Questions prepared by Helen Nixon (University of South Australia) for a workshop entitled "Popular culture, identity and the middle years" held at the 1999 AATE/ALEA National Conference in Adelaide.

Identity is closely bound up with popular culture. This is mainly because, unlike "high" culture, popular culture is overtly directed at the audience.

The questions in this activity help students analyse the ways in which they are constructed and positioned by advertisements. The questions will need to be adapted for younger students.

Collect a range of advertisements aimed at young people and pose the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the advertisement? What does the advertiser hope to achieve? Is this explicit?
• Who is the anticipated audience?
• Who are the imagined users of the product advertised?
• Who is the assumed authority on the product?
• What choices do you think would have been made about the design of the advertisement and about what to put in and what to leave out?
• What are some of the explicit values and attitudes assumed to be shared by the readers/viewers?
• What are some of the more implicit or taken-for-granted points of consensus, eg in relation to class, gender or generation?
• What continuities and discontinuities are there across the range of advertisements?

Ask students to create some advertisements that construct different, more honest representations of young people. Have them focus on purpose, audience, and positioning as well as layout, visual and verbal images, choice of words, choice of syntax and font.