My reading today 今日讀書進度

was about to start postmodernism... but end with youth culture again!

-Such youthful identity is a matter of looking right (clothes,shoes, hairstyles) and sharing tastes (for styles of music, ways of having fun), and however different such youth groups are from eacg other (differences which have sometimes involved ritual fights - mods vs rockers, teds vs punks) they equally outrage 'straight' society - grown-ups, shopkeepers, the police, teachers, newspapers quick to use such peculiar images (girls with rings in their noses, boys with tattooed heads) for their shock value.

-Shared experiences make for shared needs. Eisenstadt argued that young people seek a sense of stability to offset the experience of change, a sense of self-esteem to offset the experience of powerlessness. Youth culture is the result. It provides a clear set of values, attitudes and behavioural norms to follow whatever else is going on; by acting on youth cultural rules young people can feel good whatever anyone else thinks of them.

-According to sub-cultural theory, then, youth styles are a form of resistance not because the stylists are consiously challenging 'bourgeois ideology' but because in using social signs to give themselves a sense of control over their own lives, group members simultaneously draw public attention to the contradictions in the dominant ideology as it related to their lives.

-Youth groups use their own area of power - their 'free time' - to make a gesture against their lot... Youth subculture can only cast spells against the boring powerlessness of the daily routine, but such magic does have cultural consequences. It challenges the ideology that normally keeps the social machinery working.

． Frith, S. (1984) The sociology of youth. Ormskirk: Causeway.