“So here was fetishism turned on its head, made empowerment” — Nick Compton, on Alexander McQueen’s Autumn-Winter 2002 line

Sex on the internet is not a problem. Hear me out. Through the internet, young girls and boys are exposed to things they would eventually have to deal with anyway– but from the safety of their own homes, with the ever-present option to shut the page. Sex solicitations online are never pleasant, but they’re not as unpleasant as IRL solicitations where you either have to run away, make an awkward joke, or call the police.

I actually believe that sexual content online is a positive thing for young people. Not because I’m a perv. The world we live in is hyper-sexualized. Exposure to sexual content online allows teenagers to explore sex and sexuality in a safe environment. I am ignoring the “innocense loss” lamentation that parents seem to feel in favor of the realistic view that you can be innocent, yet informed. That’s where the internet comes in.

The internet provides a network for young people to learn about how they are viewed by adults and strangers in the real world. This knowledge creates power, and kids can do with that power what they will.

The online world is harmful in that it provides a network of enabling peers for much more harmful practices than sex, practices that parents don’t see occuring on the internet. One of the most potent of these is the Pro-Anorexia / Depression communities online. Many teenagers experience depression on a low level (either real or courtesy of a massive amount of hormones and the confusing barrage of emotion that comes with that). Without the internet, people would be more prompted to surpress these emotions (HOWEVER, surpressing clinical depression should never occur. I’m speking of the people who experience fleeting depression or intense sadness mislabeled as depression). With the existence of these communities, people revel in their negative emotions, strengthening them or making them the norm.

The same goes for the Pro-Ana community online. Many teenage girls are self concious of their changing bodies. Blogs which glorify intense weightloss regimes provide a network for people who might otherwise hide their body insecurity, reinforcing the pros of forgoing food for thinness. Blogs who post “bones-po” pictures, unrealistic diet regimes and weight loss goals, make vulnerable girls think that that is how they too should look and how they should be behaving in order to get that look. This was especially apparent with the “thigh gap” craze of 2014, the fetishization of some arbitrary body feature, the thigh gap being made the defining feature of a “good” body.

I feel that parents are all too aware of stranger danger online and the “loss of innocense” in a sexual form, rather than the mental and physical issues caused by depression and thinspo blogs that normalize and romanticize mental health issues, which have much longer lasting mental effects than, say, unwanted exposure to a dick pic.

The reading for this week covered issues concerning the dangers of the Internet. For Danah Boyd’s the dangers of the Internet include cyber-bullying, sexual perversion, and misinterpretations and mislabeling that result from parental intervention. However, at the moment there is another more politically fueled danger that is living within these digital social spaces, ISIS. This relatively young political group, serving as a radically different alternative ideological force in the Islamic world, has been using social media to get in contact with teens and other individuals to recruit and enlist them in their violent political agenda. The political organization, which has made itself globally recognized for its brutal and horrific fighting techniques, has taken advantage of the generally young age demographic present on these Social Media sites and their vulnerability to push their political ideology. ISIS’s knowledge of Social Media sites and the internet allows them to manipulate and create appealing digital personas, in the hopes of targeting a confused and lost teen or younger individual who will then accept this political agenda as truth. ISIS, knowing that the digital world has created space for the lost or confused individuals to interact and exist, the group uses anonymity and the less defined features of the web to find and contact these people.

This current phenomenon represents the pinnacle of all parental fears regarding the Internet. It is in these moments that the Internet proves its ability to manipulate and convince the weak willed individual to act, a demonstration of the true power that the Internet holds. And as more and more western young-adults enlist themselves in the ISIS regime, what does this say about the current state of our ideological existence? How does this change the conversation about the Internet and social media and young individuals relationship to both? Here, the Internet becomes a place in which individual agency and ideological belief dissipates into nothingness, the individual solely becomes a representation of a tangible existence. Culture has no bearings, and the individual succumbs to the power of “truth”. The persistence of ISIS on the Internet illustrates the power of the digital world we have created.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/31/isis-s-use-of-social-media-to-reach-you-its-new-audience.html

http://abcnews.go.com/International/isis-threat-home-fbi-warns-us-military-social/story?id=27270662

The story of Sabrina in chapter four of danah boyd’s book stood out compared to the other juveniles’ stories, particularly because she had the fear of predators and online dangers in common with all the parents mentioned in the chapter, while essentially all the other kids had no such fear, but rather fear of their parents’ worrying. It seems that influence from the media played a large role in this household, especially media covering the negative aspects of the Internet and social-networking sites. In the same chapter, boyd mentions a campaign that suggests that predators are entering households through computer monitors, although it seems that the intrusion of these predators is less likely than the intrusion of unwarranted fear caused by the media with regards to online dangers. The dangers caused by this media-persuading fear seem to be more serious than the actual predators hidden behind this fear; families are living behind closed doors, and from what danah boyd noticed, many kids are prevented from playing outside or interacting with others (online or offline) because of the fear of uncertainty.

The role of media in Sabrina and her families’ life reminds me of how media affected my life as I was growing up. Seeing that I was born in 1994 and I have spent most of my life in a post-9/11 world, the dangers of terrorism has been quite prevalent in the media especially in my early adolescent years. As a kid, the news seemed to always revolve around stories on terrorism or the war in Iraq, even to the point that I vividly remember one night, maybe when I was about nine years old, lying in my bed trying to fall asleep, yet unable to because of how scared I was that there would be a terrorist attack where I lived or near where I lived. Although, looking back at this fear, this seems completely irrational, it was very real in my mind due to the way media built up the threat of terrorism. In this light, I see that the problem and fear of online predators is not perpetuated by the danger, but rather by the media and how the media portrays this danger. The real danger is how intrusive the media can be within our households.

In the danah boyd reading for this week, she talks about to consequences of moral panics at the societal and parental level, and how it in turn places teenagers in a conflicted position within society. Being a teen in American society sets one up to a double standard; they are both a public nuisance and vulnerable targets, needing to be afraid of and afraid for. This conflicting image impacts adult’s relationships with teenagers, skewing their idea of how teenagers behave, which in turn impacts the limited opportunities available for teenagers themselves. The adult moral panic reaction does nothing but complicate things for teens as they navigate this time of their life, leaving many angry or frustrated at the misunderstanding and miscommunication left between them and adults.

The concepts of moral panic and the rift between teens and adults is everywhere in society, but you would think that adults would be more cognizant of the phenomenon since it serves as a main plot factor in so many pop culture and entertainment pieces. Footloose, The Breakfast Club, Risky Business, Titanic, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Little Mermaid, the list goes on and on. I took a trip down memory lane this weekend and watched the 2003 version of Freaky Friday with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. These themes of moral panic and adult misconceptions were central to the movie’s plot. The movie does a good job of portraying the parent perspective versus the teenage perspective in regards to teenage culture, and the resulting conflicts that arise between the mother and daughter characters as a result. The movie takes it a step further, having the mother be a psychiatrist for her profession who as a result constantly tries to psychoanalyze her daughter as if she was one of her many troubled patients. Its only when the two mysteriously switch bodies that the mother realizes the real struggles of teenagers as a result of adult misunderstandings.

It’s curious that parents would continue this idea of moral panic, despite it being so prevalent as a topic of humor and unnecessary drama in much of our pop culture media. What keeps them from changing this trend? I’m going to switch to psychology mode as I attempt to speculate: it is common for people to worry when they are faced with something that is unknown or out of their control. Worrying is a defense mechanism, giving the person a sense of power over the situation. Parents feel like they have no control over their teenagers when faced with a new technology they themselves are just getting used to. Their natural reaction is worrying about the safety and control over their kids, but being the authority figure in this dynamic allows them to take their worries a step further as they act upon their fears and strengthen their control over teen’s actions.

In this weeks reading week focused on cyberbullying and this had me thinking about something I witnessed on Friday. To begin, Danah Boyd defines bullying as “a practice in which someone of differential physical or social power subjects another person to repeated psychological, physical or social aggression”. What I saw was definitely an act of aggression, so much so that I had to call the police to intervene. To put what I saw simply, I witnessed a fight in-front of Venice High School on Friday before I was leaving to work. The fight was very bad, with a couple of kids throwing punches and others throwing each other into oncoming traffic.

I witnessed an act of real physical bullying, an all out brawl. The time was around three thirty and I was getting ready for work when I heard screams from outside. I live across the street from Venice High School and my view of the school is quite possibly too good. You may be wondering how this real altercation involves cyberbullying so I will elaborate. Amongst the screams of kids both yelling for the fight to stop and others yelling for the fight to continue I saw the something the left me in shock. While I believe violence should not be used or considered, I do feel that fights are ultimately inevitable, especially among high school boys.

I watched a group of about four or five boys throwing punches at each other. Throwing each other on the ground and kicking each other. I even saw one kid almost get hit by a car. What left me the most scarred emotionally though, were the bystanders. I watched in a saddened awe as stampedes of kids were watching the fight. Not only watching but recording and taking pictures with their phones. I saw just about every kid pull out their phone to to record this fight in some way. It blew my mind that instead of trying to stop the fight, it seemed as though these kids were too busy trying to get the perfect video, or snapchat of the altercation to do anything about it.

I called the police and within a couple minutes they came and as soon as the sirens rang all of the kids ran in spearer directions. It was as if someone had poured liquid into an ant hill and all of the ants were rushing to escape. It was definitely a sight, but in the back of my mind I had this lingering feeling of despair. I was left feeling that these kids were too concerned about taking the perfect picture of the fight to do anything. I was left wondering if anyone else tried to stop the fight, if anyone else called the police. Worst of all I was left wondering how long the fight would have gone on had I not called.

So after reading this week I am left wondering. Would Danah Boyd classify a bystander as a bully. I ask this because I imagine plenty of these kids posted the fight videos on snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and even youtube. I believe that sharing and further exposing this fight online is a sign of bullying. In this weeks reading, hen cyberbullying is introduced, Boyd writes that the “persistence and visibility of bullying in networked publics” enables “larger audiences to witness acts of bullying”. Again, by posting this online these kids are only enabling more people to witness the fight, creating a larger audience.

I hope if anything, that because of the amount of potential footage available, justice will prevail. After that experience I feel more and more so that I am loosing faith in humanity. We live in a world where people are more concerned about taking a perfect snapchat than intervening and helping those in need. I am still left in awe. I wonder what Boyd would make of this situation.

– Felipe

This week’s Boyd readings raised some questions for me about the legal diagnosis of bullying and cyberbullying. Boyd defines bullying as “a practice in which someone of differential physical or social power subjects another person to repeated psychological, physical or social aggression”. However, she points out that “simply describing one’s experience as “bullying” obscures the significant criminal harassment” that appeared to be at the crux of her interviewee’s pain. This then makes it harder for us to differentiate between “teasing” and “horrific acts of aggression”, making it difficult for the public “to fully understand the significance of any particular bullying claim”.

Given that there is a wide spectrum for acts that might be qualified as bullying, I am curious to know what the law has done to account for these differences in degree and severity of bullying instances, and how a court of law might reasonably interpret instances of bullying when their meaning is so opaque to parents and the general public. Further, given that it no longer seems appropriate to simply diagnose an act as “bullying”, I am curious to know if other torts, such as harassment, undue influence and duress might be better used to describe acts of bullying, and if so, how it would be different from traditional instances of such tortious crimes. Returning to the issue of scope, it might also seem problematic to classify bullying as a crime in all instances.

When cyberbullying is introduced, Boyd aptly notes that the “persistence and visibility of bullying in networked publics” enables “larger audiences to witness acts of bullying”, which “create novel opportunities for people to intervene”. Though the audience is wider, it also seems to lessen the degree to which people are held accountable as witnesses because of its anonymity. What is worse is perhaps the realization that cyberbullying demands not only an accurate interpretation of the act and context of bullying, but the need to sift through layers of filtered reality, impression management, social media etiquette and even self-construction- all of which add complexity to what a court might traditionally count as evidence to allege bullying.

Although the language of bullying seems legally set up for clarity (“assumes there is a perpetrator and a victim”), Boyd’s assertion that the emphasis on punishment “provides little incentive for understanding how punitive measures enable the cycle of violence to continue” suggest this binary does not work. This implicitly suggests that the legal system of judgment might be problematic in the instance of cyberbullying. She discourages the use of zero tolerance approaches that are unjust, ineffective and “create additional harm that increases unhealthy interpersonal interactions”, thus creating more bullies. However, the law generally structures itself for deterrence and a respect for the law, and does not really fit with ideas of positive reinforcement- how else would anyone adhere to the rules?

While positive reinforcement might work for parenting, the law must necessarily be different- yet the issues it needs to gain clarity on and regulate are the same. There are many instances of rules that are knowingly broken e.g. the no drinking under 21 rule, but a policy for something as serious, yet easily ignored as cyberbullying ought to keep a stronger system of checks and balances in place. While zero tolerance might not be the answer, positive reinforcement, along with other soft initiatives like education and raising awareness (two of my pet peeve solutions to any problematic issue in society), do not present themselves as strong enough solutions to the legal puzzle at hand.

http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/377515477/fearless

Boyd’s discussion of moral panic in Chapter Four of It’s Complicated reminded me of a recent episode of a new podcast, Invisibilia. The episode, entitled Fearless, opens with a story about a small town in the United States. The town was documented in a study in the 1950s – scientists observed where and what the town’s children were doing. The study continued to today. When children in the same town were asked where they were allowed to play today, the overwhelming results were the confines of their fenced-in backyards. The town’s crime rates were exactly the same as they were in the year that the original study took place. There was no tangible threat, and yet the freedom children had to roam was restricted exponentially. What happened in the years between? The rest of the episode discussed the influence fear has on us. It did not discuss technology, but I kept thinking about how Boyd would weigh in on this.

When interviewed about what they feared, the parents of the fenced-in children pointed to outside threats. Predators, cars, other children…even though the town’s crime rate hadn’t changed in over fifty years. I kept thinking of Boyd’s examples of past examples of moral panic; provocative music in the 1950s, enforced curfew and anti-loitering laws of the 1980s and 90s. These examples seem minute now – and that might be the result of Internet itself. Nonetheless, it does seem that access to the Internet, and therefore the world beyond a small town, opens up one’s environment exponentially.

But where is the fine line of the “dangerous” world of the Internet? As we have discussed, the Internet can be a place for adolescence to access communities that are not readily available to them in their immediate environments. It seems to me that most of the discussion about “Internet Safety” revolves around young women conducting themselves wisely online. Of course, there are threats on the Internet. Everyone – children, teens, adults, men, women – should consider conducting safe behavior online. Boyd supports this type of Internet Safety discourse – it’s useless to drive Internet-usage with fear tactics.

Women’s centrality in this discussion is not to discount the experiences of men online who have been sexually harassed. This certainly happens, but the mass media tends to discuss only women as prey. This happens a lot – Boyd’s discussion of How to Catch a Predator reminded me of Dateline – every single young female victim was described as “beautiful, so pretty”.   How to Catch a Predator set up accounts of young females – not men. I question the motives here. As sexual harassment moves into the digital space – not just the physical world – the discussion must widen. I think our current discussion of sexual harassment online tends to feminize the role of the victim. Beyond the core issue of sexual harassment, this is a harmful action. Not only are we equated women as victims (and thereby leaving men out of this experience of sexual harassment online), we are discouraging women from using the Internet with agency.

This week’s readings revolve around the various risks and dangers of online activity and the moral panic that has ensued among the older, parental generation in regards to the Internet use of their children online. Danah Boyd explains how this type of panic has changed an evolved through history from the beginning times of Rock & Roll to sexual predators in online forums in today’s society. The category of teenage and adolescent girls is also very prominent in this discussion, especially in regards to sexual harassment and dangers online. As explained in the articles, females are seen to be at the highest level when it comes to risk and danger online.

I found this Buzzfeed article that pertains to such an issue, as it announces Twitter’s recently-added feature in which women, in particular, can fill out a form to report online harassment.  The article contains various screenshots of what would qualify as online harassment, like when a women posts a simple, serious question about the availability/use of tampons in other countries and is then subjected to 24 hours of comments where her appearance, anatomy and politics are mocked and degraded by other Twitter users. Along with some other examples of these instances where women seem to be unfairly attacked online, the article includes some statistics from a Pew study that report that 25% of young women have been sexually harassed online and 26% have experienced stalking.

In reaction to these instances and in collaboration with WAM, a nonprofit dedicated to gender justice in the media, Twitter added this form in which women could report such online attacks. Relating back to the readings for this week, this type of form and action by Twitter/WAM falls in line with the moral panic and the discussion of Internet risk and danger, especially around young females. With this, they are recognizing the risk/danger women are subjected to and are attempting to alleviate it. My question is, how has this form changed or altered such harassment? Does this kind of action really work? What are the consequences for those that are caught doing the harassment? Also, does this bring up issues of gender equality online, as a whole? I’m sure males get harassed and bullied too, maybe especially those that are young and/or identify with the LGBT community. How are those cases being dealt with in today’s Internet realm of Twitter and other social media outlets?

          Over the weekend, I was listening to a podcast and the host briefly brought up the story of cyberbullying victim Jessica Leonhardt, although she was not mentioned by name. Instead, the host recalled the famous words of her enraged father, “There will be consequences!”, captured on video after his daughter was inundated with hateful messages from users on 4chan and Tumblr. The conversation about the situation centered around the fact that though the Leonhardt’s family’s severe problems were aired in a very public and upsetting manner, it is rather unfortunate that they are remembered largely through trivializing parodies and memes.

Although the story of Jessica Leonhardt could be seen as a problematic case study because of Jessi’s age and behavioral problems and her abuse at the hands of her father, it still engages a lot of ideas discussed by Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer in “High Tech or High Risk.” Gene Leonhardt’s memorable language (primarily “backtraced” and “cyberpolice”) and his wife’s explanations (“The officers had said there were videos, but Jess denied making them. Then my mother-in-law called and said there were videos. But I haven’t watched them. I can’t be in the room 24/7”) display a frustration with technology and loss of parental control. There was also discussion of Jessi’s potential sexual proclivity, from the initial claims of a relationship with an adult band member to investigations concerning child pornography.

Jessi’s story is not really the typical one of misinterpreted acts of self-agency (which is how similar stories seem to be framed in the reading), but it did attribute to a societal moment of moral panic consistent with a lot of tropes mentioned by Cassell and Cramer. The Leonhardts were reported about in a very sensationalized and belittling way, and their situation was used to create a dialogue about cyberbullying and sexual predation as though it was the norm.