With reference to youth, discuss how the identity of youths has been mediated.

Foucault said that our identity is mediated through other people and we then form a collective identity. Foucault is against categorising people into a group (stereotyping). He believes it is hard to get out of a group once accepted into it. By looking at Rihanna’s music video “What’s My Name?”, we can see that she conforms to the typical youth and gender characteristics. Young girls watching this video will deem her behaviour acceptable, constructing their identity around her constructed image (Richard Dyer – Star theory). This music video is an example of one that will aid the mediation of youths behaviours and ways of thinking.

This will restrict young girls views of being who they are, in order to become like Rihanna, which will result in them being categorised into a group (collective identity) and finding it difficult to change once stereotypes as Foucault suggests. Rihanna’s “What’s My Name?” shows Rihanna getting together with Drake after a short meeting in a shop. This demonstrates the idea of youth being social, busy and sexually promiscuous. As youths watch this, they’ll see it as acceptable to have relationships such as this and ‘one-night-stands’.

The lyrics are also very suggestive and youths can pick up the connotative messages which may influence their way of thinking or encourage them to continue the hegemonic view; that youths are all like this. For example, “I really wanna see if you can go downtown with a girl like me” has connotations of a sexual nature.

Rihanna represents an idea of a popular and ideal look for a young girl and this may mediate youths thoughts on what to expect and what to strive towards as Winship’s notion says. Winship’s notion of complexity is about being prepared, in terms of audience gratification, to finally recognise the ideal version of ourselves. Rihanna is portraying an ideal image of what a young female should look like and therefore their target audience will try and change to suit this image. Their constructed audience is ‘made’. This constructed view of a young female is then treated as the ‘in’ group for youths. Henri Tajfel says that “Individuals strive to improve their self-image by trying to enhance their self-esteem, based on their personal identity or various social identities - ‘in’ group, ‘out’ group.” Youths will have been mediated into wanting Rihanna’s portrayed image.

If we look at older music videos such as “Rapture” by Blondie, there is a big difference in lyrics and mise en scene. The lyrics do not have as many colloquialisms in it, nor sexually connotative message and the camera doesn’t focus entirely on the artist but also on other characters on set. If the artist had shown more of her skin and the camera had many close ups of her then this music video possibly would have been banned. In comparison, Rihanna’s music videos are much more focussed on the artist and are much more explicit. However, nothing is being done about it because as an audience, we have been desensitised to this being the ‘norm’ nowadays. Modern consumerism has helped music videos involving sexual images and violence becomes glorified. These ideologies being fed to youths may impact their thoughts and may be influenced into thinking that the representations they are seeing via the portrayals in these music videos are that of the society, as Stuart Hall says. He also says that ideological things are becoming naturalised.

Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding theory explains that the media encodes messages within their texts for us, as an audience, to decode and choose to believe what messages we think best apply to us and our situations. In terms of youths, they may pick up messages that project violence and sexualisation in a positive light. Looking at a modern youth music video, Temper T’s “Next Hype”, violence has been used as a comical factor to appeal to its target audience. Youths watching this are probably not even phased by the thoughts of violence in this video because it has become normal to involve this in music videos. Modern artists in the pop and R&B genre seem to be using ‘shock tactics’ to attract their audiences to construct their image. The weirder something is or the more something pushes the boundaries of regulations, seems to be attracting youths. Youths, then, will be more likely to adopt the same ideologies of violence and rebellion that the artists hold thus their identities being mediated to think like this.

"Identity is complicated" says David Gauntlett meaning that we never adopt one identity and keep it, but that we mediate and end up changing our opinions and attitudes regularly. This seen especially among youth. If we look at the ever-changing images portrayed by music artists these days, such as Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga. They change the way they represent themselves so their audiences are forced into persuing their 'look' or constructed image, Richard Dyer's theory. Their audiences are mostly youths which will try and follow the messages given out by these artists. If these artists keep changing their identites to keep up with the fashion, youths will never get to settle into a collective identity and are obligated to mediate along with them. Their identity will become complicated.

To conclude, youths identities are being mediated via the inconsistancy of an artist's image and the ever evolving music videos that seem to be pointing in the direction of more violence and more sexually explicit content. Youths may think that this hasn't affected them but they have become disensitised to being exposed to the promotion of violence and sexualisation and won't notice it. For the future, music videos may become more extreme and youths may end up striving to become the idealised images that artists will be portraying.