During the late 1990s the term Generation Y' was widely coined in marketing circles in Europe and North America to denote a new cohort of young people seen as a potentially lucrative consumer market but one whose high degree of media literacy made them uniquely elusive and sceptical. This paper considers how far recent developments in media technology have impacted upon the global youth market and young people's practices of consumption, and it assesses how far emergent media forms and technologies have laid the basis for a qualitatively unique digital' youth culture.
Particular attention is given to the way flexible, automated electronic technologies have allowed for the development of more specialised goods and services targeted not at a mass youth' market, but at a series of distinctive niche' consumer groups. A corollary of these trends towards flexible specialisation' and market segmentation, it is argued, has been an increasingly pivotal economic role for cultural intermediaries' designers, advertisers and marketers whose expertise in signifying practices has been increasingly drawn upon by manufacturers in their efforts to invest products with desirable meanings and cultural associations. Issues of business organisation and marketing strategy, however, cannot in themselves account for the meanings activated by young people in their practices of media consumption. The use and appropriation of texts by audiences and consumers is always a crucial link in the cultural circuit' and this paper argues that any attempt to understand the relation between contemporary youth cultures and the media demands attention to young people's active engagement with the commercial market, and to the way youth's cultures of consumption feed back into' sites of production and representation in an on-going cycle of commodification.
Name:
Dr. Bill Osgerby.
Position: Reader in Media, Culture
and Communications.
Affiliation: Department of Applied
Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University.