Young people and consumption

Contemporary youth and youth culture can hardly be understood without corresponding attention to the practices of consumption. For many youth, participating in the consumer realm is a defining feature of being young. The symbolic worlds of youth are enmeshed with the currents of a commodity culture such that youth speak a lingo that is steeped with the jargon of the market. Their references, jokes, and modes of address reflect their fluency in the language of the commodity market, its bewildering hold over them, and their ability to rework that language in ways that speak as much to their realities outside the market as to those inside it. Yet, the meaning of youth consumption has changed considerably as distinct patterns reflecting new configurations of time and space evolve. The explosion of the internet and our movement into a digital age as ‘citizen consumers’, the rise of conspicuous spending and a torrent of advertising, the emergence of segmented marketing as an alternative to mass marketing, the expansion of global markets, the proliferation of global and corporate mediascapes, the international consolidation of corporate power into mega-conglomerates, demands for external regulation by consumer advocacy groups in developed countries, and push back from the DIY (doit-yourself), anti-globalization, and environmental movements all come to bear upon the distinct historical relationship between young people and consumption. Youths’ consumer lives are further complicated by an ever-changing multi-ethnic and multicultural world marked by shifting borders and flow of movement, the ascendance of a racialized system through which meanings and symbols of cool are adjudicated in the commercial realm, a third wave of feminism with its easily commercialized symbols, and deepening social and economic inequalities. The role of the consumer market in young people’s lives has sparked much public and

scholarly debate. Debates over the perils of excess consumption by young people, for example, has been the subject of much concern by educators, parents, policy-makers, and scholars, reflecting anxieties about the shifting place of young people in a rapidly changing cultural landscape. Youths’ participation in the realm of consumption in the past century has generated much worry about their appropriate place in society, their

sexuality, their unmediated access to adult forms of cultural knowledge, their self-esteem, and even their likelihood toward delinquency, though far less often calling into question their roles in supporting consumer capitalism itself. This concern, of course has taken various forms as the logic of rationalization and consumerism reorganize cultural fields thought to be impenetrable by market and commercial influence. A most recent version might perhaps be recognized in the global McDonaldization thesis (see Ritzer 2005) wherein a new form of cultural imperialism is thought to loom large, threatening local and indigenous culture as it forcefully advances a program of cultural standardization and homogenization as commercial forms of Western youth culture from MTV to Beverly Hills 90210 are transmitted along global mediascapes, seeping into and colonizing the consciousness of entire generations as they embed themselves in the crevices of everyday life-worlds far removed from Hollywood and the cult of American celebrity. From focused investigations of the formation and expansion of youth markets (Cook

2004), to how youth consume and are consumed (Steinberg and Kincheloe 1997), to the meanings young adults assign to their consumption as they struggle to participate in mainstream society (Best 2006) and alternately etch out in-group boundaries of subcultural scenes in opposition to the mainstream (Thornton 1995), youth scholars from different disciplines have sought to map the complex and contradictory coordinates connecting youth, commodities, consumption, and the market. Indeed, youth itself carries a symbolic value marketed to an ever-widening audience. An implicit assumption directing this rich and largely interdisciplinary body of scholarship is that to understand youth as a distinct stage in the life course and as a social, economic, and political category of identity and experience is to also investigate the emergence and expansion of a commodity culture. Most agree youth consumption is not simply an economic activity but deeply symbolic in its organization. While scholars have moved in various directions, I identify here three distinct narrative schema of youth and consumption: (1) the formation of youth markets and their expansion into a variety of social arenas; (2) youths’ use of the market and its resources toward various ends; and (3) the meaning and consequence of youth consumption in late modernity and the rise of ‘lifestyle choice’ as the basis of identity and group membership. Each program has proceeded with varying attention to: (1) consumer capitalism’s global expansion; and (2) how fields of consumption are consequential sites for the reproduction of social inequalities and social distinctions. In this sense the latter do not represent entirely distinct trajectories but have largely been taken up within and through the three narrative schema I identify.