Teenager

         Teenagers – Often shown as being aggressive, moody, lazy, criminals, hate school.It is significant when discussing the films to emphasise that they are representing working class youth, rather than youth generally. Middle class youths are absent from these type of representations.

There is a whole media industry aimed at socially constructing youth in terms of lifestyle and identity. Magazines are produced specifically for young people. Record companies, Internet music download sites, mobile telephone companies and radio stations all specifically target and attempt to shape the musical tastes of young people. Networking sites on the Internet, such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, allow youth to project their identities around the world.

Youth are often portrayed by news media as a social problem, as immoral or anti-authority and consequently constructed as folk devils as part of a moral panic. The majority of moral panics since the 1950s have been manufactured around concerns about young people’s behaviour, such as their membership of specific ‘deviant’ sub-cultures (e.g., teddy boys, hoodies) or because their behaviour (e.g., drug taking or binge drinking) has attracted the disapproval of those in authority.