Media Studies on Fire: Audiences, Reception, and the Experience of Antisocial Behavior

Abstract

This article argues that the way that youth access and make sense of “offensive” media content is relevant to how they take action – or do not act – in political cultures. This argument is made in reference to a study of the “Beacon” program, a 12-week fire safety course run by the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service in Liverpool, England. Beacon serves local young people involved in or at risk from antisocial behavior. It is also a media place, politicized by a local press that articulates the course with national moral panics about youth and “hoody” cultures. As such, Beacon affords the opportunity to explore how the offense that this panic causes to young people can become a cultural resource, as reception is tied to media rituals and the production of alternative media places through acts of ordinary media practice. Through a combination of media analysis, participant observation, interviewing and reception exercises, I argue that since Beacon already had been produced in media as a battleground where the general war against the youth disorder was being fought, Beacon students also had already been produced as political subjects in media representation. To refuse the relevance of this representation to their experience was, therefore, to acquiesce to hegemony. It is no coincidence that the young people who the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service felt had benefited most from the course were also those most able to explain their situation in reference to negative media representations of youth. In one notable case, this reading of offensive content had been converted into a performance that achieved some success in changing the local press' agenda on Beacon. This indicates how reception, ritual and performance are interconnected concepts in the production of media place.