First-Year Seminar: Youth Culture and Visual Media

3 units

Since the advent of cinema through the recent development of online social networking, visual media in the United States and around the world have been identified with a market of youthful consumers and producers. This course will look at the development of youth culture in the United States and its unique relationship to visual media, including film, television, comic books, video games, and the Internet, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine youth culture as a social phenomenon generated by the young, a means of representing the experience of being youthful, and as part of the ongoing debates over the effects of media on the young. As alternately mass culture, popular culture, counter culture, and participatory culture, youth culture holds a privileged place in the history of American visual media and continues to influence production and innovation within the media marketplace.