In “A Cycle of
Outrage”, James Gilbert beings
Chapter 1: A Problem of Behavior with
a blast to the past recollection of when Look tried to help parents figure out how to tell if certain teens were delinquents
or not. They did this by printing common teenage lingo and what it meant so
that adults could better understand their language.
1. “It’s purpose
was to analyze the unfamiliar and make it less threatening (p.12).”
I believe this
quote sums up the goal of most institutions and media texts, like Life, and the Ladies Home Journal, but I
also think this quote sums up all of history, as well. From war to women,
humans have always tried to isolate something, nitpick at it, and form (often
false) conclusions about it. This may seem like a good idea when despair is
around, but doing this with teenagehood set the groundwork that labeled teens
as “unfamiliar” and as an alien life form— one of our course themes. Now
parents and adults could look at teens as if they were a subject matter in some
type of research study, rather than as their children. They could analyze and
pick apart their children’s actions to better understand them, but really all
this did was set them apart even more.
2. “On top of
curiosity and worry came the increasing recognition that teenagers had a major
impact on the shaping of American popular culture… We’ve stopped trying to
teach them how to live. Instead, we’re asking them how they think we should live (p.13)”
This quote
demonstrates David Croteau’s point in “Media and Ideology” that media texts
create and shift how people see the world and, in effect, how people act and
respond to these images. In addition, in “A Tangle of Courses”, Rebecca Raby
discusses that teenagers are “courted as a high-consumer group, and are modeled
in the media as the ideal age, with teenagehood constituting the onset of ‘the
best years of your life’. This connection between the two texts made me wonder
if maybe adults began to look to teenagers for fads because they wanted to
revisit those “best years” in their own way.
“They looked and
acted differently. Often they seemed remarkably hostile or even criminally
inclined. In other words, they looked and behaved like juvenile delinquents
(p.17).”
A few paragraphs
before this quote, Gilbert discusses the dress codes instituted by high schools
as a method to control and discipline teenagers. In this situation, teenagers
were being told that expression and individuality were means of rebellion and
danger. As soon as teens became a market for pleasurable consumption, though,
as Raby also addresses in “A Tangle of Discourses”, their expression and
possible “rebellion” wasn’t as important as a new market for businesses. The
fear returned of course, as teens took these new markets of consumption as
their own. As they were encouraged to participate in these markets, like the
work force and car industries, teenagers began shift tastes and fads.
Although it was
briefly touched upon, do you think the fear of juvenile delinquency existed
before media and institutions began to separate teenagers as their own class
capable of so much influence and power in business markets and pop culture?
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