“I find this really entertaining” – first look of the relationship between vocational school students and various media

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study how young vocational school students in Finland frame themselves and their participation in society and whether they are seen in various media. The explorative research, with n = 213 vocational school and prepatory VALMA students as co-researchers, tells us that young vocational school students use value framing to create understandings of themselves as participants in society and in media. The purpose is this to present the breadth of their thinking and to draw conclusions from the empirical data produced solely by the co-researchers. Design/methodology/approach Explorative multidisciplinary research was done as co-research with n = 213 vocational school students in Finland. Research includes theoretical background and focuses on empirical qualitative data to further illustrate the explorative nature and results of the study. Findings The findings of the explorative co-research tell us that young vocational school students use value framing to create understandings of themselves as participants in society and in media. Co-researchers view themselves as missing in traditional media but find freedom on social media. Content from various media is viewed as reliable and trustworthy but also as problematic propaganda based on personal value framing. The relationship with traditional print media is strained because young people feel that media has othered them and continues to frame them negatively. While they look for that entertaining content across the media spectrum, bullying is an ever-present concern. Research limitations/implications This study focused only on vocational school students in Finland. A broader sample of young people, or of minorities, could produce profound results on media literacy, relationships and power relations in the society. Also, framings of the various international media would provide content for analysis. More profound analysis of the data shall be done in the next phase of the research. Practical implications Study time was limited. More in-depth study will follow. Implications to future research, media consumption and framing should be done with a larger group of researchers and youth. Social implications Social implications towards framing of youth in various media and the transfer of these framing as knowledge in larger society. This includes notions of power of various actors in media and in society at large. Originality/value Multidisciplinary explorative co-research on the topic is largely missing from academia. Additionally, the voices of those in the fringes of society is muted, whilst also those youth studying the vocational schools.

Archetypes of youth as vectors in power relations - From praises to information operations

“…This also occurs on digital platforms and at individual levels. In recent years, digital communication, such as social media communication has increased, especially among young people, as digital platforms have become places for news, information, and social and global participation (Clark and Marchi, 2017;Meriläinen, 2022;Swart, 2023;Wang et al, 2023). Young people communicate their frames, thus archetypes by using digital platforms, thus bypassing newspapers and their archetypes gatekeeping.…”

“…Young people communicate their frames, thus archetypes by using digital platforms, thus bypassing newspapers and their archetypes gatekeeping. In turn, these can at best influence public perceptions of them and others (Meriläinen, 2022), thus highlighting the importance of studying archetypes. The effects of framing occur when the particular ways in which issues, actors and events are characterized have an influence on how they are understood by others, such as the youth and media (McCombs and Reynolds, 2002;Brewer and Gross, 2005;Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007).…”

“…Studies have found a connection between archetypes created by framing and their credibility, power relations, and information on society (Vargo, 2011;Meriläinen, 2022). For example, Gerhards and Schäfer (2010) stated that access to digital media has transferred one-way monologic communication, such as newspapers, and power relations to more interactive and multidialectic forms among youth (Granholm, 2016;Pietilä, 2022).…”

“…For example, Gerhards and Schäfer (2010) stated that access to digital media has transferred one-way monologic communication, such as newspapers, and power relations to more interactive and multidialectic forms among youth (Granholm, 2016;Pietilä, 2022). Youth use various digital platforms to communicate about archetypes of themselves and others to varying degrees (Bergström and Belfrage, 2018;Meriläinen, 2022). Digital platforms are places for making sense and framing of and by young people (Garcia et al, 2020) without traditional media gatekeeping but also for gatekeeping, power relations, and information operations where archetypes can be used as tools to spread division in societies.…”

“…Although equality is the cornerstone of Finnish education policy and leveling out differences in the socio-economic backgrounds of students is an important goal in educational policy, different school paths, especially high school, and vocation school, are often seen as unequal. Traditionally, they have been respected differently in various media and in society at large, as well as among youth themselves (Meriläinen, 2022;Meriläinen et al, 2022). On one hand, this is natural since different school paths produce different kinds of professionalism, but the problem might appear when and if various media and society put young people in tight frames so that their school paths will guide and limit young people's life choices.…”