media panics
As a researcher of youth and social technologies I find it difficult to cope with cases where young people reveal too much (both in terms of semi-pornographic photos and personal information). Danah Boyd had an interesting post about how the disappearance of two girls was allegedly connected to their use of MySpace. Which, it turned out, was not the case after all. I wholeheartedly agree with Danah - MySpace is safer than going to the mall. I'm very enthusiastic about the real social value of online interaction, and I don't believe mediated interaction supplants face-to-face interaction. I furthermore agree that it's problematic that there seems to be an exaggerated panic about the danger of online interaction. The panic is visible in a series of articles in Aftenposten lately, though the reported case is serious and concerns a 15-year old girl who was raped by a 19-year old boy she met online. They met on deiligst.no, later had a private IM-conversation (including the use of webcam), exchanged phone-numbers, and agreed to meet face-to-face. I understand that these rare cases are reported and discussed as a problem, even if they are the exceptions rather than the rule. The whole panic-situation proves that research is important. Mediated interaction is a natural and intergrated part in the everyday life of young people. Sharing photos online does not have to be dangerous. Chatting with strangers is usually quite undramatic. Teenagers don't regularly have private explicit web-cam shows. Yet, cases of abuse need to be taken seriously.
I guess the only sound advice we can give to worried parents is the same as ever. Be interested in what your kids are doing and don't ban use of IM, MySpace, blogs and photo-sharing services (bans will certainly not help, though I'm not a big fan of hotornot-sites - the Norwegian deiligst.no is a particularly ugly example). Oh, and respect their privacy: youth usually like to have a parent-free zone.
What happened to common sense.
Edit: re-reading my post confused me. Like, what am I trying to say? These troubling aspects of personal media use are not directly part of my research, though I am interested in how changing representations of subjectivitiy are visible through personally mediated expressions (e.g. text, photos). That is, 15-year olds do not post semi-nude and semi-pornographic photos of themselves only because they have the technological affordances to do so, but because what appears as legitimate representations of self seem to have changed in Western societies (or at least in Norway).
7 Comments:
"That is, 15-year olds do not post semi-nude and semi-pornographic photos of themselves only because they have the technological affordances to do so, but because what appears as legitimate representations of self seem to have changed in Western societies (or at least in Norway)."
Surely the boundaries of accepted behaviour are constantly negotiated and shifted, but I also believe that the way the different media "feel" can lead to different rules and practices. Many internet users have a hard time "feeling" the "recordability" and "availability" of internet content, and then they become surprised when they experience that their pictures or whatever ends up in the "wrong" hands.
My little brother recently received a reprimand from his headmaster, the reason for this being that he had distributed paper copies of a picture showing a girl in his class kissing a boy. Reasonably enough she felt this to be intimidating and frustrating. However, she was the one who had shown the picture in the first place, via a link in her msn profile. So apparently she was OK with people accessing this side of her in a digital domain, but uncomfortable when it was brought out in the real world. Perhaps the picture (somehow ironically) felt less shielded against adults and others with "no business" when represented on a tangible sheet of paper.
I think you are absolutely right, and you are pinpointing some real paradoxes. Your brother's experience is a very relevant case in this context. I believe it concerns a rather confused understanding of private zones in public? I find it confusing and difficult myself, and I guess we're still trying to figure these things out? I just hope we won't end up with people becoming even more afraid of sharing photos and stories from their lives.
I agree - but I also think communication theory could be helpful in understanding this very interesting example.
It is not primarily about information (she has kissed this boy), but rather about communication and context. As I see it, at least two things are going on:
1) The kid substitutes himself as the sender of the communication, rather than her.
2) This causes an (apparantly rather important) recontextualization of the communication flow. In the original setting, the image worked as a part of the girl's online performance of self "I am the kind of person who kiss these kinds of boys, and later feel confident to show it online for you (all) to see". Thus, she assumes control of the communication situation, by positing the viewer as a witness to her staging of herself. She comes off as a strong, selfaware woman.
In the second setting (the paper images), the image is recontextualized as a mass produced entity, and the communication now has its origin with the kid brother. By doing this, he manages to create a whole series of local contexts, where the information (she kissed this guy) can be negotiated without reference to the online context in which she originally intended it. Presumably, this enables a lot of social and cultural stereotypes about female sexuality to be set in motion ("She's a slut" or the like) - exactly because she is no longer present as the originator of the communication, and is no longer capable of controlling vital parts of the context. So, the same information about a kiss, travels in several different circuits of communication, and thereby also through several different contextualizations. And a scandal ensues.
Very nice analysis, although it might be a bit far-fetched to extract concepts of "strong, selfaware women" and "cultural stereotypes about female sexuality" from my limited account of the episode. (And, now I almost feel bad for bringing up this story - see, even this little conversation comes with its own private/public issues (so stay off these shores of the internet, bro!)).
And yes, I agree that the two information distribution incidents are different because of who initiated them, the information is identical, but recontextualised, and the control of presentation shifted. A saying "I'm an alcoholic" to B and C is different from B saying "A is an alcoholic" to C. But it hard to pinpoint the first external "initiation" when the information was public in the first place - as I recall it, others had already distributed the picture via msn without anybody minding (and of course the "grownups" didn't have access to this spehere thus leaving them unaware and unable to sanction).
Anyway, this says something about the illusion of control over information in a digital world. I said to my brother, "at least you learned something about the internet", and the girl probably did too.
Rasmus brings up a relevant point. And I'm not completely sure that the internett has anything to do with it. I think it's more about the ethics of what to do with information you're given. Of course the way the image has evolved from a strong, selfaware woman to slut, may be taking it a bit too far...but certainly not illegitimate. The kid wasn't exactly distributing the picture to show everyone how cool it was, was he? He desserves a reprimand because that's just a lousy thing to do. But does she deserve one for displaying it in the first place? No!
Although I'm suddenly intereseted in the details now. Certainly if she published the picture within a group discussion of 'friends' in MSN world, would that not be the same as telling her friends a secret and then the secret getting out? But if it was posted on the internett for all to see, well...then she had a sad lesson learned. But I agree totally with Marika, I don't want people to be afraid to post and share pictures. Now...here's where I'm a bit too optimistic! I think stuff like this is going to get better and not worse. I think kids expressing themselves on the internett are going to respect one another and each other's expressions. It's us 'grown-ups' that might ruin it all for them! But then I tend to get a little bit too romantically utopia optimistic about these things! What I definately do know, is that all the time being wasted on telling kids not to talk to strangers a.s.o. should be spent talking to them about ethics and the respect of other's expressions a.s.o.
Isak, I was just going to ask whether you were ok with us discussing principle matters concerning your brothers experiences... It clearly is a very interesting example, and it is not at all easy to see what's ethically right or wrong. I really appreciate your opinions, and Rasmus, I love discussions of communication as a processes, especially cases of mis-communication.
Well, first of all I wouldn't tell and point without shielding the involved behind relatively strong anonymity. And what I read into this is something about teachers and children's (quite different) lack of understanding the internet, and how information we put into the world can and will be used in unexpected ways. I certainly don't see it as some "kids nowadays and their cruelty"-story - in fact the number of "wrongs" here remain unclear. This is a case of unintended consequences and ignorance, not meanness. I wouldn't include it here if I held it against my brother, which I don't, but I guess I didn't realise that others might - what irony! Goes to show how easily one (even someone who regards himself quite "net literate") can fall into the public/private internet trap.
Linn (whom I should confess to having discussed this with over the backchannel that is, yup, msn): I do think this has something to do with the internet, how the possible consequences of our actions there are less transparent. And you suggest that the kids should be left to sort things out on their own - well, experiences such as these are exactly how they will. I think these are just the kinds of lessons internet users have to learn at one point or another. And yes, I think you are you are a bit optimistic about the emerging respectfulness of internet kids. It's tough being a child or a teenager, and as much as I love the internet for being a great tool for "outsiders", there's little reason to believe their online lives will automagically be so much easier and hassle-free than offline.
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