Media Consumption and the Identity Projects of the Young

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to discern the different roles of media in the identity projects of the young. Building on the idea of social identification, the analysis is focused on defining the different ways and criteria in which their own media consumption is accounted for by the young when making sense of themselves and others. Empirical data for the study included 53 Finnish university students’ essays on their relationships with different media vehicles and contents. The findings indicate that media consumption attaches to the identity projects of the young by relating to their taste preferences, everyday concerns, lifestyles and life themes, thereby addressing the basic states of human existence, namely having, doing and being. The findings demonstrate that media consumption connects with five different identity projects: (a) being a global citizen, (b) being a student, (c) being young, (d) being a devotee and (e) being healthy.

Blended Lives

“…Young people use media for viewing images of people's lives both similar to and different from their own. This can be interpreted as escapism, but can also be understood as a means of identity formation (Cranmer, 2010;Lim et al, 2013;Oksama and Turtiainen, 2004;Sihvonen, 2015).…”

“…The young people who preferred calling or talking to people face-to-face were also the ones who stated that they felt insecure with their ICT skills. A lack of appropriate education (Van Deursen et al, 2011, 2015 and/or general illiteracy (Cranmer, 2010) may provide an explanation for this, as ICT and social media are still mostly based on communication through text which is challenging for those who have difficulty in reading and writing.…”

Developing an Assessment Battery to Measure Exposure to Police Brutality on Social Media Among Black Adolescents

“…Our qualitative findings showed that Black adolescents" attitudes and perceptions are particularly pliable with their immersion in social media. Social media, which first emerged in the 2000s, has the power to affect social change in society and has cemented itself as an indispensable mode of communication among today's youth (Sihvonen, 2015).…”

“Tag a person who loves candy” – sociocultural approach to unhealthy food marketing to adolescents in social media

“…For instance, “like” buttons can be clicked back and forth on Instagram, and Snapchat provides its users with a streak score that reflects the number of consecutive days when two users have sent messages to each other (Griffiths, 2018). To understand social media platforms’ role from the adolescents’ perspective, the online sphere has to be seen as a central social context for adolescents, where they, for instance, construct their identities (Hübner Barcelos and Vargas Rossi, 2014; Sihvonen, 2015), cultivate their social relationships (Décieux et al , 2019; Hübner Barcelos and Vargas Rossi, 2014; Thulin, 2018), take political action (Allaste and Saari, 2020) and learn about the events happening around the world (Bergström and Jervelycke Belfrage, 2018). In some studies, the high (or even extensive) usage of social media has also been connected with the so-called “fear of missing out”, which refers to the desire to keep up with all the things happening within one’s social sphere (Handa and Ahuja, 2020; Sultan, 2021).…”