Media Practice Model

The Media Practice Model is a graphic representation that illustrates how adolescents use media in their everyday lives. First presented in 1995, it grew out of a collaborative student/faculty project that explored how teenagers used the mass media (television, radio, magazines, movies, and newspapers) when forging their sexual identities. Since then, it has proved to be a robust way to describe the role of media in the lives of teens not only within the context of teenage sexuality but also in general. Breaking with a tradition of studying media primarily from a quantitative research perspective, the model was based on a series of qualitative studies that focused on adolescents' room culture. In their rooms (most often their bedrooms), teenagers of the 1990s listened to music, watched television, read magazines, talked on the phone, and did homework. A privileged few had access to the Internet. Millennial teens engage in these same activities in the privacy of their rooms, but they also spend time playing video games and connecting with friends through instant messenger, email, blogs, and online diaries and photo albums. Much of the time, teens' engagement with media involves identity work, the process of creating a sense of self in the context of their immediate and larger social worlds. Unconsciously or purposefully, they draw on the media to help make sense of their lives.

The media constitute a cultural tool kit from which teens can extract social capital, cultural models, mood enhancers, and (imagined) companions. Often, teens bring their finds from that tool kit into their bedrooms or dorm rooms, where they create a material culture of posters, collages, and media hardware. What shows up on the walls, floors, beds, and shelves in their rooms points to a below-the-surface media role that is complex, linked to developmental factors, and intertwined in everyday life. Room culture research confirming these realities led to the core ingredients of the media practice model.

Graphically simple but conceptually complex, the model draws on four important research streams—British cultural studies, practice theory in the tradition of Bourdieu and Willis, the sociocultural-historical school of Russian psychology, and mainstream communications and socialization theories—to explain the relationship between teens and media.

Adapted from Johnson's conceptualization of the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural texts, the model is drawn as a circuit to highlight the interrelatedness among its core components: identity and media selection, interaction, and application (see Fig. 1). The arrows in the model point to a chronological, not a causal relationship among these elements; their purpose is to suggest that teens' interactions with media are part of the dialectical, seamless process of becoming, of existing in the world. Media (meant to include media channels, content, and forms) are understood to be important cultural mediating devices, whose influence is amplified or restrained by active individuals engaged in the everyday activities and routines, called practice, that constitute daily life. It is significant that the influence of teens' everyday media activities is, in turn, influenced by their lived experience. Consequently, the term is placed above the circuit to signify that teens' differentiated, dynamic media practices will vary in accordance with their lived experience.

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