Compulsive consumption and commercial media : changing attitudes to spending and saving among Maltese youth

Abstract

This paper explores changing patterns in young Maltese people’s attitudes to spending and saving, and how they see their lives and opportunities as being different from those of their parents’ generation. The paper suggests that many of these perceptions have been inflected by the increasingly global and commercialised orientations of the media environments inhabited by today’s youth. It is because these influences are so often unexamined or miscinstructed that more systematic and widespread programmes of critical media education are called for.