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INTRODUCTION
I'd like to find a perfect guy and live a simple happy life, dedicating ourselves to saving the world and everything in it. I want an empty apartment with a beautiful view--only necessary furniture and artistic decorations (my husband's?). I hope my life won't turn out too disappointing.
This flight of fantasy, reported by a 17-year-old girl lying on her bed listening to music, conveys the vivid hopes and fears that can come alive for adolescents in the privacy of their bedrooms. With their imaginations fueled by the potent feelings and images from the media, thoughts of perfect love and happiness commingle with worries of disappointment. In this essay I address a frequent adolescent puzzle suggested by this girl's flight of thoughts. On the one hand, adolescents in our culture place increasing importance on defining who they are and who they will be in the future. They partially shed the secure and unquestioned sense of self acquired from their families and begin to look for a more personally determined, authentic sense of identity. On the other hand, adolescents often seek these identities in what seem to adults to be predictable formulas, such as this girl's ascetic apartment, "saving the world," and idealized romantic partner. In searching for a private sense of who they are, they frequently draw on very public packaged images, often drawn from the media.
Part of the answer to this puzzle, I will suggest, resides in adolescents' bedrooms: in the kinds of experiences they have with the media when alone. Although much has been written about the role of media, particularly teenage music, in bonding adolescents to peer subcultures (e.g., Hebdige, 1979; Lull, 1987), we know much less about adolescents' private and personal uses of the media. Yet teenagers actually spend more time engaged with the media when they are alone than when with peers. I argue here that there are important, and different, things to be understood about this segment of their media experience. It is in their solitary bedroom lives where media has some of its most significant functions, where the private and public are woven together.
In order to understand adolescents' solitary media experience, we need to understand how it fits into the hour-to-hour ebb and flow of...