Parents, Media and Panic through the Years

Kids Those Days

Karen Leick

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319983189
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319983196
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book analyses articles that appeared in popular periodicals from the 1920s to the present, each revealing the panic that parents and adults have expressed about media including radio, television, video games and the Internet for the last century. Karen Leick argues that parents have continuously shown an intense anxiety about new media, while expressing a romanticized nostalgia for their own youth. Recurring tropes describe concerns about each "addictive" new media: children do not play outside anymore, lack imagination, and may imitate violent or other inappropriate content that they encounter. 

© The Author(s) 2019

Karen LeickParents, Media and Panic through the Yearshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98319-6_6

Begin Abstract

The Internet, Social Media and Smartphones

Karen Leick¹

(1)

University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Karen Leick

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter analyzes fears about the Internet, social media and smart phones. In the mid-1990s, as families began using the Internet and acquired their first email addresses, the greatest fear among parents about the Internet concerned pornography, often called “cyberporn.” In the new millennium, this fear gradually shifted to a panic over predators who might use chat rooms or new social media such as MySpace to lure young people to meet for sexual encounters. Those fears were then replaced with anxiety over cyberbullying, as several teen and pre-teen suicides were widely publicized. Today’s “moral panic” over social media and smartphones has shifted to discussions about smartphone addiction and depression, both of which are now regularly discussed on television and in books and periodicals.

Keywords

InternetSocial mediaSmartphonesAddictionCyberpornCyberbullying

End Abstract

In the last 25 years, young people have gradually migrated from certain screens (television, arcade games) to other screens (computers, smartphones). Although the transition was gradual, adults have predictably followed well-established historical precedent and began to panic as soon it was clear that new media (the internet, social media and smartphones) would become the preferred choice for youth in ways that seemed to exclude the older generation.

In the 1990s, teens still watched more television than adults would have liked, as in the previous decades. A 1990 Newsweek special issue on the “New Teens” explained that teenagers “watch TV an average of 22 hours a week. That means they spend about 3 hours a day in front of the tube.” One problem that adults frequently emphasized: “Ads consume 3 to 4 hours – about 20% – of TV watched per week.” ¹ The image of teens passively watching TV, constantly bombarded with violence, sexual innuendo, and intrusive marketing and advertising was pervasive. “Kill Your Television” bumper stickers began appearing, as a certain segment of the population resisted what was seen as passive indoctrination into America’s superficial market- and media-driven society; the band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin released a popular single by the same name, “Kill Your Television,” in 1990. Some critics noted the irony of using the phrase for a hit single that benefited from exposure on television: “Without the power of television and MTV in particular – the singer and his band might be sunk.” ² Yet, the mantra “Kill Your Television” had cultural resonance among youth who had begun to understand television as a homogenizing form of control over passive Americans who were too lazy to understand what was being fed to them by “the industry,” “the government,” or “Hollywood.”

In the mid-1990s, college students and teenagers were introduced to the Internet and acquired their first email addresses. Instructions on how to “surf the web” or “surf the net” began to appear in mainstream periodicals, as American signed up for their first AOL accounts and adults looked for help with the new and intimidating technology. In October 1995, “the two-year-old World Wide Web (WWW), which offers a whole new dimension of the Internet is still unchartered waters to most users. Only one in five of all online users (3% of Americans) have ever signed onto the Web.” ³ Most early “online users” were confined to using email—they would log on, check mail, then log off and turn off the computer—without visiting any websites. This changed quickly over the next few years. In 1995, only 26.8% of American household owned a computer; this figure would increase to about half of American households in 2000. ⁴ Not surprisingly, young people who were introduced to email as high school students or in college quickly adapted; adults, however, needed more detailed instructions. In 1996, one Consumer Reports article explained: “You may simply be curious about the ’Net or the Web; you may have explored it at home or at a friend’s house. Either way, you’re probably a bit confused by the jargon and hype.” ⁵ The helpful guide defines basic terminology, explains the differences between different Internet services (AOL , Compuserve , MSN , and Prodigy), and so on. The Internet is described as a place where users can “listen to distant radio broadcasts, play chess around the clock with people around the world, or talk with a friend in Rome for the cost of a local call. You can send electronic mail to family and friends, discuss parenting issues with others the world over, contact manufacturers’ hotlines—even shop for a used car.” There were, however, immediate concerns about other, less wholesome uses for the ’net.

As soon as it was clear that photographs and other images could be shared and accessed for free (or for a fee) on the Internet, it did not take long for online pornography, or “cyberporn” as it was called, to become a mainstream term and a massive concern among adults. They understood that the Internet would soon be the new media that the younger generation would understand and inhabit in way that their parents could not even begin to understand, and it was easy to see how youth could be exposed to inappropriate content without parents even knowing about it. Instigating a nationwide debate and panic over online pornography, Time magazine published a sensational cover story on July 3, 1995, with bold letters dominating the cover: CYBERPORN, the headline read, over a photo of a young child (around 4 or 5 years old), whose eyes are wide with horror, a keyboard in front of him. Under the bold “CYBERPORN” is the subtitle: “A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids – and free speech?” ⁶

Conversations and debates about pornography on the Internet were soon everywhere. Like other moral panics in the past, the reaction to the threat of online pornography was exaggerated and hysterical. The terms of the debate were set by the controversial Time story, which was soon discussed nationwide. The article immediately encourages readers to imagine the worst: “When the kids are plugged in, will they be exposed to the seamiest sides of human sexuality? Will they fall prey to child molesters hanging out in electronic chat rooms?” This fear of child predators would become the most emphasized danger in the early years of the internet, and articles, books, and television programs warned parents about AOL “chat rooms” where adults could create fake identities, establish online “friendships,” and lure underage internet users to meet for sexual encounters.

The statistics from a Carnegie Mellon study used for the Time article seemed alarming, although most readers of the article would not have been familiar enough with the terminology to really understand them. For example, this study found that “On those Usenet newsgroups where digitized images are stored, 83.5 percent of the pictures were pornographic.” Many readers would likely misinterpret this to mean that 83.5% of images on the Internet were pornographic, which was clearly not the case. The article goes into some detail about the ways “cyberporn” is more extreme than widely available print pornography; Elmer-Dewitt explains that there is “a demand for images that can’t be found in the average magazine rack: pedophilia (nude photos of children), hebephilia (youths) and what the researchers call paraphilia–a grab bag of ‘deviant’ material that includes images of bondage, sadomasochism, urination, defecation, and sex acts with a barnyard full of animals.” Even the marketing of the images online emphasized this deviancy; one online pornographer explained that if certain images were described as “depicting sex scenes between family members (father and daughter, mother and son), even though there was no evidence that any of the participants were actually related … these ‘incest’ images were among his biggest sellers, accounting for 10 percent of downloads.”

The sensational Time story was widely discussed, critiqued, and debated in the summer of 1995 and was enormously influential in exacerbating early fears about the Internet. The week the issue was available, “During his June 26 floor speech railing against cyberporn, Senator Charles Grassley held the magazine aloft,” the New Republic reported. ⁷ Many found the reporting in the article to be deliberately misleading and alarming. A Washington Post story explored the negative online reaction, quoting messages that had been posted about Time’s story: “This is shameless, low-down-dirty-gutterball-sleazoid-pandering-to-our-worst-fears crap, masquerading as journalism.” ⁸ A follow-up story in Time explained that the Carnegie Mellon study used had “exaggerated the extent of the problem by lumping together Internet communications with ‘bulletin board’ traffic,” a distinction lost on readers who had no familiarity with these terms. ⁹ One critic claimed that the method used in the study (which was conducted by one person and not peer-reviewed) was “akin to surveying an adult bookstore and concluding that more than 80 percent of all magazines contain obscene pictures.” ¹⁰

Despite the criticisms, many media outlets echoed the fears expressed in Time. In the Chicago Tribune, James Coates explained that:

Everything from photos of Penthouse magazine models to discussions of which barnyard animals make the best bedmates are a mouse click away for any kid with even marginal computer smarts and no parents in sight. … All they need is the sort of World Wide Web access to the Internet now available through the widely popular CompuServe , Prodigy and America Online services. These services already are in an estimated 8 million American households, and that number is expected to double in the next two years. ¹¹

How would the kids know how to find cyberporn? In 1995, there was no search engine as powerful and comprehensive as today’s Google . The first search engine, Archie (1990), was not well-known to the public, and only included file directories so users could find web addresses. WebCrawler (1994), a desktop app, was the first to includ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Childhood and Nostalgia
• Movies and Radio
• Comics
• Television
• Video Games
• The Internet, Social Media and Smartphones
• Back Matter