School Shootings, Google Trends and Marilyn Manson

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”.

Using the Internet in situations of domestic violence

Together with my two colleagues Susanne (who is the project leader) and Stephanie I just received funding for a three year research project entitled “The role of the Internet as a surrogate social network in situations of domestic violence in Swedish context”.

Domestic violence (DV) victims are successively broken down and isolated, making breaking the cycle of abuse more difficult than it would be if the victim had a network of support from which to seek help. Furthermore, the most dangerous time for a victim ready to leave an abusive situation is during the process of gathering information and the initial escape. The perceived anonymity of the digital can play an important role as a temporary, surrogate social network for DV victims when seeking information, as well as making contact with implicit and explicit networks of support. The role of technology as a tool in these processes, however, is an under-developed area of research in victimology. Although there has been a marked increase in the informational components of DV support promoted through digital channels, few studies have analyzed the effectiveness or the scope of their usage.

DV victims are increasingly reaching out through technology, not only to gain access to information, but also as a means of social support. When the social ties of the victims are broken by the abuser, networks online can become an increasingly important resource. Kranz (2002) warns, however, that DV victims often use these tools without the understanding that the technology they are relying on as a tool for information and support can also be used to track and monitor them. Motivated abusers can use technology to cyberstalk their victims both while the victim is at home, but also as a means of surveillance once the victim is outside the home.

Many digital means such as keystroke logging, accessing user information, reading private emails, using email to harass, or tracking the victim through family or children’s social site profiles can provide the DV abuser with sensitive information.  Both DV victims and private and government agencies alike are developing strategies for protecting privacy online. For example, it is not uncommon, when entering a USA-based DV website that visitors are informed that browsers can track their seeking history and how to erase their browser history. In fact, on many of these sites, the user must click away this warning before entering the site. Despite Sweden’s high percentage of Internet access, similar online information resources are lacking. From a brief review of Swedish women’s shelter’s websites, only a handful provided any Internet safety information, and none used click-through information before entering the site. In fact, one of the most popular Swedish discussion forums for DV, Misshandel i Fokus, was created in response to the need for social peer support.

The objective of the research project is to establish to what extent and in what ways Swedish DV victims use the Internet as a way to reconnect with a network of people and information. This study will examine this usage in two important areas related to DV: initial information seeking and the ways in which social media are used to create networks.

The first sub-project will establish what information is available to DV victims, through which channels this information is available (libraries, women’s’ shelters, websites, social network sites, etc), and how users experience seeking this information. The second sub-project will analyze how Swedish DV victims use social media as a way to form networks after having been isolated during the DV process. These networks will be analyzed in order to determine the effectiveness of the affordances of the different platforms (e.g., Second Life, discussion forums, blogs, Twitter, etc), as well as the strategies that DV victims employ to avoid repercussions, such as cyberstalking, when publicizing information which may not be understood to be personal, although can be used to track or harass the victim.

Talking to teachers about YouTube

Yesterday Stephanie and I talked to a group of teachers about the habits of Swedish youth using YouTube and the way that these habits are presented in the media, the historical presentation of new technologies in media, as well as a small presentation of theoretical terms used in this type of research. The talk was very well received. I think this kind of interaction is so important in research. By having a discussion with teachers, we are pushing our results down a chain of knowledge and hopefully the creators of these videos, and the knowledge that they bring to a discussion, can be met by the interest and knowledge of their (formalized) teachers in order to create opportunities for using media/technology in classroom settings.

Here are some of the materials we used:
Prezi presentation of YouTube clips

The project website, http://www.yapa.se

The project video:

IPRED interview

This week, on April 1st, the much debated IPRED law came into effect in Sweden. Because of my research on file sharing cultures, I was interviewed on Swedish TV4 [clip] about this law which allows copyright holders to force internet service providers to reveal details of users sharing files. One of the things I said was that I believe that the law will have some effect on the large group of casual file sharers, at least in the short run. Now, a few days later, that prediction has proved to be true. The Guardian writes:

“[The law] seems to have spooked some Swedes. By 2pm on Wednesday, internet traffic in Sweden had fallen by about 30% compared with the previous day. Statistics collected by Netnod, the Swedish clearing house for internet traffic, showed a dramatic drop in traffic. Compared with the previous level on Tuesday of about 120 gigabits of data passing over the network every second, on Wednesday it was down to 80Gbps.”

The fall in data may be due to people being worried that their ISP will track their data and that they may be sued for copyright infringement, which usually carries penalties equivalent to thousands of pounds.

My other main point was that, regardless of the obvious effect of these scare tactics on many users, file sharing will go on unimpaired in the long run. Historically, all attempts to stamp out or close down file sharing — such as the court sentence leading to the end of Napster in 2001 — have proven fruitless. This is of course due to the fact that the file sharing behaviors are not criminal acts in the traditional sense, and they are not just about individual platforms, services or technologies. They are also  youthful symbols of consumer empowerment reflecting a development towards new ways of accessing and using culture in creative ways. The case against Napster simply led to the emergence of a second generation of similar p2p-applications such as Kazaa and Gnutella. When attempts were made to control these, the major breakthrough for torrent technology took place. Now, as the IPRED law goes into effect, there is an explosion in strategies to make it ineffective. According to The Blog Pirate users are opening up their wlans in order for more people to be able to browse the net anonymously, and the Pirate Bay has already launched Ipredator, which is a so-called VPN service that allows users to be anonymous. Similiar services already exist, but the Pirate Bay say that no logs will be saved.

Umeå University commercials running on MTV

Starting this week, four commercial spots for Umeå University, featuring me, will start running on MTV’s Swedish site. Two of the spots are of a more general character, and will appear before various shows. In the first one, I say a few words about reality television as a research subject. The second one is about the fact that one can actually make a career out of analyzing popular culture. The third one will appear before episodes of The Hills, and represents an ultra brief reflection on identity work and beauty culture. The fourth and final one will air before episodes of Life of Ryan, and gives an equally brief analysis of changing ideals of masculinity.

The cultural sociology of Barbie

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.

Doing discursive networks at CAQR

Me and my colleague will be in Utrecht, Netherlands, for CAQR2009 (2nd International Conference on Computer-Aided Qualitative Research) on June 4th and 5th. Our paper is related to my project on crime victim discourse, but the presentation will focus on methodological aspects.

DISCURSIVE NETWORKS: VISUALIZING MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF CRIME VICTIMS USING PAJEK

This presentation will outline a method for text analysis which combines qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative network analysis. The approach has been developed as a response to the fact that the traditional variety of quantitative content analysis tends to decontextualize data to an extent that makes results potentially meaningless. On the other hand, much of qualitative discourse analysis – a field from which the authors themselves originate – is quite insensitive to things such as frequencies and correlations. It seems ideal to be able to combine the advantages of the two approaches without losing too much complexity.

One of the challenges faced by qualitative text analysis in the 21st century is related to the specific considerations that need to be made when data collection or fieldwork is carried out on the Internet. This presentation concentrates on one particular type of online data, namely print newspaper articles available in digitized form from fulltext databases. Our specific analytical example comes from a research project in which media representations of crime victims have been analyzed.

We will introduce a method that can be useful in working with such material. Even though the approach could be applied to any type of text data, its advantages become more apparent in the case of online fulltext data. This is because the sheer volume of text collected in this way – and also quite fast − easily exceeds the amount collected through traditional fieldwork or manual archival studies. In order to come to grips with these large corpora of text, some sort of quantitative strategy of analysis is called for. But since the straightforward word counting of standard content analysis is not a viable option from the perspective of cultural analysis, we want instead to sketch out an approach combining the discourse theory of Laclau & Mouffe with bibliometric and network analytical tools. In our particular case, we have used the freeware applications Bibexcel and Pajek in order to prepare the text data, analyze co-occuring concepts within in, and visualize the results in the form of vector based network maps.

Men’s violence and youth robberies

Within the last couple of days, two articles of mine have been published. The first one stems from years back (2002-03 to be precise) when I was working on a project within the field of historical sociology. In fact, the paper was long forgotten and hidden in the depths of my hard drive when I suddenly decided, last spring, to make an attempt at resuscitation. Something that proved successful. Even though its subject matter is quite far removed from the kind of things that I am studying nowadays, it still reflects some of my basic ideas on text, culture and discourse. The second one is on the moral panic about so called youth robberies that took place in the Swedish media between 1998 and 2002. Between 2004 and 2006, I ran a research project on representations of this alleged “crime wave” and I have also written on it elsewhere.

The first article is an analysis of a set of 19th century cases of ‘marital disagreement’ (male violence) in a small northern Swedish town. The data is analysed in two steps: firstly, through a general content analysis with the purpose of uncovering the principal patterns and predominant features and secondly by a discourse analysis of a key case. One of the key questions of gender theory has been that of how a social order in which men are seen as superior to women manages to prevail through space and time – transgressing historical and cultural borders. How can this order subsist in a succession of epochs and cultures which are, in many respects, dramatically different from one another? This question has already been addressed many times within feminism, particularly as part of the debate concerning the concepts of ‘patriarchy’ versus ‘gender order’. This article once again revisits this terrain, and aims to use its very specific historical case study as a point of departure for a more general discussion of how continuity and change in transhistorical male dominance and violence might be theoretically understood.

— Lindgren, S. (2008).”Theorizing continuity and change in the discourse of male violence: A case study of ‘marital disagreements’ in 19th century Sweden”. Anthropological Notebooks, 14(3), pp 5-23.

The second article aims to analyze racist news discourse by applying some notions from Norman Fairclough’s and Teun van Dijk’s work. We know that racism is shaped and defined in relation to specific historic and cultural contexts. How, then, should we grasp the many similarities between different case studies? This issue is addressed by relating the results of the case study mentioned above to the ones arrived at by Stuart Hall et al. in their classic Policing the crisis (1978). The conclusion is that these similarities have to do with the recurring externalization of internal conflicts in capitalist societies.

— Lindgren, S. (2009).”Representing Otherness in Youth Crime Discourse: Youth Robberies and Racism in the Swedish Press 1998 – 2002″. Critical Discourse Studies, 6(1), pp 65-77.

The YouTube Gunman?

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.

YouTube as a performative arena

What better way to start this new research blog off than this?! Yesterday night me and my colleagues got the fantastic news that our research project on “YouTube as a performative arena” has received funding from The Knowledge Foundation. More information about this [in Swedish] can be found here and here.

Within this three year project, running 2009-2011, we will analyze YouTube as a place were young people in Sweden express themselves in creative and artistic ways.This will be done in three interrelated subprojects. The first one, YouTube as Hybrid Media Space, is based on ethnographic research and media analysis and is centered around three Swedish youth groups and their use of YouTube in performance. Stephanie Hendrick is the one responsible for this research, and an example of her ideas on this can be found here. The second one, The Discourse on YouTube as Youth Culture, will be headed by myself and consists of an analysis of medialized reactions to young people’s use of YouTube. The third and final one, YouTube, Creativity, and Extended Concepts of ‘Text’, will mainly be run by Patrik Svensson and investigate how YouTube culture relates to learning processes in Swedish schools. We will cooperate with Kulturverket in Umeå. This will be an extremely exciting thing to be part of.