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.