pdf of a research study looking at how the “global” youth culture marketing segment is actually a local phenomenon, and therefore youth culture is not so global after all.
Kjeldgaard, D. & Askegaard, S. (2006, Sept). The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global Youth Segment as Structures of Common Difference. Journal of Consumer Research, Vol 33: 231-247.
abstract:
In this article we present an analysis of global youth cultural consumption based on a multisited empirical study of young consumers in Denmark and Greenland. We treat youth culture as a market ideology by tracing the emergence of youth culture in relation to marketing and how the ideology has glocalized. This trans-national market ideology is manifested in the glocalization of three structures of common difference that organize our data: identity, center-periphery, and reference to youth cultural consumption styles. Our study goes beyond accounts of global homogenization and local appropriation by showing the glocal structural commonalities in diverse manifestations of youth culture.
a couple of notes:
* use the web to draw together resources from global culture in order to identify with an aspired lifestyle that’s not present locally
* makes the experience more globally oriented
* the internet plays a more important role than TV in providing symbolic imagery of a central identity for youth (particularly when artifacts and expressions of that identity aren’t available locally)
* the web offers a space for “deterritorialized communities of peers” (p. 243): perceptions of greater similarity with people far away
