Noorte meediatarbimise aktiivsuse seosed elustiili, sotsiaalsete hoiakute ja poliitilise aktiivsusega
Date
2007
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Description
This bachelor’s thesis „Youth media use in relation to youth lifestyle, social attitudes and
political engagedness” is dealing with the matters of youth media use in the beginning of the
21st century.
The years before and after millenium have changed both media system and consumption
substantially. Electronic and global channels have a growing role in our information field and
internet has made operativeness one of the key values in today’s media world. The
multiplicity of channels has brougt along fragmentation of publics and the part of
entertainment in media production is growing. The influence of changing media world has
been greatest upon younger generations, for they have been raised in the internet era and
cannot imagine life without new mediums.
The generation gap is becoming more and more explicit in the beginning of the 21st century –
the connection to homeland and native tongue is much weaker for youth than it is for older
generations; youth share more global yet often more individualistic values. One of the carriers
of global values is globalizing mass media.
But the influence of media is by far much more complex than just maintaining global
consciousness. The basis of this paper is an assumption that media use has an influence on
many aspects of life – it’s related to social realtionships, one’s view of the world, one’s
interests, public and political engagedness. Because the effect of the changing media world
has been greatest upon youth, I focused on youth and their media use in today’s world. I tried
to find relations between media use and youth lifestyle; interests; social attitudes and
judgements; political engagement and interest in politics. The main hypothesis for this paper
was that the the activity of media use is connected to the general attitude towards life and
interest in one’s living environment – active young media users are also more active in other
areas of everyday life, their spectrum of hobbies is wider and they are more interested in
politics.
In the part of theoretical and empirical framework I gave the definitions for terms used most
often in this paper. I also gave an overview of youth in globalizing world. As said before,
youth are often characterised by individualistic values. They see themselves more as citizens of the world than the representatives of a certain nation. There are quite a few studies that
support the notion of „global generations” – according to this theory there are new global
generations for whom belonging to a certain cohort is more important factor of identity than
nationality. Often the basis of global generations is a certain traumatic event, 9/11 for
instance. As for the maintenance of this certain type of consciousness, global mass media has
a major role to carry. Especially global media corporations and internet give possibilities for
information to get from one end of the world to another in no time, so that anyone who is
interested enough can get the info he or she is searching for.
I also looked into the lifestyle of youth – this paper contains both an overview of the tradition
of youth lifestyle surveys and the aspects most often related to the spectrum of interests of
youth. Youth lifestyle has been a matter of interest for many sociologists since the 1950ies.
Youth subcultures and lifestyle are often considered to be related to pop culture, but more
recent surveys have also started to emphasize individual identity and its’ effects on lifestyle.
According to newer surveys youth in Estonia and in EU generally tend to be most interested
in spending time with peers, doing sports and using internet for many different purposes. I
also gave an overview of youth’s public and political engagement – in most of the recent
studies youth’s apathy towards politics and low civic engagement find proof, in Estonia and
also in EU generally.
I also gave an overview of the trends of media consumption at the beginning of 21st century.
Globalizing media world has brought along fragmented publics, superficial interest in most of
the subjects, the onslaught of infotainment and domination of electronic media. The
multiplicity of channels used, low interest in regular newspaper reading and bigger internet
consumption are the factors that characterize youth media consumption. Estonian youth stand
out for especially extensive internet use.
As for the last chapter of theoretical and empirical framewok I gave a summary of media
influences – I gave an overview of widespread beliefs about media’s possible positive and
negative effects. At different times there have been different beliefs about media influences.
Usually a distinction is made between long-term and short-term effects of media use. Media
use and it’s connection to violent behaviour is a well-explored matter of research, media
influences on political activity and apathy have also been under discussion a lot. Different
researchers have come to rather contradictory results on these matters. Nowadays the dominant approch is, that the greatest media influences come into being in cooperation of the
medium and the receiver – the last-mentioned decides whether to incorporate the meaning
offered by media to his or her own structure of meanings and values. He or she does so based
on previous experience and existing values.
The empirical part of this paper is mostly based upon a representative survey
Me.World.Media 2005 carried out at the Department of Journalism and Communication of
Tartu University, Estonia. For illustrating the main results I also use a questionnaire carried
out at Jõhvi Gymnasium, Estonia, in spring 2007 and two interviews with active and inactive
young media users.
Main results point to the higher general activity of active young media users. They are
characterized by much more diverse use of traditional media and especially internet. They are
better informed and their attitude towards media is much more critical. A well-developed
sense of criticism charatcerizes them in other areas aswell – active young media users are also
critical towards their knowledge of politics and about political institutions. But on the other
hand they find media’s representation of politics to be trustworthy more often than inactive
media users.
Active young media users are more optimistic about the development of Estonia. According
to indexes of social and liberal worldview the activity of media use is connected to more
social view of the world. On the other hand it’s important to note that self-assessments on
left-right scale do not support that conclusion. I suppose that Estonian youth often do not
know, what exactly does being rightist or leftist mean. The analysis of social assessments
supports that assumption. Active young media users support low taxes for instance, but expect
the state to support weaker members of society more often. Inactive young media users on the
other hand support totally free market economy, but also believe higher taxes to be necessary.
Almost all of the youngsters find that state should provide free education, including college
education.
Active young media users are also more active politically – they are more interested in
political matters and participate more in politics by voting and by being more interested in
different parties.
According to the research conducted I can say that Estonian youth doesn’t differ in matters of
media use, political activity, lifestyle and preferred hobbies from their peers in other
European countries.
Two important conclusions stand out. First, stratification based on information is connected to
economic and social stratification – lower income and place of habitation outside the capital
and other Estonian’s habitated bigger cities characterize inactive young media users more
often, many of them are also immigrants. Secondly, the activity of media use is strongly
connected to overall activity – same pattern of activity appears in different areas of life.
I suppose that Norris’s (2004a) virtuous circle can also be expanded to other areas of life and
media consumption, not just political activity and media content. I believe that active media
use will improve one’s knowledge of different areas of life, not just politics, and therefore
will give raise to increase in overall activity also.
As the correlations between the activity of media use, political activity and overall activity are
explicit, I suppose that the state could, finding ways to lessen stratification based on
information through different channels media and otherwise, strongly support the growth of
overall activity and that in term could be of help in reducing social stratification and
connecting t different risk-groups to the society.
Keywords
H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd, ajakirjandus, meediakasutus, auditoorium (meedia), noored, hoiakud, elulaad, sotsiaalsed aspektid, poliitilised aspektid