I am currently working on a conference paper related to our YouTube project. When I visited CAQR2009 earlier this month one of the participants, Silvana di Gregorio, gave an interesting presentation about online research tools. One of these were Google Trends which a free service that shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. I thought I’d try it out for the paper. By exporting the data to Excel and working further with it there, generating diagrams etc, I was able to sketch out an analysis very fast. I actually think that I can use this as a starting point for the paper (which will also include a number of other analyses).

Web activity in relation to three school shootings measured with Google Trends

Figure 1: Increased interest in names of locations of school shootings when they take place. Not surprising.

Figure 2 is more interesting: On events of school shootings there is an increased interest in political themes such as gun control, and pop culture themes such as Marilyn Manson. (Figure 2 is aggregated data from periods before and after all 3 above shootings).

Q: What does this mean?

A: It means that the societal reaction to incidents of school shootings follow the panic pattern described by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). In the case of gun control, for example, one might draw upon Stuart Hall’s (1978, p. 19) idea, from Policing the Crisis, that labels applied to dramatic public events are likely to mobilize an entire referential context with a set of associated connotations. Even though gun control ought to be discussed all of the time, the issue is specifically activated and understood in relation to certain things that happen in society. School shootings being one example.

As regards the case of Marilyn Manson, the peak in web activity in relation to incidents of school shootings can be understood in terms of sensitization (Cohen 1972, p. 83). Cohen writes that “a characteristic of hysteria” is that the wrong stimulus gets “chosen as the object of attack or fear”. School shootings are traumatizing events to society, and they make a number of targets more visible as candidates for social control. And these targets are of course not chosen randomly. As Cohen puts it, they are chosen “from groups already structurally vulnerable to social control”. And as Manson himself puts it: “I definitely can see why they would pick me. Because I think it’s easy to throw my face on the TV, because in the end, I’m a poster boy for fear. Because I represent what everyone is afraid of”.

A group of students from the  Culture Journalism programme here at Umeå University will film an interview with me today about the impact of Barbie on popular culture. And since I tend to say yes to everything, I said I would do it. When discussing Barbie, I think you can get quite a long way by relating the phenomenon to general theories of gendered and sexual subjectivities, and of social change, and of the relation between popular culture and the identities, dreams and aspirations of its users.

Still, to be a little more prepared than that, I decided to research the field a bit. Unsurprisingly, the subject is often discussed in terms of the potentially negative effects of Barbie on young girls: “Skinny Barbie blamed over eating disorders” (TimesOnline), “Barbie’s body may be perfect, but critics remind us it’s plastic” (Knight-Ridder), “Distorting reality for children: Body size proportions of Barbie and Ken dolls” (International Journal of Eating Disorders). But I also stumbled over this comprehensive article which both summarizes previous research on Barbie, and presents new empirical studies. Things that I will bring with me to the interview [most of these are direct quotes from here]:

- Barbie is one of the most successful toys of the 20th century and, arguably, the icon of female beauty and the American dream. Children’s toys are influential in the development of self-concept [messages about gender, adult roles, and values].

- There is disagreement over the messages the Barbie sends and the toy’s place in the lives of young girls.

- It has been argued that Barbie reflects a highly sexualized image and circumscribe girls’ play by emphasizing prescribed roles and patterns of interaction [promoting stereotypical feminine roles].

- Most interviewed girls (in a study of early-adolescent boys and girls)  reported owning at least two Barbie dolls. They reported no longer playing with Barbie dolls; however, when the group facilitator produced several Barbie dolls for use in their focus group session, many of the girls exclaimed, “Barbie!” and all expressed the desire to hold one of the dolls.

- A surprisingly common form of Barbie-related play reported by the participants was torture play. All reported damaging their dolls by cutting off the hair, painting them, or even removing appendages.

- The majority of participants argued that Barbie presents an unrealistic image of perfection that may harm girls’ developing self-concept and body image. Some reported that Barbie dolls offer positive role models because they allow girls to imagine a variety of careers and practice female adult roles.

- The disfigured Barbie doll may represent girls’ ambivalent views about their developing feminine self.

Also, a note about the continued popularity of Barbie from Elisabeth Eaves (forbes.com). She asks: “why, in this era of digital games, educational toys and over-involved parents, does our collective fascination with Barbie linger on?”. She continues:

Ninety percent of American girls ages three to 10 own at least one Barbie, according to the doll’s maker, Mattel  (nyse: MAT -  news  -  people ), and that’s just the primary market. Barbie has inspired impassioned legions of adult collectors who dote on her various iterations and costumes. She is imitated–in December, Mattel won a copyright infringement case against MGA Entertainment, maker of the Bratz dolls, who are a poutier-lipped, trashier variation. And for decades, Barbie had the distinction of being a feminist whipping girl, blamed for inspiring little girls to want to grow up to be sex objects with unrealistic physical proportions. Barbie marches on undaunted.

Referring to this book about Barbie inventor Ruth Handler, she gives some clues to the love-hate relationship [direct quotes from Eaves' article]:

- “Barbie is fascinating in part because she discomforts, which she does by shining a light where we don’t want to look, specifically on children’s sexuality.”

- “The inspiration behind Handler’s invention, she repeatedly said, was her observation that ‘little girls just wanted to be bigger girls.’”

- “Girls who play with Barbie are, among other things, playing at being desired.“

Finally, from Wikipedia, about Barbie collectors:

- There are well over 100,000 avid Barbie collectors. Ninety percent are women, at an average age of 40.

- Vintage Barbie dolls from the early years are the most valuable. On September 26, 2006, a Barbie doll set a world record at auction of £9,000 sterling (US $17,000) at Christie’s in London.

- In recent years Mattel has sold a wide range of Barbie dolls aimed specifically at collectors, including porcelain versions, vintage reproductions, and depictions of Barbie as a range of characters from television series.

- There are also collector’s edition dolls depicting Barbie dolls with a range of different ethnic identities.

In 2004 Mattel introduced the Color Tier system for its collector’s edition Barbie dolls, ranging through pink, silver, gold and platinum depending on how many of the dolls are produced.

Before the school shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, as well as before the similar tragedies in Finnish Jokela 2007 and now yesterday in Kauhajoki, the gunmen gave warnings by posting videos on YouTube. This fact is highly emphasized in the news media coverage of these events. Östersunds-Posten [Swedish] writes today that “the acceleration of violence on YouTube and in the world of videogames can [...] lead to young people not being able to tell right from wrong, or fiction from reality. Symptomatically, Kvällsposten [Swedish] emphasizes that: “After having posted the clip online Matti Juhani Saari is believed to have shot ten people”. TimesOnline writes of “the YouTube Gunman” (!). In spite of the deep tragedy of this event, a dangerous form of causality is inherent in such discourse. “After having posted the clip” Saari killed ten people. X leads to Y, or what?

Influenced by the classic theory of moral panics, Danish media researcher Kirsten Drotner has written on what she labels media panics.The latter concept refers to the recurring type of societal reactions wherein new media and novel technologies get blamed for causing behaviors and events that rather obviously have other causes. These school shootings are examples of such events. Looking back, we often laugh nostalgically at the obvious fallacies of earlier debates on youth and media, and on parental responsibility. The dime novels of the late 19th century, the wild west comic books of the 1950s, the pelvic thrusts of Elvis, and the VCR. In the rearview mirror, the repetitiveness or, to use Drotner’s term, “historical amnesia” of reactions such as these becomes all too obvious. It is apparent that this is about something else.

At every point in time when a new medium enters the stage, this tends to lead to strikingly similiar debates on basic social and cultural norms. On some occasions these debates get heated and affected, that is when we talk of “media panics”. The discussion is often polarized. The medium is demonized by some while celebrated or de-dramatized by others. In the news, it is often the negative side that becomes the most visible. The message tends to come from an “adult” direction: Teachers, librarians, cultural critics, politicians and researchers – each and everyone with their own interests and stakes in the issue – produce diagnoses and offer “solutions” directed towards children and young people. The new medium under discussion becomes a fitting rhetorical device in discussions that are, in fact, about something completely different.

Of course, these media panics tell us less about the discussed mediums as such, and more about social and cultural dilemmas that are of a wider character. The moralizing discourse on YouTube, for example, directs attention away from what is actually happening. For example the fact that the US (where, of course, Virginia Tech is located) displays the highest level of gun ownership in the world, or that Finland (where, of course, Jokela and Kauhajoki are located) comes in third on the same list. Somewhere around 1.6 millon firearms are owned privately by Finnish individuals, and the gunlaws rank among the least restrictive in Europe. You need to be  no more than 15 years of age to legally acquire a gun. Meanwhile in Virginia, anyone over 21 is allowed to buy a handgun a month, as long as they have not received a permit to buy even more. It goes without saying that neither YouTube as a medium, nor the laws as such lead in any natural or given way to school shootings taking place. Still, it makes you wonder what happened to the social analysis.