RICERCA ITALIANA     

Youth and cultural consumption

Università degli Studi di Salerno

Abstract

The project aims to examine youth cultural consumption, with particular regard to the age group comprising those who were born between 1978 and 1990.
To this end an in-depth analysis of the relation between identità formation processes and mass media consumption turns out to be crucial,given that on the one hand media provide a system of representations that can be invested with symbolic values and turned into the icon of youth and of the social role they wish to achieve, while on the other hand, as a recent research conducted by the Observatory of Communication at the Catholic University of Milan has showed, the media embody the identity principles of a generation, therefore allowing them to be acknowledged and shared, and emerge as the loci of identity formation and development.
Our research project also plans to check the analysis of consumption dynamics characterizing, in our opinion, the age cohort under study.
It is actually probable that young people aged from 15 to 19 years show a greater propensity to jump from one consumption tribe to the other, to explore and experiment with products offered by the cultural universe as a whole in a more flexible way. Instead, young people aged from 20 to 27 apparently show a consumption habits defined.
For the purposes of our research, we also need to check, whether the ongoing digital media-morphosis that is affecting the whole media universe by promoting a multiplicity of channels, information >>>

Principal Investigator

Natale AMMATURO Università degli Studi di SALERNO

Research Objectives

1.The project aims to examine youth cultural consumption, with particular regard to the age group comprising those who were born between 1978 and 1990. It also aims to carry out an in-depth analysis of the relationship between identity formation processes and mass media consumption, given that on the one hand media provide a system of representations that can be invested with symbolic values and turned into the icon of youth and of the social role they wish to achieve, while on the other hand, as a recent research conducted by the Observatory of Communication at the Catholic University of Milan has showed, the media embody the identity principles of a generation, therefore allowing them to be acknowledged and shared, and emerge as the loci of identity formation and development. Hence media settle in one's own memory, become part of one's own biographic narrative, following its stages and contributing to self-formation, thanks to their capacity to confirm and strengthen identity models, then actualising them by a mimetic or rather metaphoric representation. Media are required to provide resources to define oneself, to become recognizable through shared knowledge and to point to the road to self-formation; nowadays identity has become a highly problematic issue to such an extent that, as Bauman argues, in the fluid phase of modernity it becomes a kind of dress that one wears as long as it fits: be it sexual or political, religious or national, it keeps on changing its shape >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Cultural consumption characterizes behaviours as modern to such a point that it epitomizes the habitus of the modern man, giving us insights into the quality of transformation and modernization processes of our society. According to Marx, consumption is a finish, that is to say the conclusion necessary for the continuation of the economic cycle of capital valorization. It is not by chance that western society is defined as the "consumption-oriented society", just to point to the centrality of the act of consumption in social dynamics, that obscures and definitely supersedes the act of production, shifting from the ethics of production to that of consumption. It is important to stress that today it is not appropriate to speak of mass cultural consumption as we did a few decades ago, when the process of culture industrialization was starting to develop in our country. This is due to some fundamental reasons: the plurality of choices currently offered by the cultural industry system; the growing technological development and the continuous spreading of new media, the ever-increasing segmentation and fragmentation of audience. In fact, according to McQuail, today the multiplicity of options in terms of specific content typologies provided by the new distribution channels has created highly segmented audiences, internally homogeneous, and fragmented or scattered over an increasing number of media sources. The emergence of the hedonistic dimension and of a new tribal feeling >>>