Tag: scholarship

Understanding bullying

danah boyd sez, “Alice Marwick and I just crafted an op-ed for the New York Times entitled ‘Why Cyberbullying Rhetoric Misses the Mark.‘ It’s based on a new paper that we just released called ‘The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics’. This topic is particularly relevant right now given the tragic suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer.”


While teenage conflict is nothing new, today’s gossip, jokes, and arguments often play out through social media like Formspring, Twitter, and Facebook. Although adults often refer to these practices with the language of ‘bullying,’ teens are more likely to refer to the resultant skirmishes and their digital traces as ‘drama.’ Drama is a performative set of actions distinct from bullying, gossip, and relational aggression, incorporating elements of them but also operating quite distinctly. While drama is not particularly new, networked dynamics reconfigure how drama plays out and what it means to teens in new ways. In this paper, we examine how American teens conceptualize drama, its key components, participant motivations for engaging in it, and its relationship to networked technologies. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, we examine what drama means to teenagers and its relationship to visibility and privacy. We argue that the emic use of ‘drama’ allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency – and save face – rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative. Drama is a gendered process that perpetrates conventional gender norms. It also reflects discourses of celebrity, particularly the mundane interpersonal conflict found on soap operas and reality television. For teens, sites like Facebook allow for similar performances in front of engaged audiences. Understanding how ‘drama’ operates is necessary to recognize teens’ own defenses against the realities of aggression, gossip, and bullying in networked publics.

The Unintended Consequences of Cyberbullying Rhetoric

Trying to understand riots isn’t the same as excusing riots


Writing in the New Scientist, Prof. Stephen Reicher, a specialist in crowd psychology at the University of St Andrews, takes aim at the posturing and macho rhetoric after the UK riots that dismissed anyone who sought a sociological expanation for criminal behavior as “excusing crime.”

Another way in which politicians have restricted explanation is by intimating that any reaction other than condemnation is tantamount to condoning violence. The UK’s education secretary Michael Gove reacted furiously to the suggestion by Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour party, that government policies limiting youth opportunities might have had some relevance, castigating her for “making excuses for what has gone on here”. In this context, whole academic disciplines become suspect: in political vocabulary, “sociologist” and “jihadi” have acquired a kind of moral equivalence…

Those politicians and pundits who have tried to outlaw societal explanations of the English riots have advanced alternative theories, largely blaming the violence on the pathology of the rioters. Cameron’s declaration that they are inherently criminal and lack moral standards is one variant of this. Another is the common suggestion that the rioters lost their moral standards in the crowd; that they were mindless, swept up by the contagion of the moment or perhaps preyed upon by unscrupulous agitators.

These theories translate into convenient solutions. In the short term, don’t try to reason with rioters but use a big stick to repress them; in the longer term, look at the sickness within their communities that has turned them into amoral beasts. That only leaves the question of which communities are dysfunctional and in what ways. Thus Cameron locked horns with former prime minister Tony Blair over whether we should be talking about a broken society or a narrow but recalcitrant underclass.

Trying to understand the English riots is not a crime

 

(Image: London riot police, November 2010, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from hozinja’s photostream)

“Probability neglect”: why policy-makers are constitutionally incapable of formulating evidence-based anti-terrorism policy

A Policy Maker’s Dilemma: Preventing Terrorism or Preventing Blame (PDF), a study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, argues that counterterrorism policy fails to address real terrorist threats because politicians and bureaucrats perceive more risk from being punished by voters if they preside over an attack than they do in attacks arising from actual, probable sources.

Although anti-terrorism policy should be based on a normative treatment of risk that incorporates like-
lihoods of attack, policy makers’ anti-terror decisions may be influenced by the blame they expect from
failing to prevent attacks. We show that people’s anti-terror budget priorities before a perceived attack
and blame judgments after a perceived attack are associated with the attack’s severity and how upsetting
it is but largely independent of its likelihood. We also show that anti-terror budget priorities are influ-
enced by directly highlighting the likelihood of the attack, but because of outcome biases, highlighting
the attack’s prior likelihood has no influence on judgments of blame, severity, or emotion after an attack
is perceived to have occurred. Thus, because of accountability effects, we propose policy makers face a
dilemma: prevent terrorism using normative methods that incorporate the likelihood of attack or prevent
blame by preventing terrorist attacks the public find most blameworthy.

A Policy Maker’s Dilemma: Preventing Terrorism or Preventing Blame (PDF)

(via Schneier)

(Image: Border Patrol Checkpoint in *New Hampshire* – 2, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from chrisdag’s photostream)

XKCD on the password paradox: human factors versus computers’ brute force


Today’s XKCD, “Password Strength,” neatly illustrates the research from this paper (PDF) by Philip Inglesant and M. Angela Sasse from University College London, with the ironic conclusion that we’ve trained our users to use passwords that computers can easily guess and humans can’t possibly remember.

Password Strength

Taxonomy of technological risks: when things fail badly

“A Taxonomy of Operational Cyber Security Risks” by CMU’s James J. Cebula and Lisa R. Young is a year-old paper that attempts to classify all the ways that technology go wrong, and the vulnerabilities than ensue. Fascinating reading, a great primer on technology and security, and as a bonus, there’s a half-dozen science fiction/technothriller plots lurking on every page.

This report presents a taxonomy of operational cyber security risks that attempts to identify and
organize the sources of operational cyber security risk into four classes: (1) actions of people,
(2) systems and technology failures, (3) failed internal processes, and (4) external events. Each
class is broken down into subclasses, which are described by their elements. This report discusses
the harmonization of the taxonomy with other risk and security activities, particularly those de-
scribed by the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publications, and the CERT Operationally Critical
Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE) method.

A Taxonomy of Operational Cyber Security Risks (PDF)

Fuck and the law

“Fuck” is a 2006 scholarly paper by Ohio State U law prof Christopher M. Fairman, published in Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies Working Paper Series No. 39. It starts with anecdotes about three legally trained people — a Master’s student in law, a sheriff, and a federal judge — reacting irrationally to the word “fuck,” and goes on to explore the way that psycholinguistic factors makes English speakers go crazy in the presence of the word, and the effect that has had on law. Fun reading!

This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

Fuck

(Image: FUCK, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from giacomospazio’s photostream)