August 2004 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

"Cyber-bullies" article in New York Times
by Willard Uncapher 23 Nov '04

23 Nov '04

The following item was published in the New York Times today and may be of interest to the list. Against the backdrop of idealized, more communitarian notions of evolving community on-line, notions that may expand off-line, here we have disruptive conflicts off-line entering the digitally mediated environments. I was also interested in how the messages sent were linked to the woman's cell phone. Perhaps we see the need to re-visit some notions of how to instill ethics as well. The bullying theme of the article drifts on to other times such as young folk only gradually coming to understand the power and implications of Internet communication. Willard ### http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/education/26bully.html Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar By AMY HARMON / Published: August 26, 2004 / New York Times The fight started at school, when some eighth-grade girls stole a pencil case filled with makeup that belonged to a new classmate, Amanda Marcuson, and she reported them. But it did not end there. As soon as Amanda got home, the instant messages started popping up on her computer screen. She was a tattletale and a liar, they said. Shaken, she typed back, "You stole my stuff!" She was a "stuck-up bitch," came the instant response in the box on the screen, followed by a series of increasingly ugly epithets. That evening, Amanda's mother tore her away from the computer to go to a basketball game with her family. But the barrage of electronic insults did not stop. Like a lot of other teenagers, Amanda has her Internet messages automatically forwarded to her cellphone, and by the end of the game she had received 50 - the limit of its capacity. "It seems like people can say a lot worse things to someone online than when they're actually talking to them," said Amanda, 14, of Birmingham, Mich., who transferred to the school last year. The girls never said another word to her in person, she said. The episode reflects one of many ways that the technology lubricating the social lives of teenagers is amplifying standard adolescent cruelty. No longer confined to school grounds or daytime hours, "cyberbullies" are pursuing their quarries into their own bedrooms. Tools like e-mail messages and Web logs enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks. The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness. Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented - and often unintentional - degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent's lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills. "We're always talking about protecting kids on the Internet from adults and bad people," said Parry Aftab, executive director of http://WiredSafety.org, a nonprofit group that has been fielding a growing number of calls from parents and school administrators worried about bullying. "We forget that we sometimes need to protect kids from kids." For many teenagers, online harassment has become a part of everyday life. But schools, which tend to focus on problems that arise on their property, and parents, who tend to assume that their children know better than they do when it comes to computers, have long overlooked it. Only recently has it become pervasive enough that even the adults have started paying attention. Like many other guidance counselors, Susan Yuratovac, a school psychologist at Hilltop Elementary School in Beachwood, Ohio, has for years worked with a wide spectrum of teenage aggression, including physical bullying and sexual harassment. This summer, Ms. Yuratovac said, she is devising a new curriculum to address the shift to electronic taunting. "I have kids coming into school upset daily because of what happened on the Internet the night before," Ms. Yuratovac said. " 'We were online last night and somebody said I was fat,' or 'They asked me why I wear the same pair of jeans every day,' or 'They say I have Wal-Mart clothes.' " Recently, Ms. Yuratovac intervened when a 12-year-old girl showed her an instant message exchange in which a boy in her class wrote, "My brother says you have really good boobs." Boys make many more explicit sexual comments online than off, counselors say. "I don't think the girl is fearful the boy is going to accost her, but I do think she is embarrassed," Ms. Yuratovac said. "They know it's mean, it's risky, it's nasty. I worry what it does to them inside. It's the kind of thing you carry with you for a lot of years." The new weapons in the teenage arsenal of social cruelty include stealing each others' screen names and sending inflammatory messages to friends or crush-objects, forwarding private material to people for whom it was never intended and anonymously posting derogatory comments about fellow students on Web journals called blogs. "Everyone hates you," read an anonymous comment directed toward a girl who had signed her name to a post about exams on a blog run by middle-school students at the Maret School in Washington, D.C., last term. "They would talk about one girl in particular who had an acne problem, calling her pimpleface and things like that which was really mean," one Maret student said. "That stuck with me because I've had acne, too." One of the girls who started the blog said she and her friends had deleted all the posts because so many people - including some parents - began to complain. "I didn't see why they cared so much," said the girl, who preferred not to be identified. "It's obviously not as serious as it seems if no one's coming up to you and saying it." Rosalind Wiseman, whose book "Queen Bees and Wannabes," was the basis for the recent movie "Mean Girls," said that online bullying had a particular appeal for girls, who specialize in emotional rather than physical harassment and strive to avoid direct confrontation. But boys do their fair share as well, often using modern methods to betray the trust of adolescent girls. For instance, last spring, when an eighth-grade girl at Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, sent a digital video of herself masturbating to a male classmate on whom she had a crush, it quickly appeared on a file-sharing network that teenagers use to trade music. Hundreds of New York private school students saw the video, in which the girl's face was clearly visible, and it was available to a worldwide audience of millions. Students would go online at school while the girl was there and watch it, said one student from another school, who declined to be named. Horace Mann officials did not reply to requests for comment this week, but the student newspaper reported at the time that the school had set up out-of-school counseling for the students directly involved and held assemblies to discuss issues of sexuality and communication. The incident is not an isolated one. In June, a video showing two Scarsdale High School freshman girls in a sexual encounter, apparently taking direction from boys in the background, prompted an investigation by the Westchester County district attorney's office when a parent reported that students were sending it to each other by e-mail. A nude picture of a 15-year-old in Wycoff, N.J., taken with a camera phone, is still circulating after she sent it by e-mail it to her boyfriend and he forwarded it to his friends, other students said. Online lists rating a school's girls as "hottest" "ugliest" or "most boring" are common. One that surfaced at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y., a few years ago, listed names, phone numbers and what were said to be the sexual exploits of dozens of girls. But girls are not the only victims of Internet-fueled gossip. A seventh grader at Nightingale-Bamford School in Manhattan said she had recently seen an online video a boy had made of himself singing a song to a girl he liked, who promptly posted it all over the Internet. "I feel really bad for the guy," she said. To a large degree, psychologists say, teenagers are being tripped up by the same property of the Internet that has compelled many adults to fire off an e-mail message they later regret: the ability to press "send" and watch it disappear makes it seem less real. "It isn't quite the same as taking a dirty picture of your girlfriend and showing it to everyone in the school when you're standing there holding the picture," said Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "Life on the Screen." "There's something about the medium that has a coarsening effect." But a growing number of teenagers are learning the hard way that words sent into cyberspace can have more severe consequences than a telephone conversation or a whispered confidence. As ephemeral as they seem, instant messages (better known as I.M.'s) form a written record often wielded as a potent weapon for adolescent betrayal and torment. A sophomore girl at Fieldston High School in the Bronx, for instance, agreed not to return this fall after a racist comment she wrote in an instant message to a friend about a boy who had spurned her ignited controversy last spring. The friend forwarded the message to the boy, and copies were distributed around the school the next day, people familiar with the situation said. Fieldston High officials declined to comment, as did the girl and her parents, who requested that her name be withheld to protect her at her new school. But several parents criticized the school administration for pressuring the girl to leave rather than using the incident as a means to teach a lesson about racist speech - and the pitfalls of instant messaging. "When you say things over the Internet, it feels like you are spewing into your diary," said Sandra Pirie Carson, the parent of a Fieldston graduate and a lawyer who offered to mediate between the school and the girl's family. "If she had said those offensive things to her friend on the phone, I have a feeling the friend wouldn't have called him and repeated what she said, and even if she had, I doubt it would have had the same effect." Many schools, ill-equipped to handle these new situations, are holding assemblies to talk about them and experts in traditional bullying are scrambling to develop strategies to prevent them. "It's so nebulous; it's not happening in the lunchroom, it's not happening on the school bus, yet it can spread so quickly," said Mary Worthington, the elementary education coordinator for Network of Victim Assistance, a counseling organization in Bucks County, Pa. "Over the last year when I've been out in schools to do our regular bullying program the counselors will say, 'Can you talk about e-mails or I.M.'s?' " For parents of several students at the Gillispie School in San Diego, such strategies were to be developed on the fly when online threats between their children and those at another school turned into a more classic form of bullying. About 30 students from Muirlands School showed up at Gillispie one afternoon last spring, carrying skateboards over their heads and calling out the screen name of one of the boys with whom they had been chatting online. Kim Penney, the mother of one of the Gillispie boys, said she had since removed the Internet cable from the computer in her son's room and insisted that he hold online conversations only where she could see them. "It was frightening to see the physical manifestation of this back and forth on I.M.," Ms. Penney said. "I just never thought of it as such a big deal." ###

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Re: first post (An Internet Without Space)
by Michele White 01 Nov '04

01 Nov '04

Dear Colleagues, Thanks for the interesting posts on space. One of my concerns is the ways that the concept of Internet space often leads to the idea that there are people on the screen or inside the interface. While there are certainly people engaging through varied technologies and they are very invested in their connections, the mediated aspects of engagement and the deeply constructed interfaces and identity representations are sometimes not addressed. This mediation significantly shapes what we see and experience. With increasing computer processing speed and connectivity, ubiquitous computing, and more detailed simulations it becomes easier and we are often encouraged to forget the technologies and representations. My hope is that we can address both user interests and the ways that traditional ideas of age, class, gender, race, and sexuality (which are conveyed through visual and textual representations) are reinscribed through technologies, practices, and depictions. I know that Ulla has asked me about alternative terminology and I often try to model this in my writing. I employ such terms as "setting" instead of space. Admittedly, sometimes thinking through our ways of speaking the Internet removes further words from my vocabulary and leads to a spluttering or form of unspeaking. As I researcher, I believe that one of my responsibilities is to consider the ways that individuals view and speak about Internet settings, contemporary technologies, and other social experiences and to suggest the problems, promises, and (as Ulla prompts) the other ways that individuals and societies can represent and produce these technologies and cultural practices. I sometimes rework a vocabulary from the humanitiesparticularly film and media studies, photography theory, literary studies, and art history to write about such depictions as the rectangular or body-shaped images of synchronous graphical settings or the photo-like images of webcams. We might also look to writings about past technologies to understand our representations of the Internet. Television and other media have been understood as live, alive, and a space. Thomas Hutchinson indicated, that with television "the outside world can be brought into the home" (ix) and Charles Siepmann argued that television was a way of "'going places' without even the expenditure of movement" (340). More recently, Rhona J. Berenstein has noted that television also had the reputation of "being a medium of immediacy: an apparatus that, more than film, offers its viewers live access to the world around them and hence it was assumed, to reality " and that television resonates "in spatial terms, suggesting a physical proximity between the viewer and the performance rendered" (26). In any case, it seems to me that each vocabulary and way of understanding the Internet produces a set of cultural perceptions that shape our understanding of these technologies and social practices, what they are, and what they can be. All my best, Michele Rhona J. Berenstein, "Acting Live: TV Performance, Intimacy, and Immediacy," Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real, ed. James Friedman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Thomas H Hutchinson, Here Is Television, Your Window on the World. New York: Hastings House, 1948. Charles Siepmann, Radio, Television, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1950.

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Re: [Air-l] Tutorial: How to unsubscribe from air-l
by Eszter Hargittai 26 Oct '04

26 Oct '04

> one key point of communicating with the list is that you have to > send > from an email that is subscribed to the list, it has to be a > perfect > match, or the list software will discard it. > Of course, unfortunately, this setting makes it impossible to use aliases for this list, unless you're okay with not ever posting anything. Eszter

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screening out spam
by Gary Thompson 26 Oct '04

26 Oct '04

The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail—even with an academic address—is spam. I’ve got my “rules” set up so as to try to catch some of this: --if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., “market,” “drugs,” “investment,” “penis,” “casino,” then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains “admin,” then it goes in the trash box --if the “to” says “undisclosed recipients,” etc. I’m wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations). Gary Thompson

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Reminder Workshop on information society metrics at AoIR5
by Michel J. Menou 17 Sep '04

17 Sep '04

Dear colleagues Some time ago a CfP was posted for the pre-conference workshop MEASURING THE INFORMATION SOCIETY : WHAT, HOW, FOR WHOM AND WHAT ? Co-Sponsored by the European Chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology - ASIS&T/EC. Thorough descriptions can be found on the conference section on the AoIR5 web site http://aoir.org/2004 and at http://www.asis.org/Chapters/europe/announcements/Measuring-eng.htm , in English, French and Spanish. Abstracts of the proposed position papers are due June 26. They should be sent to the undersigned. An online discussion will allow to prepare for the F2F event and broaden participation to colleagues who won't be able to attend. it will take place on the listserv of the Monitoring and evlauation section of the ICT4Dev site of the Development Gateway http://www.developmentgateway.com/evaluation We look forward to your contributions. Yourself, your behaviour, your society are being measured. This is an unique opportunity for you to tell what all these measures and indicators mean to you. Cordially Michel Menou mailto:Michel.Menou@wanadoo.fr

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AoIR Feminists and Queers Doing Internet Research Birds of a Feather
by Michele White 01 Sep '04

01 Sep '04

Dear Colleagues, I am proposing a "Feminists and Queers Doing Internet Research" birds of a feather meeting. This meeting might address the representation of women, queers, and people of color in new media keynotes and other positions of honor, the politics of Internet research, and increasing our visibility and practices in AoIR and the "field." We could meet Sunday during the scheduled BoF time (1-2:15pm) and then potentially schedule something else. I look forward to hearing other people's thoughts on what needs to be discussed and accomplished. Looking forward to this! Michele

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Research on identity communication in online communities
by Meng Ma 30 Aug '04

30 Aug '04

Hello All, My advisors and I are conducting research on the identity management of online community members. I find some posts in this list very interesting and relevant. For example, last week or so, somebody posted a discussion regarding how people pick their nicknames online. We are studying various ways people manage (or negotiate) their identities and present themselves as who they are in the cyberspace. We are not able to find too much academic research in this area besides old works from Goffman and some social psychologists. So I think maybe I can post here and see if some colleagues have similar interests and/or can give some advice. Also, we developed an online survey for our study. If interested, anyone is welcome to fill it out while we conducting a pilot test. Here is a link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=6415601545 Sorry to bother those who are not interested. Thank you! _____________________ Jessie Meng Ma, PhD Candidate DIT, R.H.Smith School of Business University of Maryland, College Park.

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What's Kansas City doing on 9/11?
by david silver 30 Aug '04

30 Aug '04

Friends, I am passing along information about events that will take place in Kansas City on Saturday, September 11. Anyone living in or near Kansas City should totally go! I believe the events represent the best in public scholarship. The reason I am posting this to a list devoted to internet studies is this: about 95% of all coordination of The September Project exists via the internet. The events (below) are organized in large part by my friend and colleague, George Williams, an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. George's blog: http://ghw.wordherders.net To find an event near you, please visit http://www.com.washington.edu/september/map.asp david *** On September 11, 2004, people from all over Kansas City will share and discuss their ideas about citizenship, democracy, and patriotism. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City (call 816-235-2559 for more information). Open forum & Bring-your-own-picnic, 11-2 University Playhouse (51st & Holmes) Come have your say, listen to speakers, singers, poets. Bring a picnic lunch and have a conversation on the grass. Roundtable Discussion, 2-3:30 Oak Street Residence Hall Professors, students, and community members will discuss "Civic Responsibility in Light of September 11." Voter Registration Miller Nichols Library Exercise your right: register to vote. Johnson County Public Libraries (call 913-495-7514 for more information). The Continental Soldier, 10-11 a.m. Antioch Library, 8700 Shawnee Mission Parkway, Merriam, KS Storyteller Mark Armato brings to life the soul of an army soldier facing the discontents of war. Patriots and Poets, 12-1 p.m. Lackman Library, 15345 W. 87th St, Lenexa, KS Kansas City Star book editor and poet, John Mark Eberhart will read several poems celebrating freedom and democracy and mourning the losses of war. Patriots and Poets, 2-3 p.m. Central Resource Library, 9875 W. 87th St, Overland Park, KS John Mark Eberhart will read several poems celebrating freedom and democracy and mourning the losses of war. The September Project is a collection of people, groups, and organizations working to create a day of engagement, a day of conversation, a day of democracy. The September Project is for all people. To learn more: http://www.theseptemberproject.org Contact George Williams at williamsgh[at]umkc[dot]edu _______________________________________________ cultstud-l mailing list: cultstud-l(a)mailman.acomp.usf.edu http://mailman.acomp.usf.edu/mailman/listinfo/cultstud-l

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Cool Stuff
by Nancy Baym 28 Aug '04

28 Aug '04

Are you looking for a way to support AoIR and own more things at the same time? We have a variety of AoIR items available for purchase featuring the AoIR logo, some designed just for the upcoming Sussex meeting. Some items (including the fabulous messenger bag) are even on sale! We've got shirts, jackets, hats, mousepads, mugs, bags, and more! Browse our merchandise at: http://www.cafepress.com/aoir All the money we earn selling this stuff goes right back into the association that brings you things like...this list! If you have an AoIR-relevant design you'd like us to consider using on these things, send it to me and we'll consider it. And a reminder that paid membership in AoIR brings with it benefits such as discounted conference registration, book discounts, and journal discounts. The newest member discount? 20% off all books in the Digital Formations book series published by Peter Lang (including the first Internet Research Annual, featuring select papers from the first three AoIR conferences). To join visit http://aoir.org/join Nancy -- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org

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Game studies birds of a feather meeting
by Mia Consalvo 28 Aug '04

28 Aug '04

Hi all, I just posted a message in the forums to have a BoF meeting for all those interested in digital games at Sussex. The day/time is Sunday 1-2:15 (from my draft of the program anyway). Please post there if you can make it, and if you can't, but would like to get together for a social gathering later in the conference, email me directly and I can let you know when and where we're getting together for that. Mia -- Mia Consalvo, Ph.D. 213 RTVC School of Telecommunications 9 South College Street Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 (740) 597-1521 consalvo(a)ohio.edu

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