My paper, “Teens, Tribunes, and Tribulations: Representations of Youth and Technology in Mass Media,” is now available for download.

Written last fall for a public sociology class, it examines how essentialist and determinist constructions of youth and technology (of the sort espoused by Bauerlein in my most recent post) act as vehicles for exploitative adult beliefs and fears related to power, control, and norm preservation.

This paper was also a winner of the District of Columbia Sociological Society’s 2010 Irene B. Taeuber Graduate Student Paper Award.

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I was strolling through the old Google Reader this morning and found an article on CNN about “hooking up.” How’s this for a first sentence?

When Jennifer Nicholas sees television shows or movies where characters “hook up” or have sex with “friends with benefits,” she cringes, because that’s how she got herpes.

Subtext, anyone?

I don’t really have anything to add, except what South Park has already said.

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Teens and Texting (New York Times, 5/26/09)

Step 1: Select an act, norm, or condition to become stigmatized. The group or subculture primarily associated with this topic should ideally have little to no political power, and already be associated with other deviant behaviors (e.g., teenagers).

Step 2: Write a title stating the topic and its association with harm, but be sure to insert a qualifier (e.g., “may”) so everyone thinks you’re being objective. Then dispense with any objectivity in an opening paragraph that can be read over an ominous soundtrack on the evening news.

Texting May Be Taking a Toll

They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.

Step 3: Cite statistics inappropriately, such as invoking the mean of a non-normal, non-symmetrical distribution doubtlessly skewed by extreme outliers. Use large numbers to stun consumers with little understanding of scale. If the rate of change is mostly fueled by recent developments (e.g., the ubiquity of the cell phone and proliferation of unlimited texting plans), cite this unsustainable rate of change, knowing that many consumers will erroneously apply linear extrapolation.

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

Step 4: Identify the potentially harmful consequences. These consequences should ideally encompass several potential areas of harm (e.g., physical, mental, developmental, psychological, moral). Lumping these consequences together in a list near the beginning of your story is particularly effective.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Step 5: Assemble a cast of authority figures sympathetic to the possibility of harm, When possible, refer to them by their full and impressive titles, to further establish that they Know Stuff.

Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif. …

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years …

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif. …

Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington …

Step 6: When citing empirical evidence offered by experts, rely upon the most unrepresentative methods possible, such as small purposive samples. Rather than offering relevant information, such as the outcomes of tests of statistical significance, use vague descriptors of quantity, such as “many” or “most.”

… Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day. …

… Ms. Yager recently gave an anonymous survey to 50 of her students; most said they texted during class. …

… Dr. Joffe says parents tend to be far less aware of texting than of, say, video game playing or general computer use, and the unlimited plans often mean that parents stop paying attention to billing details. “I talk to parents in the office now,” he said. “I’m quizzing them, and no one is thinking about this.” …

Step 7: Rather than relying upon empirical evidence, however, most expert testimony should reflect unverifiable or unverified opinion. Examples include broad, overgeneralizing theories, stereotypes masquerading as broad, overgeneralizing theories, or normative assumptions masquerading as broad, overgeneralizing theories. As these statements are the “substance” of your story, cite as many as possible. To preserve a veneer of objectivity, at least one expert must have crammed his or her opinion with qualifiers and weasel words.

… “Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.” …

… Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm. …

… Professor Turkle can sympathize. “Teens feel they are being punished for behavior in which their parents indulge,” she said. And in what she calls a poignant twist, teenagers still need their parents’ undivided attention. “Even though they text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” she said. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.” …

… Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said it was too early to tell whether this kind of stress is damaging. But he added, “Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorders, so we have some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs.” …

Step 8: Do not interview or otherwise acknowledge any of the millions or tens of millions of participants who do not suffer negative consequences. Instead, locate multiple outliers, and pretend that these participants are representative.

… Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honor student in Bethesda, Md., used to text on her tiny LG phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard. A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs. …

… Greg Hardesty, a reporter in Lake Forest, Calif., said that late last year his 13-year-old daughter, Reina, racked up 14,528 texts in one month. She would keep the phone on after going to bed, switching it to vibrate and waiting for it to light up and signal an incoming message. …

Step 9: Interview a social control agent who can testify to the unchecked proliferation of your topic, and his/her institution’s current inability to halt it. [Note: The social control agent may be replaced in certain instances by a victim/concerned parent-turned-moral-entrepreneur.]

Teachers are often oblivious. “It’s a huge issue, and it’s rampant,” said Deborah Yager, a high school chemistry teacher in Castro Valley, Calif.

“I can’t tell when it’s happening, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said. “And I’m not going to take the time every day to try to police it.”

Step 10: Include an example of how your consumers can take matters into their own hands. The most effective way is to select an outlier clearly requiring intervention and showing that the intervention has been responsible for the amelioration of negative consequences. If done properly, many consumers will overreact to this uplifting story and impose draconian measures upon those not actually threatened by the menace.

Mr. Hardesty wrote a column about Reina’s texting in his newspaper, The Orange County Register, and in the flurry of attention that followed, her volume soared to about 24,000 messages. Finally, when her grades fell precipitously, her parents confiscated the phone.

Reina’s grades have since improved, and the phone is back in her hands, but her text messages are limited to 5,000 per month — and none between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays.

Step 11: Edit the story and sprinkle with qualifiers—enough that you appear to be objective, but not so many that your consumers perceive that the menace is largely fabricated. Every qualification should be immediately followed by a return to fearmongering.

The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

Step 12: Submit to your editor, and wait for the inevitable flood of copycat stories from other media sources to legitimate your topic. Congratulations, you’ve just created a social problem where none existed before! Rinse and repeat whenever you feel like imposing your normative biases upon hegemonic society.

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MySpace: 90,000 Sex Offenders Removed from Site

When I think of the attitudinal outlook driving moral panics, I think of my experience working as a technology assistant at a one-to-one laptop high school at the height of the MySpace/Facebook sexual predator panic from 2004-2006.

The school organized a series of informational sessions for parents, emceed by the school’s tech coordinator. As a barely-drinking-age, MySpace-and-Facebook-using employee of the school, my job was to de-mystify these sites by demonstrating what these sites do and describing what teens get out of them. My presentation was followed by that of a police officer from a neighboring community who specialized in digital crime, whose role was ostensibly to describe the dangers and provide tips to parents seeking to keep their kids safe.

It was a recipe for disaster. A mere college student cognizant of the dangers but sympathetic to the innumerable teens who use these sites safely didn’t stand a chance against an authoritative cop telling lurid tales of sexual abuse cases and making no secret of his distaste for these sites. Without fail, the Q&A sessions devolved into public witch hunts in which I was expected to defend the entire population of social network site users and explain why parents shouldn’t forbid their children from any and all online interactions.

One interaction sticks out prominently in my mind. An outspoken Luddite father attended one of these sessions and launched into a diatribe in which he all but accused me of abetting sexual predators in their quest to rape his daughter. I began my response by noting that he had grossly mischaracterized my beliefs about the dangers of social network sites.

“What do you believe?” he challenged.

“I believe that most parents overreact, and most teens underreact.” The audience responded with audible murmurs of approval.

His face contorted in disgust. “I don’t know how you can overreact to the things you hear in the news,” he snarled.

I try to make a point not to ascribe to simplistic grand theories of social behavior. But it’s hard for me not to interpret the articles written in the wake of this finding as a basic lesson in the populist theory of media bias.

The appeal of the article is entirely dependent upon the preexisting panic parents feel about strange Internet practices and the inability of most consumers to accurately assess scale. We know hundreds, or at best a few thousands of people over the course of our lives. In that context, a football stadium full of sexual predators is downright menacing.

But in the context of the 76 million unique visitors to MySpace in the U.S., this accounts for a whopping rate of a little of one in a thousand: 0.118%.

No one in their right mind would dispute that some teens are ignorant of the dangers of socializing with strangers on the Internet. Nor that one incident of sexual predation is already one too many. But only two types of reporter would broadcast a 0.1% incidence of deviant behavior as a significant finding: (1) one who is as ignorant as the masses that (s)he seeks to inform, or (2) one who knowingly understands that his or her audience would be awed by the raw figure of 90,000 deviants in a scary context.

“What’s this world coming to?”

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I didn’t back up my assertion of decreasing adolescent sexual activity last night with much evidence, but Gene Expression‘s investigation is worth the read.

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CNN:

Passing notes in study hall or getting your best friend to ask a boy if he likes you or, you know, LIKES you, is so last century. Nowadays, teenagers are snapping naked pictures of themselves on their cell phones and sending them to their boyfriends and girlfriends.

Many of these pictures are falling into the wrong hands — or worse, everyone’s hands, via the Internet — and leading to criminal charges.

[...] Psychologists said the phenomenon reflects typical teenage hormones and lack of judgment, with technology multiplying the potential for mischief.

I’ll be honest: sensationalist, condescending media coverage of adolescent behavior is near the top of my list of topics that challenge my objectivity. But whatever my emotions, how articles like this proliferate is an interesting academic puzzle.

That the kids are alright—relative to previous years, anyway—isn’t a secret among sociologists. Most measures of what we define as deviant behavior among youths have been declining for decades. The most respected ongoing study of teen drug use, Monitoring the Future, finds that except for a spike in the mid-1990s, rates of use have consistently held steady or declined since 1979 [pdf]. A CDC study published the same day as the CNN article above found significant “overall improvements in health-related behaviors,” including rates of sexual activity, drug use, and attempted suicide.

Mainstream media coverage about deviant youth behaviors during this time, however, has tended to fixate on negative trends, often manufacturing hysterical mountains out of statistical molehills. The Just Say No crusade was launched in the midst of free-falling rates of drug abuse. Considerable fears of school shootings persist, despite the fact that no more than 42 students have been violently killed in any year since 1992. Although the aforementioned positive CDC story hasn’t received much media attention, a different CDC study from March estimating that 1 in 4 American teenage girls has an STD was featured prominently by ABC, CNN, FOX News, the New York Times, and USA Today.

Clearly, there are historical, economic, communicative, and even biological forces partly responsible for this phenomenon. But I wonder if this popular aversion to a positive outlook about younger generations has a particular resonance in American society.

“Blaming the victim” is commonly used in a criminological sense, but the origin of the term is actually sociological, and it has a different meaning in that context. William Ryan used it to describe the Moynihan Report’s “[attempt] to divert responsibility for poverty from social structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor.”

When it comes to youth today, there are many compelling social structural factors at work: nearly 1 in 5 living in poverty (the highest percentage of any age group), 11 percent of those under 18 and 29 percent between 18 and 24 without health care [pdf], unstable families, restricted civil liberties, and a compulsory educational system that both American political parties agree is in need of major reforms. These factors have been enumerated and scrutinized by social scientists such as Robert Epstein, John Gatto, Henry Giroux, and Mike Males, but aren’t cited nearly as often as perceived moral failings.

Why might we be motivated to emphasize behavioral and cultural factors at the expense of social structural factors when kids and teens behave badly? One possible reason is that American society is particularly susceptible to adopting a victim-blaming perspective. The tenet that ours is a “land of opportunity” in which anyone is capable of achieving material and social success is to a large extent one that denies or diminishes the influence of repressive social structures. Certainly many Americans have made astonishing achievements in spite of their lowly socioeconomic backgrounds, and certainly our degree of social mobility exceeds that of many other countries. But that doesn’t mean that repressive social structures don’t exist, that they aren’t strong enough to exclude many others from the possibility of mobility, or that those trumpeted rags-to-riches tales aren’t mere aberrations.

The secular “land of opportunity” narrative is reinforced by our religious roots. Blaming the victim, to a large extent, requires a belief in a just world, which lends itself to the brand of predestined Protestantism that proliferated in America’s early days. One of the granddaddies of sociology, Max Weber, argued in his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that material and secular success became equated with spiritual success in the vacuum of religious authority following the Reformation. Though Protestantism certainly doesn’t contend anymore that bad things don’t happen to good people, for many years many denominations did.

Age in many ways is no different than gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. All are potential demographic vehicles for social stratification. All have been axes along which much historical subjugation has occurred, as the hegemonic category has enforced structural inequities. And all have been occasions for victim-blaming.

Today, respected media sources quote psychologists who sneer at “typical teenage hormones and lack of judgment.” Fifty years ago, they might have cited “experts” who would bemoan typical female hormones. Or typical African-American lack of judgment.

Although racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices still persist, most Americans have accepted after long struggles that traditionally subordinate populations aren’t biologically inferior, morally bankrupt, intellectually deficient, or a dangerously deviant fifth column set against the destruction of all that is good and healthy in our society. Yet even the most politically correct adults, after the next school shooting, will attribute those very misguided qualities to their children’s cohort without irony.

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During my pilgrimage to City Lights bookstore, I came upon a book entitled Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity.

Unfortunately, I didn’t buy the book, and Amazon’s search inside feature let me down, so I can’t quote the passage I read in the Introduction. But in short, the author, Hal Niedaviecki, writes about his decidedly nonconformist history and the increasing frequency with which he’s funneled referential birthday cards about his individuality.

His well-meaning parents, witless to the irony of a multibillion dollar corporation responsible for untold conformist holiday behavior embracing individuality, feel validated by their selections. But Hal is depressed. His very uniqueness has been co-opted by capitalism.

The identification of this phenomenon isn’t new (which was the ultimate reason I didn’t buy the book). Thomas Frank and Christopher Lasch wrote about this in the 1990s. Naomi Klein has been crusading against it for almost as long, as has Kalle Lasn. Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal book The Tipping Point is to a considerable extent about how consumer phenomena are products of social movements backed by economic investment.

One thing I find lacking in this discussion is the distinction between economic and social conformity. On one hand, there seems to be an unmistakable trend toward elevating consumption into an “experience” or identity instead of a mere economic transaction by connecting products to the trappings of social norms and values. This practice, in my opinion, is made possible by the explosion of psychological and sociological knowledge in the twentieth century. With the diminishing returns of economic maturity and sudden plenitude of social scientific knowledge, in many instances it’s simply cheaper to change the consumer than to change the product.

[Note: By far the best exploration of these related phenomena I’ve encountered is a BBC documentary entitled The Century of the Self (available for free online divided into four hour-long parts: 1 2 3 4). Starting with Freud and ending with Bill Clinton’s focus group-driven 1996 campaign, it traces how advances in the social sciences were leveraged for practical use in other fields, such as advertising and politics.]

From a sociological perspective, the primary tendency being exploited is our society’s disposition to associate various roles and subcultures not merely with a particular set of norms and values, but also a particular set of products its members are expected to consume, which predates the recent revolutions in advertising. Thorstein Veblen, an early sociologist writing at the turn of the 20th century, noted in his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, how members of the upper classes consciously adopt and cultivate a lifestyle of “conspicuous consumption,” procuring and displaying products with exclusive symbolic value, even at the expense of functionality (e.g., eating utensils made of silver instead of more durable metals).

More recently, Michael Solomon and Henry Assael have argued for a gestalt approach to symbolic consumption, producing evidence that consumers are motivated to assemble a “product constellation” to “define, communicate, and enact social roles.”

However, there’s a very different type of social conformity that exists outside of consumer behavior. This variable is probably more accurately described as a social cohesion, a relative consensus (or lack thereof) over those social norms and values. In other words, how much diversity exists in a society over the definition of desirable norms and values, and how entrenched or ossified are those that currently prevail in the society as a whole?

This variable has been explored to some extent in cross-cultural studies, such as this one by Jung-Soo Yi [pdf], which have employed a dichotomy of “collectivist” and “individualist” cultures to describe differences in social cohesion between, for example, Japan or Korea, and Canada or the United States. Of particular interest are studies that have examined the unique position of members of one type of culture assimilating into the other, such as those contained in Greenfield and Cocking’s Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development.

Although academic literature has focused primarily on identifying and contrasting levels of social cohesion in different cultures, there’s no reason it can’t also be applied to measure changes in one culture over time. Most would argue that there’s been a lessening of cohesion in American society during the last half of the twentieth century by this rubric. The popular narrative suggests that America enjoyed a cohesive afterglow in the years following World War II, which was fractured by the consciousness revolution in the 1960s and fragmented into a million pieces by Generation X in the 1980s and 1990s.

I’m fascinated by how these two social trends—the commodification of conformity by economic interests, and the attenuation of social cohesion—have interacted with and often reinforced one another. With less social cohesion than a century ago, privilege is no longer a requirement to engage in conspicuous consumption. Everyone consumes to distinguish his or herself from everyone else. A hundred years after Veblen, Chuck Palahniuk’s office-drone everyman, despite an utter lack of wealth, status, or power, voices the same sentiment that Veblen saw in the privileged men of his time as they purchased silverware: “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?”

More subcultures create more business opportunities. There exists a potential market for every ethos, no matter how idiosyncratic, to express itself through consumption. And as long as it’s profitable, businesses will continue to provide that service, regardless of the consequences.

After all, even Lasn’s anti-brand organization, Adbusters, now sells a line of “ethical alternatives.”

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Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s work on social networks is getting a lot of attention from both online and traditional media. From yesterday’s Washington Post:

The pair reported last summer that obesity appeared to spread from one person to another through social networks, almost like a virus or a fad.

In a follow-up to that provocative research, the team has produced similar findings about another major health issue: smoking. In a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team found that a person’s decision to kick the habit is strongly affected by whether other people in their social network quit—even people they do not know. And, surprisingly, entire networks of smokers appear to quit virtually simultaneously.

I found this to be an intriguing and slightly amusing finding in the context of the U.S. government’s war on drugs. As any American knows, preventive efforts in this country to curtail drug abuse have tended to place considerable emphasis on the acquisition of specific social skills, such as the “Just Say No” campaign or the D.A.R.E. program’s reliance on resisting “peer pressure.”

I’ve always thought it was an odd strategy on the face of it, ignoring as it does the native desire to experiment and the physiological rewards of recreational use. While there’s undoubtedly a social element to drug abuse, the notion that millions of innocent children are being seduced into drug use by their serpentine friends (despite the best efforts of their omniscient makers) has always struck me more as a self-serving Judeo-Christian fantasy than a cogent sociological explanation.

For the most part, the academic literature supports my skepticism. Evaluative studies on the efficacy of D.A.R.E., such as those listed below, have consistently shown that D.A.R.E.’s effect on drug use is statistically insignificant at best.

• Dukes et al. 1996. A three-year follow-up of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.). Evaluation Review, 20, 49-66. [SAGE subscription required]

• Ennett et al. 1994. How effective is drug abuse resistance education? A meta-analysis of Project DARE outcome evaluations. American Journal of Public Health, 84, 1394-1401. [pdf]

• Lynam et al. 1999. Project DARE: No effects at 10-year follow-up. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 590-593. [pdf]

• Wysong et al. 1994. Truth and DARE: Tracking drug education to graduation and as symbolic politics. Social Problems, 41, 448-472. [JSTOR subscription required]

In 2001, a Surgeon General’s report categorized D.A.R.E. as a school-based program that “Does Not Work,” citing its “social skills training and…developmental [inappropriateness].”

More substantive theories span biology, psychology, and sociology, and collectively reflect the myriad of factors influencing individuals with regard to drug use. (A good summary of these theories appears in Erich Goode’s Drugs in American Society.) Biological theories rely on genetic factors or postulated metabolic imbalances. Psychological theories cite reinforcement, “problem-behavior proneness,” or psychological pathologies.

In sociology, Robert Merton’s anomie theory of deviant behavior suggests that deviance occurs in the absence of traditional avenues to success and has been invoked to explain drug use. Travis Hirschi’s social control theory suggests that deviance occurs in the absence of social controls and consequences. Alternately, Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson’s self-control theory posits that a lack of self-control caused by inadequate parental socialization is the primary cause of deviant behavior.

Other sociological theories acknowledge more directly the influence of an individual’s particular social group. Social learning theory, derived from a combination of Edwin Sutherland’s theory of differential association and psychological behaviorism, suggests we learn acceptable behavior from our social group, which may or may not conform to the standards of society at large. Howard Becker’s subcultural theory posits that a social group’s attitude toward drug use is partly responsible for the formulation of its individual members’ attitudes toward drug use.

Could Christakis and Fowler have discovered some sort of social alignment mechanism by which behaviors are transmitted beyond the range of one’s immediate social group, beyond the scope of social learning and subcultural theories?

If the meme of direct peer pressure was enough to ignite a social panic, think how paranoid we’ll become if we find out that we’re pressured to do drugs by people we don’t even know.

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