Youth Culture
Youth culture is a modern terminology, and it has become a common means for understanding the identity of youth. Is there a concept of youth culture or youth subculture as such? What is the essential way of understanding the true youth identity? How does the concept of youth relate to the concept of culture? How is the youth positioned in relation to childhood and adulthood? These form the indispensable questions relating to the concept of youth culture, and it is most vital these are responded with most certainty to understand the actual human aspects as they relate to the important concept of youth and youth identity. In the modern world, there are ways by which the concept of youth is comprehended, and one of the essential aspects of this comprehension is relating this with the concept of youth culture. The impact of globalization and the emergence of the modern culture have retained their most powerful hold on the concept of youth in its relation to the community and the culture.
The positioning of the concept of youth in the most primary aspects of its behavior is the trend of the time. “If childhood means acceptance, and adulthood means conservatism, youth means rebelliousness. Youth are seen as the part of society that is most likely to engage in the process of cultural borrowing that is disruptive of the reproduction of traditional cultural practices, from modes of dress to language, aesthetics, and ideologies. From Japanese punk to Australian hip hop, youth subcultures are seen as being implicitly rebellious, born as much from a desire to reject the generation that went before them, as from identification with what they have become.” (Heaven & Tubridy). Therefore, the concept of youth is one of the most significant concepts that call for a detailed analysis. Accordingly, the focal concern of this paper has been to accurately comprehend the concept of youth culture and to find out the exact means of finding meaning to the youth identity on the background of the modern concepts and percepts of youth subcultures.
As we begin exploring the concept of youth cultures and their relation to various human elements, it is pertinent that we define the concept of youth culture most appropriately. To be exact, the term youth culture is of modern origin and seems to cover myriads of aspects in modern man’s life. “The notion of a youth culture was developed from the psychological term ‘adolescence.’ Whilst the latter suggested that the key to understanding youthful behavior lay in physical bodily changes and emotional upheaval surrounding the onset of puberty, the idea of a youth culture suggested that such behavior was caused by social and economic change. In 1942 the American sociologist Talcott Parsons coined the term ‘youth culture’ to isolate the supposedly unique and highly distinctive behavior patterns that were thought to be emerging amongst American ‘adolescents.’ (Muncie, 2004, p.156).
Remarkably, such an understanding of youth culture does not respond to the essential questions concerning youth identity. However, it is significant that the explanation points to the essential question concerning the role of the changing social and economic situations on youth culture. The emerging social situation all through the world is the right framework to establish a significant understanding of the youth culture. Mostly, the concept of youth culture itself, as in the case of other social concepts, is a construct of the society and the culture, which act as the fundamental powers behind the construction of human theories and ideologies. When considering this determining force of the society and culture along with the fact that youth are the most important social actors, we can correlate the concept with prominent issues of the modern world such as resistance, popular culture, gender, sexuality, family, school, work, politics, violence and changing practices such as dating. This is a significant framework to understand the concept of youth culture.
As we have already remarked, there have been various ways to understand the concept of youth culture. It is essential every effort explain this dominant concept relates to the sociological concepts of youth identity. In an analysis of the post-modern tendencies of youth interaction with the world, it is significantly noted that the youth identity is comprehended effectively in terms of the subcultures it forms. This has been one of the most notable ways of understanding the concept of youth culture. “Considerable work has been carried out empirically on subcultures and on youth cultures. There has been a recognition that links have to be made between sociology and the relations of class in an industrial society, and this means the relations with adults and the total relations of these groups to the means of production.
Many studies explore the impact of societal reaction, or the meaning of style, or the effects of the neighborhood, of immigrant culture, of femininity or popular manufactured culture, and these are now being related to the struggle for space within dominant ideologies.” (Brake, 1980, p.176). Therefore, the youth subculture is the result of a continual struggle for an individual space within the construct of the society. This need for a ‘room of its own’ was necessitated by the societal positioning of the youth in relation to childhood and adulthood. Many of the essential investigations of youth culture point to the social nature of youth within the subculture of youth. Thus, the subculture of youth is represented through very many ways, including the practice and culture of the most popular graffiti and hip-hop songs and the culture of technology-mediated modes of communication among the younger generation, such as the practice of text messaging, emailing, etc. may be best comprehended as the result of a societal makeup or construction of youth culture by the existing social culture.
It is, therefore, essential that factors that contribute to the growth of youth subcultures. There are various aspects of the modern world that go into the making of a youth subculture. “Caught up in an age of increasing despair, youth no longer appear to inspire adults to reaffirm their commitment to a public discourse that envisions a future in which human suffering is diminished while the general welfare of society is increased… the relations between youth and adults have always been marked by strained generational and ideological struggles, but the new economic and social conditions that youth face today, along with a callous indifference to their spiritual and material needs, suggest a qualitatively different attitude on the part of many adults toward American youth – one that indicates that the young have become the lowest national priority.” (Epstein & Giroux, 1998, p.25-26). This marked difference between the social factors and the existing youth concepts and identity confront mutually, and we may attempt to explain the youth subculture in this background. Therefore, one of the essential remarks about the practice of the social construction of separate and distinguished youth culture is that the concept of youth has been affected by the existing paradigms of the social structure and social culture.
In the modern world, the concept of youth culture is understood in terms of what the youth of the present day are constructed by the societal perception of youth. Thus, whenever there were attempts to isolate the youth identity from the general structure of the society, the result has been such which harms the existence of social harmony. The construct of youth subculture, therefore, becomes a powerful tool to explain the prevalence of issues and problems related to youth behavior. “For many youths, especially those who experience ruthless subordination and oppression, nihilism often translates into senseless violence, racism, homophobia, drug addiction, date rape, suicide pacts, escalating homicide rates, and a refusal to participate in building communities of hope and alliances with other oppressed groups.” (Epstein & Giroux, 1998, p.26). Ultimately, it is, therefore, necessary to comprehend that the concepts of youth, youth culture, and youth subculture are essentially the construct of society and societal norms.
The subcultures, including the youth subculture, within the culture are the result of several factors, and the dominant value system of the society is an influential element in the makeup of these subcultures. “In any complex, stratified society, there are several cultures which develop within the context of a dominant value system. The dominant value system is never homogenous; instead, there are constant modifications and adaptations of dominant ideas and values.“ (Brake & Brake, 1985 p.6). There are various aspects of the society and the social value system that go into the making of youth subculture, and therefore it is necessary that the concept of youth is determined after acquiring the right perception of these factors. This explains the reason for the stereotyped concepts of youth culture.
The concept of youth and that of the youth subculture depends very much on the societal factors that are the significant force behind the construct of the concept of youth. “Constructed primarily within the language of the market and the increasingly conservative politics of media culture, contemporary youth appear unable to constitute themselves through a defining generational referent that gives them a sense of distinctiveness and vision…” (Epstein & Giroux, 1998, p.25). In this perception of the subculture as it exists in the cultural framework of a society, it is also necessary that we understand the different perceptions regarding the subcultures.
As has been mentioned early, the youth subculture is the construct of society and the mainstream culture. There are times that the youth subcultures, due mainly to the way it has been framed and constructed, turn to be anti-social and problematic. “Subcultures exist at the cultural fringe and are typically anti-establishment and confrontational. Subcultures are frequently portrayed as dangerous by the mainstream media and are typically associated and confused with delinquency… Divested of their extreme stylistic alterity and transformed into a consumable object by fashion, music, and other cultural industries, subcultural styles are frequently appropriated by, and thereby integrated into, dominant culture. To say that subcultures are typically anti-establishment and confrontational is not to say that such practices are always conscious and considered critiques of the dominant culture. Cultural practices that oppose dominant culture in this way are more properly referred to as counter-cultures.” (Heaven & Tubridy). Thus, the youth identity has got multi faces which also suggests that the framing of the youth culture within the most appropriate way is necessary for the youth to be useful members of society.
Through the investigation, it has been found out that there are various ways in which the concepts of youth, youth culture, and youth subculture are comprehended in modern society. The theories of the social construction of youth very well establish the concept of youth culture and the framing of youth subculture as it turns the youth top the right paths of social construction is the need of the day. It is because the construction of stereotyped youth culture within society turns the youth into being socially harmful, and this will affect the existence of the society. Therefore, in the modern world, the essential need of society is the construction of a youth culture that, instead of harming the very existence of society, joins the efforts of social building.
Reference
Heaven, Cara., & Tubridy, Matthew. 11. Global Youth Culture and Youth Identity, Web.
Muncie, John. (2004). Youth & Crime, ebrary.Inc. Sage. P.156.
Brake, Mike. (1980). The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures, Routledge, p.176.
Epstein, Jonathon S., & Giroux, Henry A. (1998). Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Pedagogy of Display” in Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, Blackwell Publishing, p.25-26.
Epstein, Jonathon S., & Giroux, Henry A. (1998). Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Pedagogy of Display” in Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, Blackwell Publishing, p.26.
Brake, Mike., & Brake, Michael. (1985). Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada, Routledge. P.6.
Epstein, Jonathon S., & Giroux, Henry A. (1998). Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Pedagogy of Display” in Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, Blackwell Publishing, p.25.