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1 Evolving social media
1.1 Introduction
“Can you kill yourself already?”
“Fuckin ugly ass hoe.”
“Nobody even cares about you.”
On 9 December 2012 16-year-old Jessica Laney was found hanged in her home in Hudson, Florida. For months prior to her suicide, Jessica had been the target of extensive cyberbullying through the popular online social media site ASKfm. Her story is devastating on its own, yet even more unnerving is that the experiences of Jessica Laney are not unlike those of Amanda Todd, Ryan Halligan, David Molak and many others. Each of these young people was bullied extensively on the Internet, eventually taking extreme measures to finally escape their tormentors. The Internet continues to foster countless similarly vile interactions and outcomes, be it through social media platforms, online discussion forums, comment sections of local news sites, or even personal email. Hate has taken up residence in the online space on a global scale.
Although the general consensus tends to stress the benefits of the Internet in the sense of its provision of a platform for free expression of opinions and convenient interaction, recent years have increasingly brought into view the darker aspects of the online world. These include various forms of negative behaviour involving cyberbullying, harassment, stalking, slander, manipulation of personal information and fraud. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have helped terrorists and other criminal actors communicate and reinforce their activities while also manipulating sentiments with increasing effectiveness. Often, even extreme threats are communicated via mainstream channels such as Facebook or YouTube. In addition, the Internet is home to potentially disturbing and harmful content such as torture or snuff videos showing the actual deaths of people. It is also clear that certain material can be more harmful for some users and less so for others. In the discussion of potential harm, the primary focus of concern is, understandably, on children, teenagers and young adults.
This book consequently focuses on the darker aspects of the Internet through the lens of youth and young adults in particular. It does so by paying particular attention to the core force of harm in today’s online society, namely the communication of hate. Online hate (i.e. cyberhate), as a global phenomenon, specifically targets either individuals or groups of people. Notably, it is not a specific exception to the rules of interaction but rather is rooted in mainstream experience. Vile and hateful online interaction is seemingly becoming the new norm even in the most socio-economically advanced Western societies. It takes many forms, often masking itself as rational opinion or justified expression. Hate, as it exists today, is of course nothing new. What is new, however, is the extent to which online tools allow global dissemination of content and ease of access to targets, and make it difficult to mitigate or prevent negative experience among users which spend a great deal of time navigating in that environment.
The modern tools afforded by these technological developments have become central to the ways in which we communicate, explore and connect to the world. Immediate access to global news, friends, interests, new contacts and modes of expression has become an assumed part of life for owners of enabling mobile phones. It could be argued that being online has become a mundane aspect of life in most Western societies, where constant connectivity is the norm. We tend not to be awestruck by the incredible capabilities afforded to us by technology in the way that someone new to this array of enhancing tools would be. Today, information, communication and entertainment are all activities that can be found in a single device not much bigger than the palm of your hand. Smartphones are, however, only a small element of a larger entity of different ICTs. Computers, laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers have all been developed to provide easy access to the online space. Furthermore, the online space itself has taken a constantly growing role in the daily life of most Western societies, even to the extent that these are referred to as a homogenous body of information societies.
Although the expanding role of the different ICTs seems relatively rapid, large-scale evolution of the new information societies began in the aftermath of their transformation into post-industrial societies (Bell, 1973). This transition took an even steeper turn roughly two decades ago, and today almost half of the world’s population is able to “log in”. This technologisation of Western society has introduced great changes in all aspects of everyday life. For many, working is no longer tied to a specific time or location, as one’s office can be set up almost anywhere. Furthermore, leisure is increasingly spent in front of a screen, whether to read the news, watch a movie, or connect with friends. Due to the impact that different ICTs have had on both work and leisure, they have become central management tools for many of the components of everyday life. However, and to put things into a bit more perspective, computers and mobile devices are not the first, or even the biggest, wave of technological change that has hit Western homes and working life. Television, and particularly the various other electronic home appliances that were introduced to the mass market in the 1940s and 1950s, revolutionised much of society and how it would be operationalised from then onwards (Bittman, Rice & Wajcman, 2004; Cowan, 1976). However, what the Internet as a connecting mechanism has done is redraw the boundaries of communication, information and entertainment in a global context, a change unlike any other thus far.
Early computers and the predecessors of the Internet, such as ARPANET, were constructed for the purpose of helping to process and distribute information among the scientific community. Like many things originally intended for limited use, computers and the Internet eventually became an integral part of the modern-day household. The significance of these technologies at the societal level is linked to the development of a new way of conceptualising context, namely through the information society framework (e.g. Castells & Himanen, 2002) or network society (van Dijk, 2012). The information, or network, society is a concept introduced for the purposes of better understanding the growing role of new technologies within the societal context, and is a multifaceted phenomenon which has inspired a number of books. For the sake of a more focused approach, we will not delve into the theoretical discussion of the specifics of what constitutes an information society. Rather, we will focus on a few of the central elements that are associated with these societies. In particular, we are concerned with the dynamics of the darker aspects of the online society here.
In Chapters 2 and 3 we address some key theoretical tools and integrate both criminological and social psychological theories on computer-mediated behaviour. Criminologists have shown factors associated with criminal victimisation involving risk environments (e.g. Pratt, Holtfreter & Reisig, 2010; Reyns, 2013), and social psychologists have underlined the significant overlap between identity group behaviour and conditions favouring anonymity of some kind (e.g. Spears, Postmes, Lea & Wolbert, 2002). These perspectives help us to understand the behaviours of content creators and consumers, and the social dynamics at play in the online environment in terms of risk and victimisation. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 focus on the rising presence of online hate in the cross-cultural context and show empirical findings regarding exposure and impacts of online hate and harmful content among young people. In Chapter 7 we go beyond empirical observations by introducing what we call the Identity Bubble Reinforcement model, or IBR model, in order to more fully understand risky behaviour and reinforcing phenomena. Finally, in Chapter 8 we link the book’s main themes together and assess implications for the future.
In order to provide a better understanding of some of the main aims of this book, we endeavour to answer the following key questions:
• What is online hate, what forms does it take, and what are the implications of exposure?
• How prevalent is exposure to hate material among young people cross-nationally and does exposure vary by nation?
• Which components of past theory can be leveraged to improve understanding of hate in the current online environment?
• How do risk factors, social identity dynamics and the mechanisms of the modern online environment relate to exposure to hate?
• How might the risk of online exposure to hate shape the future of Internet use?
The following chapters therefore aim to provide answers to these question by utilising past theoretical frameworks and recent research literature while also offering empirical interpretations based on unique cross-national survey data collected in the UK, the US, Germany and Finland. The interpretations based on our findings provide us with new possibilities for understanding the changing computer-mediated landscape in which young people of today spend an increasing proportion of daily life. We can, through our data, detect the current characteristics of exposure to hate within countries, while also mapping out common denominators in terms of hate material cross-nationally. However, before delving into the dark side of the Internet, this chapter takes a few steps back to better contextualise how we, as modern Western societies immersed in new technology, arrived where we are today. Through this, we hope to clarify some of the core elements of the present-day information society and what they were built on. In particular, we provide a brief overview of the evolving roles of social media in the rising culture of risk.
1.2 From new media to social media
“New media” is perhaps the most common and popular term associated with the distinction between old and traditional media that has resulted from the emergence of new electronic technologies. According to Livingstone (1999), the term “new media” was first coined in reference to advances in home entertainment, such as video cassette recorders (VCRs), computer games or satellite television. However, today, the common understanding of what constitutes new media has taken a slightly more evolved form. New media not only relates to the digitalisation of traditional media, such as newspapers and television (Lawson-Borders, 2003; Lievrouw, 2004), but also includes various aspects of digitised interaction, thus combining the central elements that make up the present-day technological landscape (see also van Dijk, 2012).
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of new media is their interactive nature. These interactive functions are usually referred to as social media. Here, we treat social media as a distinct extension of the new media phenomenon, as they have developed to the point of being a global environment combining both technology and interaction on a new scale. So what do we mean by social media? Our definition requires a bit of background on the evolution of the Internet. We argue that social media are largely an end result of the transformation from what is referred to as the Web 1.0 society into the Web 2.0 society. From a practical perspective, this was really a transformation of behaviour. That is, users were previously far more passive consumers of all aspects of online content. This was in large part due to the fact that only relatively few individuals had the capability, tools and therefore means to produce content online. These few individuals were commonly known as webmasters. As a result, much online interaction operated like a one-way street, with a unidirectional flow of information to the consumer.
With the transformation to a Web 2.0 society, a new highway was constructed. Here, content began travelling in both directions, as formerly passive users were able to become increasingly active content producers. This resulted in technological advances in both online platforms and the tools used to access the Internet. In other words, technology had become affordable, simple and accessible enough to be conveniently usable by the masses, enabling a more active role. This, in turn, meant that control over what is produced online left the hands of the few and became the property of all users. This is not to say that self-expression in the online context did not exist before Web 2.0. It did, as a number of different online discussion boards were in operation in the early 1990s. What changed, however, was the ability to produce individualised content accessible by other users in a more structured and, most importantly, global platform with the aid of user-friendly technology. As such, social media involve platforms for expression and interaction where users are able to create content and manage social networks, with Web 2.0 being closely associated with the emergence of different social media services. MySpace was among the first global social networking services to be at the front line of the transformation from passive consumption to active content production. As O’Reilly (2005) has expounded, Web 2.0 was not so much a technological upgrade from Web 1.0, but rather a transformation of how the Internet and ICT technology are actually used (see also Witte & Mannon, 2010). This meant that the social implications of technology were taken to a completely new level.
Notably, social media are not an entirely new phenomenon. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) note that the term social media was already in use in the 1960s, though the current understanding of what constitutes social media is vastly different from those early days. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) also argue that despite the close connection between Web 2.0 and social media, they are not in fact one and the same thing. Web 2.0 serves as an “ideological and technological foundation” (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61) for that which eventually became social media. They argue that from the point of view of average consumers, the most widely used applications can be listed as follows:
1 social networking sites (e.g. Facebook)
2 video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube)
3 Wiki sites (information sites that can be freely accessed and edited by users, e.g. Wikipedia)
4 various forms of blogs (personal or microblogging sites such as Twitter)
5 virtual communities (e.g. Second Life)
6 online game communities (e.g. World of Warcraft).
What must be noted here is that despite their study being only a few years old, Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2010) construction of social media is already slightly outdated. This serves as a clear example of the rapid pace at which social media continue to evolve as new services constantly emerge. Photo-sharing services such as Instagram are currently among the most popular social media applications, whereas the likes of Periscope, a live video-streaming service, is gaining popularity quickly as well. Present-day social media are thus becoming increasingly a live visual tool, serving as a window into the everyday lives of modern young and formerly young people alike. On the other hand, it could be argued that this is merely a natural progression from reality television, which has been around since the 1990s. Indeed, it is interesting to note that today many have the necessary tools to create content with a production value similar to content commercially mass produced. The result is the emergence of an entire industry based on social media content creation.
Another important aspect of the growing role of the different types of social media is that these services have also becom...
