EverydaytalkInvestigatingmediaconsumptionandidentityamongstschoolchildren.docVIP

Everyday Talk: Investigating Media Consumption and Identity Amongst School Children Caroline Dover Abstract: This paper refers to research investigating the significance of teen engagement with media and popular culture within the everyday environment of a multi-ethnic secondary school. Involved here is an interest in the formation and negotiation of the young informants’ identities. It is argued that the social significance of media and popular culture can be explored by adopting an ethnographic research model that engages with everyday social interaction and social processes. A set of research methods is proposed for exploring the use value and symbolic value of media and popular culture for different teen consumers. The research model presented enables an investigation of everyday media use that extends beyond the focus on interaction between the text and the consumer commonly found in media consumption studies. Keywords: Media and popular culture consumption, identity, interaction, everyday life, media ethnography Introduction The purpose of this paper is to propose a research model for exploring the use value and symbolic value of media and popular culture for different teen consumers, in relation to their everyday social interactions. The media and popular culture industries offer highly significant resources for the consumption-related activities of adolescents in Britain. At the same time, this consumption is an important aspect of these young people’s social relationships and, as such, is implicated in the continual process of identity formation. Much of the attention given to “identity” within Media Studies has focused on textual representations (of gender, class, ethnicity and so forth), fan group membership or cross-cultural comparisons of media markets. An alternative approach is to attend closely to the situated ecology of identity performance and perceive macro identities (gender, ethnicity, race, generation etc) as constructed and locally inflected