In Progress

It seems the term global youth culture is gaining widespread traction in the marketing/market research/trendspotting communities. PSFK, an excellent marketing blog out of the UK, has a quick introduction on the topic, inspired by a blog called YouthMesh, which describes itself as a Christian-oriented youth organizing community. YouthMesh takes a stab at explaining what global youth culture entails, but derails slightly into how it applies to Christianity. And last year, Newsweek had a crass and fairly off-the-mark take on the topic in an article titled Children of the Web that promises to explain ” what business can do to cash in” on the emerging community.

I recently completed a down and dirty literature review on global youth culture and its relationship to popular culture production as a prelude to my master’s thesis research next year. I thought it might be helpful to distill the essence of the paper here and shed some non-jargony light on what exactly global youth culture encompasses, and why that might not be the best term for it. For more on the topic, I suggest you consult the bibliography found at the end of my literature review “Global Youth Culture Moves into Cultural Production.” It isn’t comprehensive, but it’s a good departure point.

Global youth culture might sound like a nice all-encompassing term, but it actually gets defined a few different ways, depending on who’s doing the defining. Here’s my stab at crafting a definition that works for everyone.

Global youth culture: A community of youngish people, roughly from 14 to 35, who share a love of mainstream popular culture including music, movies and fashion and acknowledge a shared mindset with others in their age bracket around the world. They’re found on social networks, own digital products like iPhones and digital cameras, and are wide open to marketing messages, some sophisticated, some less so. The marketing community loves them because they can be fiercely passionate about their artists, products and brands, so they make good evangelists among their personal networks. They’re the people making movies like Slumdog Millionaire and bands like Justice and MIA a huge success. And one of my favorite TV shows, ABDC on MTV, is really all about this group, even if its contestants are all US-based.

So what does the academy have to say about this group? Well, two things, primarily.

1. Global youth culture is a significant political force in the world. They’re the engine powering the Obama love right now, but even more so, have had an impact on the issues of our day — global warming and power imbalances stemming from imperialism among others (WTO riots, anyone?). Avaaz and MoveOn are great examples of activist global youth culture in action today.

2. The commodification of culture is the norm for them, which leads to homogenization on at least some levels. Academics (and everyone else) has a tendency to go to extremes, so the people who write about this use terms like “McDonaldization” to convey its widespread evils and talk about it as the death of family and ethnic traditions.

A few more tidbits from me:

MTV is trying to create a social platform for this audience at MTV Iggy. I think they got a LOT of things right so far but are obviously still feeling their way as they continue to grow this effort. I don’t get the name, but I think the aesthetic is exactly right — the bold black, modular layout, and technicolor imagery. In my opinion, because of language barriers, global youth culture is primarily a visually-oriented culture. Sound and image are both important, but the printed word means a whole lot less. A striking image or animation is the best way to get their attention.

Capitalism is their friend. Lots of entrepreneurs who use their do-gooder or artistic ambitions to start corporate or nonprofit ventures very early. When there’s so many and on a limited number of topics, it’s inevitable that there’s a lot of overlap in effort and audience. It remains to be seen whether this will continue, given the remarkable proliferation of efforts that leads some to inevitably fizzle out. But I think what parents and teachers can do to nurture these efforts is encourage a more targeted focus on issues affecting the local community, so that there will be less overlap but young people will still be able to retain the ownership that is so motivating.

Global youth culture is NOT synonymous with homogenization. Many young people who fit into this age bracket participate in certain mainstream cultural phenomena and not others, as suits their personality and backgrounds. Yes, some might be more conformist and product-oriented than others, but in all cases, it’s employed mostly as a means of expression of identity. (”Expressive activity” is the technical term.) Sometimes this does mean the waning of traditional customs, but not always. This is really the distinction between global youth culture and “Westernized” youth culture — in global youth culture, the transfers go both ways. Traditional or ethnic cultural influences emerge in these expressive activities like music, dance and art. And young immigrants are more likely to retain their traditions in host countries, now that there are sizeable diaspora communities in many parts of the world.

Finally, I must include my reservations about the term “youth.” The fact is that global youth cultures is employed to mean both a shared outlook and understanding of the world, and a set of current popular tastes regarding art, music, fashion and other expressive activities. This new globalized outlook may be young right now, but as its adherents age, I think we’ll see it take its place as a normalized understanding of the world. In my view, the globalized perspective is here to stay, whereas the tastes in popular culture are more the specific ken of young people. Soon enough, the next generation of young people will find new passions to share with their peers and new causes to get agitated about, and the current crop of global youth cultural tastes will go by the wayside.

Drop me a line if you find any of these ideas interesting!

Posted on February 4th, 2009 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Global Culture, Media, Uncategorized