice than a collection of competing interests. It is often assumed within the narrative tradition that mental health is directly proportional to the coherence of an individual's life narrative, and that mental illness or traumatic events can disrupt well-being by fragmenting that coherence. While the integrating function of narrative is important, an exclusive focus on coherence can marginalize issues of multiplicity and complexity that emerge when life narratives are examined in depth. A singular, fully integrated life narrative is not a realistic representation of selfhood: even in a generative life, what results is not so much a singularity of voice as a deeper complexity of conflicts and competing voices beneath any surface story.

Since all these matters are contextual, fourth-year students' identities cannot easily be reduced to social demographics such as class, age, ethnicity, gender, or religion. The extent to which religion and ethnicity are embedded in students' lives determines their identities: the deeper the embeddedness, the stronger the primordial bond. This in turn affects how students see themselves in relation to members of other cultures, their social position, and how they relate to others as members of a multi-ethnic state. Ultimately, it was context that explained the differences and commonalities of values among participants — since context was the key factor, each position was dependent on the situation.

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