Cultural practices of adolescents: France at the beginning of the third millenium

The experimentation model seems the most appropriate for giving an account of the cultural practices of adolescents. Youngsters derive recognition and satisfaction from compliance with the standards of their peer group, even though they never have any genuine prescriptive and cultural autonomy. Several factors are additional to this model: firstly, the decline in time-honoured culture, a certain kind of anti-intellectualism, the development of eclecticism, and the rise of the multimedia-advertising economy; secondly, the fact that this generation is the first to have known, since infancy, a highly diversified multimedia scene; and finally, television's triumph of intimacy.
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