Media - our identity creator

Katherine Hamley (Editorial Chair of the Philosophical Quarterly and Head of the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at St Andrews) wrote a very interesting article titled „Media Use in Identity Construction“. In this article, she focused on the way that youth is influenced by the media and therefore somehow raised and shaped. At the beginning, she gave a definition of identity and on that way she later proved that this „State of being a specified person or thing: individuality or personality” is being disturbed and manipulated.



“Young people can be seen to change their identities throughout puberty and often have different identities at the age of 11 or 12 to when they hit mid teens to their early 20s. Throughout this period, they will be in contact with many different influences ranging from older brothers and sisters, what is deemed to be ‘cool’ in school to popular imagery derived from the media such as the ‘in color’ this season.”
She emphasizes the fact that to be different and unique today isn’t easy at all. Since we have so many examples to look at, we seem to get lost and so does our identity. Katherine also mentions imitation of characters seen on TV and possible negative influence on a personality of a viewer, especially the one that is yet to be shaped.
What I find very interesting is the fact that she used real examples to illustrate her point.
“…young people are also able to gain material to construct their identities from listening to music and especially when they pay close attention to the lyrics of songs. Sometimes, a young person is able to find a certain line of a song which completely sums up how they feel, and this can go towards making them feel more secure in themselves and therefore enabling them to pursue a specific area of their personality further.”
The writer covered all media sources and their influence in detail. She brought many new interesting ideas regarding the diverse ways we are being silently manipulated. The article is very useful and very well covered in constructive critics and reasoning.
“Through television, magazines, advertising, music and the Internet adolescents have a great deal of resources available to them in order for them to choose how they would like to present their ‘selves’.”

According to all mentioned above, it is not very hard to conclude that letting media shape ours or our children's personality and reducing its individuality is not really the future we would like to have but scenario to be afraid of.

To read the whole article, visit: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/klh9802.html