SUB-CULTURE .handling by the media

Most of what finds itself encoded in sub-culture has already been subjected to a certain amount of prior handling in the media,..thus in post-war Britain, the loaded context of sub-culture style is likely to be as much a function of what Stuart Hall has called the 'ideological effect' of the media as a reaction to exceptional changes in the institutional framework of working class life.

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In 19th century Britain there were sub-cultures included in the works of Charles Dickens and Andrew Morrison..and mentioned with Henry Mayhew and Thomas Archer.

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Chicago 1927 Frederick Thrasher produced a survey of over 1000 street gangs.

During the 1950's Albert Cohen and Albert Miller sought to supply the missing theoretical perspective by tracing the continuities and breaks between dominant and subordinate value systems. Cohen stressed the compensatory function of the juvenile gangs.

"In the gang, the core values of the straight world..sobriety, ambition, conformity, etc,,were replaced by their opposite ; hedonism, defiance of authority and the quest for 'kicks' ." (Cohen,1955).

"The 1950's Teddy Boys and late 1970's revival and this second incarnation brought it closer to the parent culture. The complex interplay between the different levels of the social formation is reproduced in the experience of both dominant and subordinate groups..and this experience ,in turn, becomes the 'raw material' which finds expressive form in culture and sub-culture."(Hebdige ,1979).

"The mass media are more and more responsible for providing the basics on what groups and classes construct an image of their lives meaning, practices and values of other groups and classes." (Hall, 1997).

"The spontaneous eruption of spectacular youth styles has encouraged some writers to talk of YOUTH AS THE NEW CLASS. ..to see in youth a community of indiffertiated Teenage Consumers." (Hebdige, 1979).

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