Browsing by Author "Schenk, Jan"

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    Locating Generation X:Taste and Identity in Transitional South Africa
    (2012) Schenk, Jan; Seekings, Jeremy
    When Douglas Coupland (1991) published Generation X in 1991. South Africa was undergoing massive political and social transformations. The preceding years had been marked by political turmoil, the danger of imminent civil war and violent clashes between the apartheid state‟s security forces and angry protesters against the apartheid regime. The government‟s racist policies were ostracised by the international community – boycotts and sanctions were throttling an economy already at the brink of collapse due to the monstrous costs of an institutionally divided society and the lack of a sizeable affluent and welleducated middle-class. In 1989 Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and at the time of Coupland‟s writing negotiations were in full motion in preparation for the country‟s adoption of a new constitution and its first democratic elections in 1994. Thus the characteristics of Coupland‟s (anti-)heroes, their aimlessness, whininess, “slackness” and very fictionality stand in stark contrast not only to the US black and white youth protesters of the 1960s, but also to the ambitions, anger, harshness and the very reality of most young South Africans during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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    Quantifying Taste: Findings from a survey on media and taste among teenagers from six high schools in Cape Town
    (2009) Schenk, Jan
    Recent studies suggest that young South Africans increasingly use references to popular culture, such as music and fashion, in making racial distinctions. This leads to a reinterpretation of race categories but not to the demise of the importance of race in the way adolescents see themselves and others. It is argued in this paper that the link between race and popular culture is creating and maintaining racialised taste patterns, which in turn causes adolescents to develop racialised media preferences. In other words someone's race, in terms of self-definition, is not only a strong predictor for someone's taste in popular culture (in this paper exemplified by music taste) and media preference (here restricted to radio, television and music television) but also one can find a strong relationship between certain music tastes and media preferences. This argument is supported by the statistical analysis of data from a survey with schoolchildren from six public high schools in the Greater Cape Town Metropolitan Area. The results show that among the participants significant relationships exist between race, music taste and preferences for certain radio, television and music television stations as well as between race and certain music genres. These findings are being discussed against the background of an increasingly segmented mediascape and the question for the attainability of a collective South African identity. It is concluded that racialised media preferences might encourage media producers to target audiences based on race, thus promoting racial difference rather than cross-racial similarities or commonalities.