September 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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Re: MCI's"Anthem" commercial
by Tama Leaver 30 Sep '04

30 Sep '04

Hi Shani, A small but watchable quicktime version of the MCI advertisement is archived here: http://it.stlawu.edu/%7Eglobal/pagessemiotics/montagemci.html Cheers, Tama -----Original Message----- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 17:12:52 +0100 From: "Orgad,SS" <S.S.Orgad(a)lse.ac.uk> Subject: [Air-l] MCI's"Anthem" commercial Dear All, Does anybody know where I can get a copy of MCI's infamous television commercial "Anthem" from the mid 90s? Cheers, Shani _______________________ Tama Leaver (Mr) English, Communication and Cultural Studies (M202) University of Western Australia 35 Stirling Highway Crawley WA 6009 Australia Ph: +61 (0) 411 044 062 Fax: +61 (8) 6488 1030 email: tama(a)cyllene.uwa.edu.au CRICOS PROVIDER No. 00126G

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Annual papers due Oct. 1
by Mia Consalvo 30 Sep '04

30 Sep '04

Hi Everyone, Just a reminder that Friday October 1 is the deadline for papers to be submitted to me for the third AoIR Annual. Here are the details for submission guidelines. Let me know if you have individual questions about any of this off list at consalvo(a)ohio.edu Thanks-- Mia -- Mia Consalvo, Ph.D. 213 RTV Building School of Telecommunications 9 South College Street Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 740.597.1521 ********************************* CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS AoIR Internet Research Annual Volume 3 Edited by Mia Consalvo, Kate O¹Riordan & Sheizaf Rafaeli Peter Lang Publishing, New York Overview: The third annual will draw from the theme of the Sussex conference, ³Ubiquity,² and provide an array of cutting-edge research from the growing field of Internet Studies. This volume will also delve more deeply into the selected topics, allowing researchers to gain the depth as well as breadth of knowledge needed to be fully informed about this critical area of new media technology. Submission Details: *Suggested length: No more than 3500 words, INCLUDING references, tables, and notes. *Format: MS Word, sent electronically to Mia Consalvo at consalvo(a)ohio.edu *Style: APA style will be required for all accepted papers, but submissions can be in another style, provided author is willing to make the change later. *Publication history: Papers submitted for consideration in the Annual must have been presented at the AoIR 2004 conference in Falmer, England. However, they must not have been published in any other outlet. *Decisions: Final decisions about inclusion will be made by December 31, 2004. Submit completed papers electronically to Mia Consalvo at consalvo(a)ohio.edu Deadline for submissions: October 1, 2004 *************************************************

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MCI's"Anthem" commercial
by Orgad,SS 30 Sep '04

30 Sep '04

Dear All, Does anybody know where I can get a copy of MCI's infamous television commercial "Anthem" from the mid 90s? Cheers, Shani ************************* Shani Orgad, PhD Department of Media and Communications London School of Economics London WC2A 2AE United Kingdom tel: +44 (0)20 79556493 e-mail: s.s.orgad(a)lse.ac.uk http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/shaniorgad.htm

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Upload information for AoIR 2004 paper archive?
by Lois Ann Scheidt 30 Sep '04

30 Sep '04

Could someone repost the information for adding papers to the conference archive? I can't seem to find it, late I know but better then never, and the list archive is giving me a 404 error when I try to search it. Thanks Lois Ann Scheidt MPA MIS SPHR CCP Doctoral Student School of Library and Information Science Indiana University Bloomington IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com

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Fwd: [Air-l] SMS via Internet in Austria
by Astrid Dickinger 29 Sep '04

29 Sep '04

>dear all, > >i made a survey on sms usage of students in austria (sample 365). >they reported that they >send 21 sms >receive 23 sms >on average in a week >46% of the messages they send are sent via the internet >42% of the messages they receive are sent via the internet > >i hope this helps >astrid > >_____________________________________ >Astrid Dickinger >Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration >astrid.dickinger(a)wu-wien.ac.at >http://www.tourism.wu-wien.ac.at/cgi-bin/ift.pl?personal/dickinger.htm >>>-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- >>>Von: air-l-aoir.org-bounces(a)listserv.aoir.org >>>[mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] Im Auftrag von Philipp >>>Budka >>>Gesendet: Mittwoch, 29. September 2004 08:53 >>>An: Association of Internet Researchers >>>Betreff: [Air-l] SMS via Internet in Austria >>> >>>Dear all, >>> >>>I couldn't find data on the quanitity of SMS and MMS messages send in >>>Austria. But, according to the Austrian Internet Monitor, 37% of internet >>>users use frequently web SMS (sending SMS via the WWW). >>>79% of Austrians over 14 do have a cell phone, 97% in the group of 14-19 >>>year olds >>>(http://mediaresearch.orf.at/index2.htm?internet/internet_aim.htm) >>>Cheers, >>> >>>Philipp >>> >>>-- >>>Philipp Budka >>>philbu(a)gmx.net >>>Rustengasse 5/10 >>>A-1150 Wien, Austria >>>http://www.philbu.net >>>http://www.lateinamerika-studien.at >>>--

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RE: [Air-l] Each Dane sends 102 SMS messages per month
by St-Amant, Kirk 29 Sep '04

29 Sep '04

Charlie and Merlyna, These are fascinating numbers; what are the sources of these statistics (for those of us who'd like to cite them in future research)? Thanks, Kirk ________________________________ From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces(a)listserv.aoir.org on behalf of Merlyna Lim Sent: Tue 9/28/2004 2:00 PM To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org; hitch(a)hum.ku.dk Subject: Re: [Air-l] Each Dane sends 102 SMS messages per month Thanks, Charlie for your info... This is interesting... I'm curious to know about other European countries... Meanwhile, here some 'numbers' from Asia ... for comparison.. in Hong Kong, where 83% of total population are using cellular-phones, there're only 23 SMS messages sent per month per head on average. Meanwhile, in China 124, Singapore 219, and Philippines 466 SMS messages/month!! In Indonesia, telco company says it's 4 messages per day per head.. so in average is roughly 120/mo... -merlyna- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charlie Breindahl" <hitch(a)hum.ku.dk> To: <air-l(a)aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 2:01 PM Subject: [Air-l] Each Dane sends 102 SMS messages per month > In the first six months of 2004, the 5.4 million Danes have sent > 2,958,045,000 SMS messages - or 102 per month on average. In the same > period, the Danes sent 4,367,000 MMS messages. > > SMS messages are short text messages sent from and received on mobile > phones. MMS messages are multi-media SMS messages, predominantly sent from > camera phones. The use of SMS messages is predominantly a youth phenomenon, > but SMS is increasingly used instead of phone-in voting and in mail-in > competitions. > > Just thought you'd like to know :o)= _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org(a)listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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