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On mobile communication and youth “deviance”: Beyond moral, media and mobile panics
Abstract
Cautionary voices have pointed to the apparent dangers that mobile media and communication pose for young people in the form of “deviant” activities such as sexting and mobile phone-facilitated bullying and criminal activity. Such incidents have ignited moral panics about the proliferation of mobile media because they are seen to facilitate emergent social/spatial interactions that are either unprecedented, or occurring on a scale not hitherto witnessed. While labelling concerns about youth deviance that is, in some measure, enabled or facilitated by mobile communications as “moral panics” is unproductive, it would be equally myopic to disregard the risks that mobile media can pose for youths in certain circumstances. This article critically examines the panic discourse surrounding youths and mobile media before reviewing research that suggests how mobile media can present risks for youths in particular contexts and milieus.
... Past research has pointed out that the excessive use of social media has moral and behavioural effects on young adults (Bergman et al., 2011;Brough et al., 2020;Brunborg & Andreas, 2019;Ge, 2020;Lim, 2013;Riehm et al., 2019). Due to the heavy exposure to digital platforms, individuals are inevitably influenced cognitively, emotionally and socially (Brunborg & Andreas, 2019;Immordino-Yang et al., 2012). ...
... Social media platforms encourage conformity, which entails the necessity to adopt the social community (Brough et al., 2020). Deviant behaviours on social media start to set an example since the users normalize and even glamorize popular content such as Happy Slapping videos (Lim, 2013). In other words, users begin to think that it is natural to approach someone, slap him/her, post it online and get likes for that. ...
... In other words, users begin to think that it is natural to approach someone, slap him/her, post it online and get likes for that. Longer time spent on social media demonstrated a positive relationship with increased boundary-testing behaviours (Lim, 2013). In the environment of social media, users find it challenging to interpret the moral aspects of the shared content. ...
Joyful selfies taken at disaster sites create a controversial topic in terms of moral boundaries in digital life. While some consider it acceptable to take smiley selfies in a tragedy zone, others find this behavior morally questionable. This article demonstrates empirically that excessive time spent on social media explains, at least partially, a greater tendency to like morally ambiguous content on social media. Specifically, this article shows that consumers tend to like more questionable content (such as smiley disaster selfies) on social media when they spend more time online. Further, this article shows that this effect is mediated by increased individualistic thinking. Responses to the survey experiment (N=206) compared the tendency to like morally ambiguous content between groups of little, moderate and excessive use of social media, and tested for the mediating role of individualistic thinking on the relationship between time spent and liking behavior. Secondly, the moderating role of an ethical reminder on time spent and the fact of liking morally ambiguous contents is demonstrated. In the presence of an ethical reminder, the effect of time spent on social media and liking morally ambiguous content becomes insignificant. This article contributes to theory on social media consumption by offering a novel underlying mechanism, such as increased individualistic thinking, as one variable that partly explains the liking for morally ambiguous content. This article also offers practical contributions for social media platforms and policy makers, showing that ethical reminders could be a possible and simple nudge to help consumers act more morally or become aware of morally questionable content.
... Often, these recommendations are not grounded in scientific evidence (Ophir et al., 2021;Orben, 2020) and turn out to be ineffective (Choi et al., 2018). However, Lim (2013) notes that scholarly classification of the debate over mobile technology's negative effects as a media panic disregards the range of studies that provide evidence of these harmful effects. According to Goggin (2006), in a media panic, public discourse tends to focus on the dangers and harms of the new medium, overlooking the complexities of the relationship between the medium and users, such as the development of diverse and original ways of using the medium or giving unique meanings to the new medium. ...
... This presence enables recording and dissemination and the development of offensive practices that trigger media panic. (Lim, 2013). ...
Media panics research is concerned with widespread social anxiety formed around a new technology or medium. This study adds to existing research by characterizing a new form of media panic around augmented reality applications, and specifically that which erupted concerning Pokémon GO, a popular augmented reality game. Based on a content analysis of items related to the game published in Israel's major print and online media in the period immediately following the game's launch, we classify the negative media coverage as a media panic and propose an explanation for its emergence. We argue that the negative reactions to the game stem specifically from the game's unique features and its mobile infrastructure, and especially its use of augmented reality that combines users’ virtual experiences and their interactions in actual physical space. We identify a third wave of mobile panic in this current phenomenon, one which takes into account the unique features of mobile technology as infrastructure for augmented reality applications. In contrast to previous incidents of media panic that focused on the harmful effects of increased technology use by young users, and their detachment from their physical environment, this wave represents an essentially opposite phenomenon, in which physical mobility itself, facilitated by the use of augmented reality, is deemed dangerous to players’ health and safety.
... Due to the growth of pervasiveness in cellular communication and swift modernization in the cellular market, the media market became highly capricious, where customers must adjust again and again to changeable stages and ever-developing priorities. Around the same moment, the increase of using smartphones in Sri Lanka and other instrumental media leads to additional complications and enrichments in cellular communications [16]. This research describes and explores the dominant cellular communication provider in Sri Lanka, their services given to the customers and traffic plans given, and the competitiveness between them. ...
The development of telecommunication is an essential factor to the economic sector while having an impact on opportunities. For communication among economic acts all around the world as well as inside a country. Nowadays, network providers give quality connections and opportunities to retrieve information by different technologies, traffic plans, and their service has become an essential part of society. Examining the leading network provider in Sri Lanka by using theoretical findings of telecommunication and technologies of communication is the main aim of this research. The monographic method, induction deduction method, and graph comparison method have been used in the research. Theoretical features of telecommunication, leading mobile network providers in Sri Lanka, financial performance indicators of those network providers, service and traffic schemes given by them, and competitiveness among them have been described in the research. Investigating the mobile traffic schemes and services provided by various network providers, it has been visible that they are almost similar in comparison but looking at each offer more closely revealed that some variations are essential to the customer and things that must overlook. After looking at the competitiveness among these network providers, it can conclude that in Sri Lanka, Dialog scored the most number points. In contrast, Mobitel and SLT scored points to become second and third in the race, respectively. By looking at the main factors in this comparison, Dialog must improve its ratings in areas like discounts given to the customers, the charge of the service, and supply of the service where others scored more points than Dialog.
... "Zillenials" those born between 1995 and 2010 [31 p55] and are the first generation who have access to ICTs for the entirety of their lives [32,33] and ICT use is intrinsic to youth lives and culture [34]. Scholarship on youth and ICTs tends to emphasise the negative impacts and risks of ICTs on youth focusing on topics such as smartphone addiction [35], online bullying, violence, and ease of access to problematic content and pornography [36]. This emphasis contributes to a negative perspective of youths' ICTs use a supports moral panic that problematizes youth's access and usage of ICTs [34]. ...
Introduction
Research indicates that sexual and gender minority youth [SGMY] may engage more with information communication technologies [ICTs] more than their non-SGMY counterparts Craig SL et al. 2020. While scholarship generally explores youth’s use of ICTs, there are gaps in scholarship that connect SGMY, their ICT engagement and influences to mental health. This scoping review will synthesize the literature that connects these core concepts in order to better understand the influence ITCs have on the mental health of SGMY and to develop a more fulsome understanding of this emerging area of literature.
Methods and analysis
Following the scoping review framework of Arksey and O’Malley, the search will be conducted in the PsycINFO [Ovid interface, 1980-], MEDLINE [Ovid interface, 1948-], CINAHL [EBSCO interface, 1937-], Sociological Abstracts [ProQuest interface, 1952-], Social Services Abstracts [ProQuest interface, 1979-], and Scopus. Descriptive summaries and thematic analysis will summarize the articles that meet the inclusion criteria using an extraction table.
Ethics and dissemination
The review outlined in this paper provides an overview of information that exists on the technology use of SGMY, ICTs and the interconnection with mental health. Results will be disseminated through peer reviewed journals and national and international conferences. As information collected for this paper as is retrieved from publicly available sources, ethics approval is not required.
... Moreover, the audience that attends such performance is changing and expanding (Hodkinson, 2017;Hogan, 2010): if until a few years ago virtual content was disseminated mostly within an inner circle of people who also knew each other offline, today digital platforms allow words and images to be spread to an audience composed of unknown people. Through social media, style and cultural patterns are spread and can lead to emulation, and the same is for deviant forms of rebellion (Lim, 2013;Patton et al., 2014). ...
American sociological research and prevention policies on youth deviance and juvenile street gangs have a very long tradition. Since the mid-1990s, in some European Countries, youngsters' antisocial behaviors in public spaces gained terrain in criminological studies and on the public and political debates. In Italy, instead, youth has not been traditionally meant as a 'security' problem, but rather as a matter of educational and social policies. In recent years, however, also in the Italian context urban violence of juvenile street groups has become a recurrent topic in media representation, a source of citizens' insecurity and an issue to be solved by local security policies. Even though from classical approaches street gangs appeared as a complex phenomenon (aggregations involved in criminal acts but, at the same time, types of socialization for youth having a migratory background), there is the tendency to describe street groups according to a unitary and criminalizing 'gang' model. The aim of the article is to situate the study of youth street groups within the broader topic of juvenile delinquency in Italy. Moving from how the youth question evolved in Italian debate and policies, socialization practices as well as deviant behaviors of youngster in public spaces are analyzed. The difficulty for young people from the marginal strata to access a structured sociality located in certain urban spaces risks resulting in a subordinate social role and, eventually, in violence as a reaction in search of visibility. The ultimate goal of the article is to provide a reinterpretation of street groups that is not oversimplified and that pays attention to processes of inclusion/exclusion within the social structure, urban space, and the related conflict dynamics .
... In the same way, they can also exclude actions and identities that are inconsistent with the peer norms through social mechanisms like gossip and ridicule (Loh & Lim, 2019). These peer culture dynamics are reproduced on social media where young people create distinctive norms, practices and shared identities that re-enact their specific peer culture online (Lim, 2013;Loh & Lim, 2019). To belong to these peer cultures, young people now have to create, present and perform a visual self that is in line with the peer group's moral understanding of socialisation (Yang et al., 2017). ...
... Excessive use of social media applications in university students is known to become a cause of estrangement with parents, siblings, and other significant family members, such as grandparents (Siddiqui & Singh, 2016). It can also contribute to other problems such as involvement in deviant activities (Lim, 2013); uptake of drugs and intoxicants (Gutierrez & Cooper, 2016); involvement in extremism and violence (Alava et al., 2017); and loss of selfesteem and identity crisis (Jan 2017). ...
Pakistan is known for its strong family bonds. University
students need strong support from their families for the maintenance of
ethics, health and production. However, there is fear that greater use of
social media is contributing to the weakening of family relations. This
research aims to identify the relationship between time spent on social
media and the quality of family relationships of university students. A
total of 200 students were sampled. Welch ANOVA showed that the
mean difference of family relations to social media usage was
statistically significant, Fw (3,92.91) = 8.258, p<0.01 and the Games
Howell post hoc test reveals that the quality of family relations was
significantly lower when social media usage is more than 5 hours (21.8
± 11.1). The paper discusses possible interventions to reduce social
media usage and improve family quality time, which can be helpful for
policymakers, psychologists, social workers, and social welfare officers
... Some studies have reported that moral panic was associated with perceived "deviant" activities, arising from online interactions amongst young people (e.g. Lawson & Comber, 2000;Lim, 2013). The identification of SN as a 'problem' for young people positions them as vulnerable and in need of protection and control. ...
This chapter reviews scholarly literature on the beginnings and trajectories of media and children’s research from the 1950s to the present. This review illustrates how young people and media scholarship has shifted from the hypodermic media effect paradigm to the era of active audiences and audience negotiation today. Unsurprisingly, it appears that following the moral and media panics of the old paradigm, new forms of anxiety have emerged in the digital age regarding children’s and young people’s safety, resilience, and vulnerability while using digital technologies. In addition, this chapter dives into the current landscape of the digital environment in relation to children and young people in Majority World Countries and concludes by identifying gaps that the entire book fills within scholarly literature.
While pedagogy is predominantly viewed from the perspective of classroom instruction, educators worldwide invariably play a critical pastoral role of shaping the personal development of their students and nurturing in them life skills. With the avid use of participatory media by young people in peer interaction, educators need to be aware of the attendant risks and opportunities so that they may offer counsel and render appropriate advice. To this end, through interviews with 36 Singaporean male juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk, this study explores how these youths utilise participatory media in their peer interaction. The findings indicate that for this vulnerable youth population, participatory media such as social networking sites can become a platform through which they are unwittingly drawn into criminal behaviour and post-rehabilitation, participatory media may offer an insidious route to recidivism. Participatory media complicates peer interaction by presenting risk factors such as network transparency, negative peer modelling, network seepage and network persistence, all of which have implications for these youths sliding further into delinquency and criminal activity. This article concludes with recommendations on the strategies which youths-at-risk can employ to avoid the risks of participatory media.
Research on the social and psychological effects of mobile phone communication primarily is conducted using self-report measures of use. However, recent studies have suggested such measures of mobile phone communication use contain a significant amount of measurement error. This study compares the frequency of mobile phone use measured by self-report questions with error-free log data automatically collected through an Android smartphone application. Using data from 310 Android phone users in Japan, we investigate the extent to which nonrandom measurement error exists in self-report responses to questions about mobile phone use and predictors of this error. Our analysis shows that users generally overreport their frequency of mobile communication and that overestimation is better predicted by proxy measures of social activity than demographic variables. We further show an example of how overreporting can result in an overestimation of the effects of mediated communication on civic engagement. Finally, the value of behavioral log data in mediated communication research is discussed.
SMS and mobile voice telephony have become a common part of the teen experience in Nor- way. Almost 19 out of 20 teens own a mobile telephone. In addition, Norwegian teens are frequent users of mobile voice telephony and, in particular SMS. Access to mobile communi- cation plays into the way teens experience emancipation from their parents, their integration into the peer group and the resulting boundary testing issues. In addition, the device plays into more illicit behaviors for a small portion of teens. This paper uses the survey data gath- ered from a random selection of 11 928 teens in Norwegian Statistical Research's study Ung i Norge (Young in Norway). The data was collected in February of 2002. The data material provides one with broad insight into many facets of teen's lives. The analysis here indicates that SMS and mobile voice telephony play into the adolescent experience in complex ways. The analysis indicates that these forms of mobile communication facilitate emancipation as- sist in peer group bonding, and, in a small number of cases, play into more illicit activities. There is, however a special role in terms of boundary testing behaviors that is, in many ways, an integral part of emancipation.
Although acknowledging the importance of adolescent friendships in the etiology of delinquency, prior studies have yet to provide a detailed examination of the role of actual friendship networks in delinquency. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (1995–1996), this study's incorporation of friendship networks allows for a more rigorous conceptualization and measurement of peer delinquency based on carefully defined networks of adolescent friendships. Findings illustrate that friendship networks are very heterogenous in terms of members' participation in delinquent behavior with the majority of adolescents belonging to networks containing both delinquent and non-delinquent friends. In support of differential association's premise that delinquent behavior is influenced by the ratio of definitions favorable to those unfavorable to law violation (Sutherland, 1947), the proportion of delinquent friends in a respondent's network is most strongly associated with respondents' subsequent delinquency. This relative measure of peer delinquency is preferable to a measure of the absolute level of delinquency occurring by friends, the average delinquency committed by friends, or the absolute number of delinquent friends. Enmeshment in a friendship network where consensus about the appropriateness of delinquency is maximized (i.e., all friends are delinquent or non-delinquent) most effectively constrains the behaviors of network members to resemble the groups' behavior.
Providing the first comprehensive, accessible, and international introduction to cell phone culture and theory, this book is and clear and sophisticated overview of mobile telecommunications, putting the technology in historical and technical context.
“Sexting” is the term commonly used to refer to the transfer of nude or semi-nude pictures or videos between mobile devices. This paper contextualizes the reaction to the practice of sexting among adolescents by exploring legal responses and reviewing the literature on teens and cell phone use. The purpose of the paper is to identify, explore and analyze the key themes emerging from the coverage of teen sexting by television news in the United States. The author explores three primary themes that emerge from the broadcast discourse: preference for technologically deterministic explanations; reliance on gender-differentiated scenarios; and, a preference for solutions involving surveillance. This paper further explores whether the discourse around sexting can be understood using media panic theory. Noting the problematic conflation of risk and harm in the discourse, the author concludes by suggesting avenues for future research regarding the creation and transmission of sexual images using digital devices.
Drawing on relevant theory and research, it is argued that the impact of delinquent peers on delinquency is conditioned by (1) attachment to peers, (2) time spent with peers, and (3) the extent to which peers present delinquent patterns (i.e., present definitions favorable to delinquency, model delinquent behavior, and differentially rein force delinquency). Regression analyses with data from the National Youth Survey provide partial support for these arguments. When the above variables are at their mean or lower levels, a measure of association with peers who engage in serious delinquency has no impact or a negative impact on delinquency. When the above variables are at higher levels, delinquent peers (serious) has a strong, positive impact on delinquency. A measure of association with peers who engage in minor delinquency, however, is not conditioned by the above variables.
use, in particular, often stress the liberatory effects of mobile media, and how it enables young people to escape the demands of existing social structures and parental surveillance. This paper argues that the mobile phone can indeed enable communication that crosses prior social boundaries, but this does not necessarily mean that the devices erode the integrity of existing places or social identities. While Japanese youth actively use mobile phones to overcome limitations inherent in their weak social status, their usage is highly deferential to institutions of home and school and the integrity of existing places. Taking up the case of how Japanese teen's mobile phone use is structured by the power-geometries of place, this paper argues that characteristics of mobile phones and mobile communication are not inherent in the device, but are determined by social and cultural context and power relations. After first presenting the methodological and conceptual framework for this paper, we present our ethnographic material in relation to the power-dynamics and regulation of different kinds of places: the private space of the home, the classroom, the public spaces of the street and public transportation, and the virtual space of peer connectivity enabled by mobile communications. Method and Conceptual Framework Our Research This paper draws from ongoing ethnographic research on mobile phone use and location, centered at Keio Shonan Fujisawa Campus near Tokyo. We draw primarily from two different sets of data. One is a set of ethnographic interviews conducted by Ito in the winter of 2000, with twenty-four high school and college students about their use of media, including mobile phones. The central body of data behind this paper is a set of twenty-four "communication diaries" and interviews collected between July-February 2003 by Okabe and Ito. For this study, our intent was to capture the usage patterns of particular individuals. We adapted data collection methods piloted by Rebecca Grinter and Margery Eldridge (2001) where they asked ten teenagers to record the time, content, length, location, and recipient (or sender) of all text messages for seven days. As with interviews, this data collection method still relies on second-hand accounting, but has the advantage of providing much more detail on usage than can be recalled in a stand-alone interview. We expanded the communication log to include voice calls and mobile Internet, and more details about the location and context of use. Participants were asked to keep records of every instance of mobile phone use, including voice, short text messages, email, and web use, for a period of two days. They noted the time of the usage, who they were in contact with, whether they