Media and generational conflict: from ethnography of deviance to cybernetics

Abstract

The media have played a central role not only in defining identities but also in managing the conflicts they trigger. This is particularly evident in the 1960s, when the generational conflict supported by the modernization of society and consumption was clearly delineated, but it persists today in a completely different era. Not only because of the considerable transition from a vertical to a horizontal society, from the centrality of institutions and of the “father” to an inclusive and in its own way problematic democratization. Our era is also crossed by a general feeling defined as retromania (Reynolds, 2011), capable of pervading every area of daily life, communication, consumption and fashion. For this reason it may make sense to “unfreeze” from the past a book that aimed to take stock of the issue of youth subcultures, beyond the brakes and inhibitions of a more institutional sociology. Herein lies the value of a reflection that manages to avoid in- volvement in the same panic that it studies, such as the excessive enthusiasm of some exponents of Cultural Studies for youth cultures. This study deals with the new youth formations of the Sixties, namely the epic of the Mods and the Rockers, whose epic clash on the English beaches is explained for the first time within a more general framework. Against the banal description of media as “mirrors” or “shapers” (Hodkinson, 2016) of social phenomena, a more complex interpretation suggests that they are circular and adductive means where a specific social identity can be manufactured according to social trends.