Cyber-risk and Youth

Digital Citizenship, Privacy and Surveillance

Michael Adorjan, Rosemary Ricciardelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351657303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Psicologia dell'educazione

Cyber-risks are moving targets and societal responses to combat cyber-victimization are often met by the distrust of young people. Drawing on original research, this book explores how young people define, perceive, and experience cyber-risks, how they respond to both the messages they are receiving from society regarding their safety online, and the various strategies and practices employed by society in regulating their online access and activities. This book complements existing quantitative examinations of cyberbullying assessing its extent and frequency, but also aims to critique and extend knowledge of how cyber-risks such as cyberbullying are perceived and responded to.

Following a discussion of their methodology and their experiences of conducting research with teens, the authors discuss the social network services that teens are using and what they find appealing about them, and address teens' experiences with and views towards parental and school-based surveillance. The authors then turn directly to areas of concern expressed by their participants, such as relational aggression, cyberhacking, privacy, and privacy management, as well as sexting. The authors conclude by making recommendations for policy makers, educators and teens – not only by drawing from their own theoretical and sociological interpretations of their findings, but also from the responses and recommendations given by their participants about going online and tackling cyber-risk.

One of the first texts to explore how young people respond to attempts to regulate online activity, this book will be key reading for those involved in research and study surrounding youth crime, cybercrime, youth culture, media and crime, and victimology – and will inform those interested in addressing youth safety online how to best approach what is often perceived as a sensitive and volatile social problem.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The internet and advances in communications technology over the last ten years, specifically in terms of broadband connections coupled with the rise of social network sites (SNS) and social media, has amplified not only opportunities for youth regarding expressions of identity, intimacy, and sociability, but also risks related to privacy, abuse, and misunderstandings in their lived experiences (Livingstone, 2008). Youth are bombarded by messages from parents, peers, law enforcement, teachers, the media, and the government regarding how to manage web-based risks when online. Often encouraged to self-monitor, youth are to be responsible (and are often held accountable) for their online actions, with the directive of teaching youth to avoid harm from cyberbullying, sending nudes, or “sexting,” and other forms of risk (including from online sexual predators) (boyd, 2014; Karaian, 2013). This is especially true for female adolescents, whose risk potential is often thought to be higher than that of their male peers (Bailey & Steeves, 2015). Cyberspace itself presents a virtually “limitless victimization risk” (Hinduja & Patchin, 2009: 24).

The internet has engendered an electronic panopticon (Haggerty, 2006; see below for details regarding the theoretical frameworks of this book) – an omnipresent yet often invisible sense of surveillance online to which people orient themselves to (cf. Foucault, 1977). Calvert (2000: 94), reflecting on the online world, posits that “we want to be watched, we expect to be watched, and concomitantly, we expect to be able to watch others.” Calvert’s words are undeniably reflected in the societal messages directed to young digital natives (Livingstone, 2003: 148; Prensky, 2001), which place great emphasis on young peoples’ self-responsibilization. Here self-responsibilization refers to the ways youth receive and react to warnings about potential harms online, and their moral steering. Although these messages come from many sources, scholars recognize that governance, beyond the purview of centralized states, is distributed across civil society, including NGOs, families, and schools (Chhotray & Stoker, 2009; Yar, 2013). Governments have minimal ability to govern online worlds that are often decentralized, crossing boundaries and borders beyond direct control of governments (Crawford, 2006; Rose, 1996a). As such, responsibility for the management of populations is downloaded to particular communities and organizations. Schools and parents (similarly challenged as big government) are themselves responsibilized for the ongoing moral training of youth by, for example, patterns of monitoring and surveillance that align with state interests (Kelly & Caputo, 2011).

A number of governmental initiatives in Canada, for instance, have targeted youth with messages about online risk and potential harm – some in response to tragedies such as the death by suicide of both Rehtaeh Parsons in Nova Scotia and Amanda Todd in British Columbia. Researchers have highlighted how female youth in Canada, largely exclusively, are encouraged to self-regulate their use of the internet, especially regarding the distribution of sexual self-images, through governmentally approved, yet controversial, campaigns (e.g., Karaian, 2013). Comparable campaigns and media discourses are found in the United States and the United Kingdom, which also aim to responsibilize mainly female adolescents regarding their production and distribution of sexual images online (Marker, 2011; Pedersen, 2013). Apart from governmental sources, adolescents receive many messages from parents, teachers, police, and media about how to retain privacy, manage online risks, and about the negative potential of anonymity. However, scholars have revealed a disjunction between what teens define as risk and “safety.”

Specifically, some adolescents define privacy online in terms that are not related to their visibility to strangers (i.e., their safety) but instead to “inappropriate others,” including parents, teachers and those in “direct authority to them” (i.e., the risk of “getting in trouble”; Pedersen, 2013: 407). Further, students often express doubts over the ability for school officials (and even the police, see Adorjan, Ricciardelli, & Spencer, 2017) to help in situations of cyberbullying, and some are also reluctant to inform parents for fear of losing their online privileges (Agatston, Kowalski, & Limber, 2007: S60; Q. Li, 2010: 382). Students use texting, multiple Facebook accounts, and other techniques to hide their activities online from distrusted teachers and parents, making cyber-risk more difficult to detect by school officials, parents, and other members of the community, and masking potential signs of mental health problems that may contribute to depression or suicidal ideations (Allen, 2012; boyd, 2014; see also Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of relational aggression among teens).

Exacerbating this maligned view of the wider community, the advice given to students to mitigate the risk of harm online is often a variant of “don’t talk to strangers”: they are told they are responsible for protecting their private information and passwords and never to disclose this information to anyone on or offline (boyd, 2014; Hinduja & Patchin, 2009: 151). This self-responsibilization ethos, culled from broader late modern ideology and state governance (Rose, 1996b), is revealed by some interview-based research on cyberbullying, where students have expressed that “no one cares” about cyber-victims, and that the message from communities remains “deal with it yourself ” (Q. Li, 2010: 384). Here, self-responsibilization is tethered to resignation and distrust, further isolating youth who may be dealing with complex emotional violations in a very public space. The result being a form of victim blaming that penetrates in youths’ public and private lives because of the online sphere in which it begins. Said another way, the messages youth receive regarding online risks, when internalized, result in the perpetuation of inequalities related especially to gender. For example, recent research indicates that teen and young adult females are more likely than males to apply privacy features (e.g., restricting access to their profiles) on SNS (Hoy & Milne, 2010; Patchin & Hinduja, 2010; Sheehan, 1999). This likely reflects the internalization of cyber-safety messages that subtly imply online realities are thought to be more disparaging for females in comparison to males and, perhaps as an unintentional consequence, reinforce gender stereotypes about expected male versus female qualities and persons (see Connell, 2005). Nonetheless, governmental resources to address problems like cyberstalking and cyberbullying, including websites that provide resources and services, may ironically be viewed with distrust by youth because they are provided through the same medium through which victimization is experienced (Spitzberg & Hoobler, 2002: 87). Little is currently known about how such initiatives, as well as parental and school-based efforts at monitoring and managing cyber-risk, are being perceived and responded to by youth.

Exploring the experiences of youth and cyber-risk in Canada

This book seeks to contribute to emerging knowledge regarding how youth experience cyber-risks in their own words. It complements existing quantitative examinations of cyberbullying assessing its extent and frequency, but also aims to critique and extend knowledge of how cyber-risks such as cyberbullying are perceived and responded to. This is particularly important since, as we examine in Chapter 5 regarding relational aggression, cyberbullying as a concept promoted through media, cyber-safety programs, and so forth may not gel with how youth are perceiving interpersonal conflict (see also Walton, 2005). In Canada, research has yet to explore how youth are interpreting perpetually evolving cyber-risks (though see Bailey & Steeves, 2015), and how they are receiving and potentially resisting societal messages about risk management. Youth are not passive consumers nor receivers of content and ideology; they have agency (i.e., the ability to make decisions on their own accord) and as such are active digital citizens who are “much more active and social with their use of media,” especially online (Cassidy, Faucher, & Jackson, 2013: 594; see also Chu, 2010). Echoing Haggerty’s (2006) observation that models of contemporary surveillance, often presuming top–down forms of governance, exclude the “actual experiences of people being subjected to different governmental regimes,” and that “modestly realist projects” are required “that analyze the politics of surveillance on the experiences of the subjects of surveillance” (42), we examine Canadian youth perceptions towards cyber-risk as well as strategies to govern youth conduct online. Our study responds to those who suggest that scholarship on governance and “governmentality” – the examination of the efforts by various sectors of society to govern conduct – would greatly benefit from grounded empirical research (Haggerty, 2006; T. Li, 2007; Nadesan, 2008).

Researchers looking at the risks facing youth today usually center on particular areas, such as cyberbullying (including “flaming” or hostile and aggressive interactions, harassment and cyberstalking; Hinduja & Patchin, 2009; Q. Li, 2010), sexting (i.e., sending or receiving sexual messages online; Karaian, 2013), or radicalization through “narrowcasting” (targeted messaging) of extremist ideological content to youth (Lombard, 2007). Yet, recognizing that cyber-risks are moving targets, we seek to ask youth what is most significant to them, if anything, regarding online risk, rather than explore specific areas of risk and crime per se. Thus, our focus is on the areas and forms of cyber-risk that youth report as most pertinent to them, expressed in their own words. The book largely centers on teens’ experiences within networked publics, defined as spaces “restructured by network technologies” (boyd, 2014: 8). Specifically, we are referring to spaces that are simultaneously “constructed through networked technologies and … the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology and practice” (boyd, 2014: 8). An example of such a space is any social media or network site, which, throughout this book, we refer to as a social network site. Today, SNS such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are accessed by teens using a variety of devices, primarily their (smart) cell phones, iPads, and other handheld technologies, and not just through their respective websites (the likely etymological origin of the term social network site). Despite the different ways SNS can be accessed, boyd and Ellison’s (2007) prescient definition of SNS (originally capturing all “web-based services”) remains applicable and relevant today. They argue that SNS enable users to:

(1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(boyd & Ellison, 2007: 211)

boyd (2014) further describes four properties of SNS highly relevant to how teens use these platforms as well as the warnings they usually receive about inherent risks: persistence (i.e., the durability of online content); visibility (i.e.., one’s “digital footprint” which becomes visible to the projected audience); spreadability (i.e., the ease through which content is easily shared); and searchability (i.e., the accessibility of content through internet searches, which are relatively easy to find given the other three components). boyd argues that, taken together, these features enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks which, acting together, engender both the risks and opportunities discussed in this book.

Within SNS spaces, existing research, especially in the Canadian context, has generated significant and crucial knowledge on select areas such as cyberbullying (e.g., the extent and severity in schools; see Q. Li, 2010), yet insufficiently captures what online risks are most salient to youth from their own perspectives and in their own words, or how youth respond to these risks. Moreover, the ways in which youth appropriate and have agency to actively resist directives from parents, police, educators, and the wider community to manage online risks and ameliorate harm is an under-explored area of cyber-risk research. Accordingly, we examine the perceptions and responses youth hold towards cyber-risks as a function of “the interaction among its components,” including peers, teachers, administrators, and police, “rather than simply focusing on any group in isolation” (Q. Li, 2010: 376). Through focus group discussions with teens aged 13–19 (see Chapter 2 for methodological details), we look to fulfil three interrelated objectives in this book. We ask (1) How youth define, perceive, and experience cyber-risks and which cyber-risks are most salient in their lived experiences (Chapters 3, 5, and 7); (2) How youth are responding to these cyber-risks (especially the strategies they employ to safeguard their privacy; Chapters 3 and 6); and (3) How youth are responding to the various messages, strategies, and practices they receive from society regarding their safety online. Here our focus is on messages from parents and educators, as well as responses to parental and school-based monitoring and surveillance (Chapters 4 and 8).

Chapter overview

This book is structured in the following way. Following this introduction, in Chapter 2 we detail the methodology for the research described in this book, including details of our sample as well as the processes involved in recruitment, focus group facilitation, and data analysis. We also discuss our experiences conducting research with teens and address issues related to positionality, power, and the importance of applying an “ethical imagination” (Adorjan, 2016) regarding research with youth broaching topics such as cyberbullying, sexting, and having participants who may have survived such attacks.

Chapter 3 sets the groundwork for the “whats” and “whys” of teen online sociality. That is, we discuss what SNS teens are using and what they find appealing about them. We begin here because for teens the emotional medium of connection and identification is online; it is where they seek and establish their visibility, project an evolving self, and receive feedback from their peers. The cyber-risks and more deleterious experiences that are highlighted in the chapters that follow exist alongside and, moreover, are enmeshed within the positive and enticing features of going online (Livingstone, 2008). In Chapter 3 we underscore the value of SNS for the role they play in social connection – the most important positive feature of going online identified by the teens with whom we spoke. Chapter 3 also highlights the question of teen internet addiction. We asked our participants how often they logged onto social media, and if they felt themselves to be “addicted.” The overwhelming response, interestingly, embraced the discourse of addiction (often with shared laughter among the group), though our participants stressed the importance and multifaceted use of technology, not only for socializing but school work and accessing information. Despite the opportunities for social connection online, this is also accompanied by a persistent search for social acceptance driven by a fear of missing out (FOMO), and often, social comparison which, we argue, indicates a festering paranoia that lies at the heart of growing up with such communications technology.

Chapter 4 addresses teenagers’ experiences with and views towards parental and school-based surveillance. First, we delineate between “monitoring” which is often accepted (sometimes begrudgingly) by adolescents as justified based on parental concerns for their safety online, and “surveillance,” which is perceived as more coercive and often perfor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Research focus and methodology
• 3 Teens online: what and why
• 4 Youth attitudes and experiences towards parental and school surveillance
• 5 Relational aggression
• 6 Privacy mindsets
• 7 Gender, sexting, and the teenaged years
• 8 Policies, practices, and concluding thoughts
• Index