Youth-Generated Media

Broadly defined as self-expressive media and communication artifacts, youth-generated media have long existed and have been associated with specific social movements, such as the 1960s U.S. and French student movements. Since then, media produced by young people for young people have become more ubiquitous as media-making tools became cheaper, smaller, and more accessible. In the process, youth-generated media are redefining the utility and usage of media-making tools from the photocopy machine (zines) to mobile phones (video uploading sites). This entry summarizes some different approaches to youth media and then identifies the characteristics of youth-generated media through case studies from the Arab world.

Youth-generated media are self-expressive, diverse, vibrant, and internally contested. They figure in industrial and developing societies and have also been flourishing in both progressive and extremist circles. Youth-generated media are the outcome of historical processes of reappropriation of multiplatform mediafrom graffiti to blogs, flyers to online videos.

Today's youth may have rediscovered the power of “DIY” (do-it-yourself). During the 1970s, the term “DIY” gained the status of a subculture with the punk movement's reliance on self-promotion by producing flyers, self-publishing, self-distributing, and the feminist movement (developing ways for “consciousness-raising”). The “DIY” ethos is perhaps resurrected now because cheap access to technology increases opportunities to produce and distribute media. But “DIY” is not just a by-product of new technologies. Whether individually or collectively produced, youth-generated media are often done without any framing adult involvementnot even financial.

However, to see youth-generated media as completely independent is also misleading. They closely [Page 560]interact with political, cultural, economic, and social structures. In some cases, young people may have started with some adult support because access to production means is closely linked to financial independencerarely available to youth. In other cases, youth-generated media may be part of organized social, religious, or political activities, such as the range of media developed by young people in organizations like Boy/Girl Scouts, Bible study groups, or political party chapters. It can also be argued that youth-generated media are often entangled with mainstream media; their ideas are featured in newspapers and cable shows, their makers are interviewed in newscasts, and their artifacts are often circulated on commercial video web portals.