Rumaana Gaffar- Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In my media product you may think we have represented one social group of school kids but as you can see these children aren’t in uniform as they leave their exams so we know they’re sixth formers. This then leads on to saying that we have represented the ‘teenagers’ social group not only school children. When people think of teenagers many things come to mind. I have asked a few people to give me the first few things that come to mind when I say typical teenager and I have got these into a brainstorm so that I can evaluate the representation of teenagers in my opening sequence according to the responses I got.

In my media product we have followed some things which directly follow a typical teenager’s stereotype from the brainstorm above. Firstly our media product is based on how the children are planning to take drugs afterschool and teenagers are usually represented with drugs as this shows them being rebellious towards the society and this is one of the characteristics for typical teenagers of this generation. The place in which they’re planning to take drugs is at their school when the school is closed. This shows the students being reckless, looking for trouble by being somewhere where they should be. This also shows they’re spoilt as they are allowed out during late hours and being in such a lonely place at this time would be dangerous and it shows they’re doing it deliberately but unknowingly as they’re still teenagers. This is exactly what a typical teenager would do as they rush into thing and as you can see in our media product, the 2 teenagers didn’t take even half a minute to plan to take drugs. This shows the way teenagers rush into things and this is why they make mistakes as they don’t stop and think about what they’re doing. In today’s society, one thing that means a lot to teenagers are their gadgets so that they can either keep in contact with people that aren’t with them. We have presented this in 2 ways in our opening sequence. Firstly the teenage boy calls the drug dealer and this shows teenagers use their gadgets to connect with other people in the world. On the other hand the teenage girl gives a completely different representation of what gadgets mean to teenagers. She uses her device to listen to music and this shows her blocking herself from her surroundings and this may be just because of her having a rude attitude or just wanted to keep to herself as teenagers like being independent. This also confuses us as audience and this also shows us that teenagers are very difficult to understand. We still can assume what teenagers do and why they do it but you cannot be sure as every individual teenager does things in certain ways for different reasons.

In today’s society the main reason why children become uncontrollable is because they’re trying to live up to societies expectations as, in today’s generation, ‘fitting in’ is a major issue which can lead to kids going to serious extents and getting themselves into serious situations just so that they fit in with the reckless society of school.