The Youth Market

This interview with Tim Bowden was recorded for the website From Wireless to Web, produced in 2005.

Tim Bowden is a broadcaster, radio and delivision documentary maker, oral historian and author. You can view his full biography at From Wireless to Web

The website is a selective history of broadcast media in Australia. Decade by decade, from radio and newsreels to TV and the internet, this history shows how the Australian broadcast media developed and shaped the way Australians see themselves.

From Wireless to Web is a Film Australia production in association with Roar Film.

Area of study 1. Representation

The media represent reality to audiences through the essential elements of selection, construction and representation. Each media form and process constructs an image or representation of an event, idea or story and represents it in a way which is different from the audience’s direct experience of reality.

These representations involve the selection of images, words or sounds and the ways in which they are presented, related and ordered. Often this is not immediately evident in the media product which can present itself as natural and realistic. Media codes and conventions, together with such factors as the degree of realism intended in the text, the cultural contexts of the time and place of production and legal restraints, help shape a product’s structure and meaning. A media product should be approached in terms of how it constructs meaning (and therefore its relationship to reality) rather than solely according to whether the product is realistic.

In the 1953 Hollywood classic The Wild One, Marlon Brando plays a character called Johnny Strabler, a sexy, surly, self-centred young man who loves jazz and hates authority. At one point in the film he gets asked the question, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Famously he replies, “Whattya got?” The answer said it all. Johnny was against anything and everything. And with that, Johnny defined an attitude that young people took to heart.

During the post-war years and the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, youth became identified as a distinct social grouping, and 'teens’ were targeted as consumers with unique preferences.

Often teenagers defined themselves by rejecting the values, tastes and choices of their parents. Trends associated with the rebellion included the rejection of institutional marriage traditions, recreational drug use, and a general questioning of the supremacy of the monarchy, the church and the nuclear family. Demanding their individual rights, many grew their hair, and with compact transistor radios close to hand they embraced the rebellious sounds of rock’n'roll.

1. Answer the following questions from the Video Clip Context and the video clip of Six O’Clock Rock:
   1. Who was identified as a ‘teenager’?
   2. Do you think it is possible or desirable to identify teenagers as one particular group?
   3. How are teenagers represented in the clip?
2. How would you describe ‘pop’ music? How would you describe ‘rock’ music?
3. List as many music shows that you can think of that are on television today.
   1. Who do you think they are aimed at (their target audience)?
   2. What in particular makes you think this is their target audience?
   3. How do you think they represent their audience or viewers? Look at the clothes they wear, the content of the music, how they act and what actions there are to appeal to a particular audience? Do you think this representation is fair?

Go to From Wireless to Web for more about the history of broadcast media in Australia.