Exploring the Private in Traditional Youth Cultural Theory and Beyond

Abstract

At the start of the second decade of the third millennium the task of making sense of young people and their cultural lives in an increasingly globalised world is becoming ever more complex and difficult. This is not least because as Miles (2000) and others have argued, notions of a globalised world bring with them new ways of thinking about young people and their youth cultures, and indeed the very concept of youth itself is no longer seen as the reserve of the young but rather a lifestyle choice of those well beyond younger years. These new ways of thinking encompass a variety of approaches, for example post-modernism, ‘risk’, globalisation and what has been termed ‘individualisation’ (Beck 1992; Miles 2000) whereby notions of ‘boundaries’ and ‘characteristic qualities’ as identified in traditional youth cultures are no longer so easily recognisable or definable in a contemporary youth cultural context. In a relatively short period of time the concept of youth culture has shifted from one that is understood and observed primarily as collective action, to action that is increasingly individualised, arguably more self-motivated and fragmented and consequently much more complex.

Rather than being marked off by a set of objective and unchanging distinguishing features, the concept of ‘youth’ is a social construct. As such, its boundaries and characteristic qualities have varied between different societies and across different historical periods. (Osgerby, 1998, p. 17)