It is again that time of year in Australia when the annual pilgrimage of school-leavers head coast-ward and generally provide the media with (mostly stock) footage of wilding hoardes of young folk publicly drinking themselves into scenes of alcohol fuelled violence. The beautiful thing with reports from schoolies, particularly over the last couple of years, is that you know before the report has even begun what is to follow- the old formula of kids gone wild, illicit sex, alcohol, senseless violence, and the ever-present moralising admonishments by the ‘mature’ reporter waving the finger at these out-of-control young things. A report earlier this week from Channel 9 during their 'Today' program followed entirely this logic, but with some surprise, added a twist. It was noted that, on the whole, schoolies this year have been 'well behaved'! But before the story was lost and all those old expectations could be re-written, the report cut to footage of violence and alcoholism from previous years and spent the remainder of the report tut-tutting the behaviour of young folks celebrating the end of school.
This sort of reporting is all too familiar, and when young folks are involved- people who by and large dont have any real access to present their own perspective in the mainstream media (apart from unwitting appearances in carefully selected and edited interviews)- they come off looking (at worst) entirely violent and out of control, or (at best), a bit silly and irresponsible. This isnt anything new of course- Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis were archetypal out of control teenagers once (until they became icons of a generation, of course)- but it does point to how we choose to represent and come to understand entire groups of people. The truth has little place in media representation, particularly when it is up against the long-held and discursively formed assumptions of a viewing public and almost salacious expectations for what we want to see a large group of young people doing.
Yep, sure, there is a reality of violence, alcohol abuse, and less than consenting sex probably occurring at schoolies, and this is far from ideal or desirable. But this also happens in pubs most weekends, on football club tours, and in aspects of wider society generally. This sort of behaviour isnt the domain of young folks alone, and isnt representative of all young people as the Nine report acknowledged but then went on to suggest otherwise.
But back to the news report. The really interesting thing with the report, apart from the mixed messages of good bahaviour and imagery of kids-gone-wild, was that it also introduced some new terminology into our social vocabulary. The 'schoolie' (the typically 17-18 year old high school graduate) has long been accompanied by the 'toolie' at these events (the 'toolie' is the mostly derided older young person coming back for a second or third bite at the schoolies cherry- schoolies are very much a clique when it comes down to it and don’t need those older, more tragic, toolies telling them whats for). But then something new was mentioned by Nine’s reporter- the 'droolie'! (the 'droolie' is an even more insidious character- and even older person who hangs around to pray on the young hipsters whilst they drink themselves to oblivion. In many ways, these people seriously are problematic). What a brilliant bit of social categorisation, slipped casually into the report as an ordinarily understood term!
What is at stake here? What should we do with the broad sweeping generalisations and ontological establishment of an entire group of people? How should we react to the hysteria that gets whipped up around who these people are and the lengths to which we see the media deploying definitional traits (traits the media were in part responsible for identifying to start with)? There is something profoundly sociological in these exercises of categorisation, but an amateur sociology at best that has no real concern for implications for the ways these people are represented beyond generating ratings. Here was the production of a social knowledge- a public pedagogy in action. Here was a word that defined a category of person and was slipped into the report as if we all knew and understood precisely what ‘sort’ of person was being talked about.
The problem of course is that, as we see time and time again, the media machine works in a co-dependant relationship with our fears and anxieties and largely re-inforces our assumptions (whether correct or not) in order to stay 'relevant' to our viewing tastes. Rarely does a groundbreaking piece of reporting occur that openly challenges viewers to reconsider views (especially in commercial television). So what we have occurring here is the wheeling out of all those old tropes that we expect to see- tropes that are almost comforting in that they re-affirm our fears, anxieties and expectations, whether 'true' or not. But added to this is the generation of new terms that feed into the logic of the old and go even further in re-enforcing our understandings of the world. The case of our largely 'well behaved' schoolies being accompanied by footage of violence, alcohol and general social nuisance, in conjunction with the idea of the lurking droolie, is key example of this.
Andrew.
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