ABSTRACT
Despite the significant amount of research on youth cultures within cultural studies, sociology and social psychology since the 1950s, there has been surprisingly little academic work on ‘youth’ and television. This is perhaps due, on the one hand, to the domestic, private nature of television viewing and, on the other, to the presentation of ‘youth’ as a public problem. Whereas youth is displayed through style, music, ritual and resistance, television is less spectacular and urban, altogether more ordinary and suburban (Oswell, 1994; Silverstone, 1994). Moreover, the relationship between youth and television is also entangled within debates
concerning the distinction between ‘adult’ and ‘child’. It is as if the attempt to imagine young people’s relation to television is always troubled, as if youth is forever figured as in between, never to find a happy resting place. In order to unpack this we need to see how television has been construed as a particularly domestic medium and how the notion of youth television has always been something of an impossible object.
