Abstract
Youth is a source from which almost all areas of society want to draw. Winning over youth is a necessity for survival for many areas of society, for trade unions as well as for capital, for churches as well as for politics. Even if we know that youth do not exist as a homogeneous group, we are still looking for them, researching them and orienting educational and political action towards their well-being. This well-being is the extrapolation of the respective group-specific ideologies and one tries to win them over to adopt them. The media play an important role in this social process. They are seen as an important influencing factor that can help or hinder one's own interests, depending on which media offerings the young people turn to. The assumption of an opinion-forming and action-forming function of the media is general and undisputed. On the one hand, this function is used specifically to exert influence on young people. This is obvious both in the field of commerce, but also in the other segments of society to varying degrees of intensity . Based on empirical observations, the "years of early adolescence, from twelve to sixteen, (...) are the decisive years for political thinking" (Adelson 1980, p. 272). On the other hand, the influence of the media is also feared and always loudly and publicly articulated and problematised when - mostly monocausal - connections are made between deviant youth behaviour and the media. In recent years, this has mostly been the construction of a connection between homicides of young people running amok and their use of violent computer games.
