Skip to Main Content
Social media is transforming the way of urbanites communication, creation, production, consumption and entertainment. It breaks down the geographical divisions of cities and creates new digital communities. Focusing on the ways in which digital platforms shape and are shaped by young people in urban contexts, this course will critically examine the impact of social media on pop culture, identity formation, community building, fandom, celebrity economy, and cultural consumption. Through this exploration, students will examine how social media research intersects with the lived experiences of contemporary urban youth. This course encourages students to connect their personal experiences in social media using and engagement with youth culture to the concepts and theoretical frameworks introduced, developing a critical thinking of the everyday practices of the younger urban generation.
This book focuses principally upon the dress and music of Britain's Mods, Rockers, Skinheads, Teddy Boys, Rastas, and Punks, and interprets their styles as ritualized expressions of subversive intent. Hebdige analyzes styles of clothing, music, and speech and shows how, in general, these provide imaginary identifications for the groups who adopt them. Hebdige urges that each style be understood in relation to the social class experience of its creators, the culture of their parents, the black immigrant presence, and the mass media. The dominant theme is that youth styles represent semiotic guerrilla warfare.
This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood, and looks at the way these features find expression across many different subcultural groups: from the Ranters to the riot grrrls, from taxi dancers to drag queens and kings, from bebop to hip hop, from dandies to punk, from hobos to leatherfolk, and from hippies and bohemians to digital pirates and virtual communities. It argues that subcultural identity is primarily a matter of narrative and narration, and also argues for the idea of a subcultural geography.
