著者

小川 豊武

出版者

日本マス・コミュニケーション学会

雑誌

マス・コミュニケーション研究 (ISSN:13411306)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.84, pp.89-107, 2014

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify how the category that applies to young people was carried out in national newspapers in Japan. Recent research in Japan criticizing discourses on the youth in mass media through empirical data has increased. Researchers insist that many of the discourses on the youth were stereotypes that ignored their diversity. However, in the only studies that are intended to dismantle the clarity of discourses on the youth, the question of why non-empirical discourses have been accepted by the reading public has been overlooked. Given these issues of concern, this research uses conceptual analysis in ethnomethodical research to understand how the category that applies to young people was carried out. Ethnomethodology aims to clarify the operational norms that make it possible to understand their act by describing how people use categories and concepts. In precious studies, other researches have focused on seinen and wakamono: seinen roughly means youth while wakamono means young people. The subject of analysis is articles in national newspapers from the 1950s to the 1960s, which used seinen and wakamono categories. This analysis revealed that in mass media the carrying out of seinen and wakamono as categories actually had various activities. These categories were never intended to be only stereotypes, rather they have allowed for many activities other than understanding the actual conditions of young people. Seinen was associated with organized institutions, with strong ties to educational oppotunities for men and women. Wakamono was associated with non-institutional groups, and it was also associated with the mass media's self-describing and synthesizing practice. By way of this function, these categories were affecting the way of segmentation and how newspapers create an understanding of young people.