My whole life I just never clicked with the car interest, and I was always amazed when people knew so much about cars. I especially started to notice this difference when I turned 16 and began driving and car shopping. I didn’t have a clue about a single thing. Make and model? What is even is that? I was clueless, I couldn’t tell you a thing about a car brand, car part, or the understanding of the workings of a motor vehicle. There are people who LOVE this though, specifically my boyfriend. He’s a mechanic and cars are is main interest and hobby, same with all his buddies. I’ll never get it. That’s why the “car culture” seems like a perfect culture to study for this assignment. More specifically, the drifting culture. The culture of driving super-fast, faster than most of us have ever driven, with souped-up engines going around sharp bends and hard turns (sounds terrifying to me), but they have a huge following of people who love doing it and the entertainment of it. Here’s a picture of what the cars look like.
After researching the culture and talking with my boyfriend and many of his friends, I find that the drifting culture gives them a sense of adrenaline and enjoyment, because they to would all love to drift their cars but they can’t due to the legality of it all. In this article I found here, they state “Drifting works because it increases the adrenaline and danger of a sport that’s already exciting and attracts a brand-new audience around the world.” I also found many people who are fond of the drifting culture has values that were first instilled in mechanics and the interest of cars overall. They have a deeper appreciation of the difficulty of drifting, and the skill that must come with it by knowing so much about cars to begin with.
So, to seek out how exactly this culture uses media I chose to focus on my boyfriend’s favorite youtuber, “Adam LZ”, or Adam Lizotte-Zeisler. I found some information here, that describes well who Adam is exactly. They say, “Adam is a BMX rider who made a name for himself through his popular YouTube channel, where he posts BMX webisodes, drifting videos, “how to” videos and more. He has taught kids around the world how to do barspins, 360s, and more. He has his own clothing brand named LZMFG.” Obviously, we can see Adam has a following. His entire following is to due to the media, had he not created his YouTube channel many people wouldn’t know about drifting. Plus, Adam’s YouTube channel heavily influenced others to do their same, creating their own following expanding the growth of this culture and love of drifting. Adam has built a large following on the platforms many of us have; twitter, Instagram, facebook. This contributes big time to his success and ability to do what he does, the media allows him to advertise himself. Through this advertisement he’s able to have to economic means to provide the content car lovers enjoying seeing. Media is everything!
Overall, I believe being a part of the drifting culture/the entertainment of it satisfies social needs. According to our reading, Nick Couldry says , “social needs can be said to shape media cultures where the need for general social contact, or the specific need to socialize with one’s peers (at work, in a particular cultural formation, or simply those of the same age), shapes distinctive forms of media production or consumption. “ I believe the social needs of people shaped the large media need for content of drifting which lead to a huge following of people online. These followings of people often have many other friends that are interested in the same content, forming a cultural formation of friendship and togetherness in the Youtube and social media community in regard to entertainment part drifting culture, not the people who are doing the work of providing the content.
To wrap this up, I think media leads the most important role in this culture. The faces of drifting that are to credit to the growing following and education of drifting wouldn’t be able to without media. Without the ability to produce videos of drifting, how-to-videso, etc many people simply wouldn’t know about drifting. I guess I can say, after watching many of Adam LZ’s videos I can sure tell you, it’s still not for me! But, Adam is a funny guy and his content goes further than just drifting which makes this culture easy to be apart of and enjoyable. I may not be the first person to hop in a car with one of those guys, but, their videos sure are interesting and I can understand why my boyfriend is so interested and how it appeals to his values directly, making it easy for him to be apart of that culture
Fixing Up Normal College Gals Lifestyle 