moral panics: young people & the internet

Journalists love an outrage like ordinary people love hot cross buns. A couple of items have cropped up in the Australian media recently around cyberbullying & the impact of the internet on young people that I think require a little scrutiny.

Exhibit 1: Miranda Devine wrote an article last week entitled MySpace cadets sliding into addiction. Ms Devine quotes Susan Greenfield. Baroness Greenfield is probably a very good researcher in her field of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. However she also has a side vocation as a writer of speculative fiction. Unfortunately, many journalists cannot tell the difference between scientific research and speculation. Based on this interview, the ABC's Kerry O'Brien seems to be one such journalist. I would like to see the Baroness actually support her claims with, y'know, some science. Dr Ben Goldacre puts it very well in this article.

To her credit, Ms Devine does quote some research. Well kinda. She mentions the work of Dr Mubarak Ali. Currently researching the problem, Ali says internet addiction is so serious that by 2012 it will likely be classified as a mental disorder in Australia. Being a bit of nerd, I dropped Dr Ali an email asking if I could receive a copy of his published research. He was kind enough to respond and tell me that he hadn't published anything yet. He pointed me to the Teenspeak website where he is running a survey on this topic. I asked him how many people had responded to his survey (i.e. his sample size) and, as the survey appears voluntary, how he'd be controlling for self-selection biases. He hasn't got back to me yet but it is Easter so I am looking forward to his response after the holidays.

I must confess that I have a suspicion of the term "internet addiction". I haven't seen articles about TV addiction or radio addiction or SMS addiction or telephone addiction. As this ACMA report states (p.2): Despite these changes, other aspects of young people’s discretionary time are notably stable. Electronic media and communication activities overall take up around half of children and young people’s aggregate discretionary time, and this proportion hasn’t changed since 1995. So far from becoming slaves to technology, young people's use of tech has remained fairly stable - it's just the tech they are using that has changed.

Near the end of the article, Ms Devine makes this comment: Her fears may be reflected in reports this week from two fatal traffic accidents in Yagoona and Burwood, where onlookers were said to have watched, laughed, chatted and taken photographs, ignoring the pleas for help from one man as he died, treating the scene as if it were entertainment. When I was a police reporter almost 20 years ago, such a scenario would have been unthinkable.

The problem I have with this statement is simple. If the internet makes us bad people then we would expect to have seen rates of violent crime rise over the last decade as internet use became more widespread. However the opposite is true: rates of violent crime have trended down over the last 10 years as web usage has trended up. N.B. I am not claiming that the internet makes us better people - simply that there are probably other factors that are more important than the internet.

Let me be clear: I am sure that some young people do not have a healthy pattern of internet usage. We need to have a public debate about the impact of these new technologies on young people and the role their parents could be playing. However I would prefer to base this debate on facts and evidence rather than innuendo.

Which brings me to Exhibit 2: ABC's Four Corners programme last Monday. The topic was cyberbullying. The first half of the show seemed sensible enough - discussing first ordinary bullying and then bullying with an online component. Then it all got a bit weird. The main story was an awful one of young man who took his own life. Prior to this he had been harassed by a former friend using a number of different communication media.

You have to sympathize with someone who has had to bury their child. However I have an issue with the ABC supporting statements like: "There's a new word that I've created for this it's a new drug, and the new drug is cyberspace. Cyberspace to us has taken our child."

Suicide by young males is a horrible problem but it is not a simple one. As the Wesley Mission state: Suicide is a complex issue which, while tragic, confronts families, friends and wider communities. It results most often from an accumulation of risk factors, and it intersects with problems and concerns across society: mental health, drugs and alcohol, family issues, employment, cultural identity, law enforcement and criminal justice, education and poverty.

Rather than discuss the complex issues around teen suicide and the particular issues around men (& our chronic inability to seek help when trouble strikes), as far as the ABC was concerned it was all about the interweb as a sinister tool for bullying that is so powerful it makes people kill themselves. This undermined the valuable first half of the programme.

Again, let me be clear: Bullying is an issue. It probably always will be. There is so much good work that could be done in discussing this with parents - but can we have a grown up talk please?

Are we capable of that or would we prefer to work ourselves up into a moral panic instead?