In this book I am less concerned with identifying, quantifying, and calculating the risks young people encounter online, but rather my focus is on how risks and anxieties are constructed and mobilized within society; thus it is important that I explain what is meant by the concept risk. The notion of risk is used to describe a lot of different behaviors, practices, and situations from the mundane to the serious. If you start to pay attention you realize how often we interject concepts of risk into our everyday lives to the extent that they often fade into the background. For example, we may leave for work early on a rainy day because traffic will be slow and we do not want to “risk being late,” we may drive slower because we do not want to “risk getting into an accident,” and of course we all wear seatbelts to “reduce our risk of injury” in the event we do get into an accident. This simple example demonstrates how our lives are regulated through an awareness of risk as well as the different nodes which contribute to regulation: self-regulation based on experiences (e.g., leaving early so we are not late), expert opinions and data (e.g., statistical data demonstrates rain increases the likelihood of a car accident), and institutional enforcement through laws and policies (e.g., the state requires drivers to wear a seatbelt). For that reason, the meaning and the regulation of risk must be historically and contextually situated.
The meaning of the word “risk” has changed throughout history. Most commentators link the concept of risk with pre-modern maritime ventures related to dangers associated with sea voyages. “At that time,” according to Luhmann (1993, p. 226), “risk designated the possibility of an objective danger, an act of God, a force majeure, a tempest or other peril of the sea that could not be imputed to wrongful conduct.” In this way risk was considered to be something beyond human control and therefore outside of human blame or responsibility. However, changes in meanings of risk accompany the emergence of modernity towards the end of the seventeenth century and gaining momentum in the eighteenth century.
Modernist notions of risk are often associated with models of insurance based on probabilities and chance in which risks can be “good” (i.e., gain) or bad” (i.e., loss) (Douglas 1992). However, by the end of the twentieth century notions of risk as neutral—that is, with the potential for good and bad outcomes—tend to be lost. According to Lupton (1999, p. 8), “Risk is now generally used to relate only to negative or undesirable outcomes, not positive outcomes. … In everyday lay people’s language, risk tends to be used to refer almost exclusively to a threat, hazard, danger or harm.” Lupton goes on to note that probability is less important in colloquial uses of risk. In fact we tend to conflate notions of risk and uncertainty and employ notions of risk to describe unfortunate events even when the probability of harm is not likely or even estimable. Lupton and others (Short 1984; Douglas 1985, Skolbekken 1995) suggest the proliferation of risk in expert discourses has contributed to an increased awareness and adaption of risk in society.
What society determines is a risk and what, where, and who gets labeled as “risky” have significant implications for how we think about identity, ourselves, others, institutions, and governments. For the purpose of this book it is important to consider how technology and youth are constructed as risk and of what consequence. There are different epistemological and theoretical approaches to studying and conceptualizing risk. On one end of the epistemological continuum is the cognitive scientific perspective commonly found in fields such as engineering, statistics, psychology, and economics. This approach views risks as objectively identifiable threats or hazards that can be measured independently of social and cultural processes (Bradbury 1989). Researchers taking up this approach ask key questions such as “what risks exist and how should we manage them?” While they acknowledge risks sometimes get distorted or biased through social frameworks (often blaming lay people’s biased or misunderstood perception), this approach fails to ask how risks get constructed in the first place. (Lupton 1999).
A sociocultural perspective of risk emphasizes what is omitted from a cognitive scientific approach: the social and cultural contexts in which risk is understood and negotiated. This approach has been adopted in disciplines such as cultural anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and technology studies. Within the sociocultural perspective there are (at least) three primary approaches: cultural/symbolic, “risk society,” and governmentality theorists who draw from Foucault’s theories. The first two, cultural/symbolic and “risk society,” are associated with a weak constructionist perspective which recognizes risk as an objective hazard or threat that is inevitably mediated through social and cultural processes (and can never be known in isolation from these processes). The cultural/symbolic approach (largely influenced by the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas) focuses on how notions of risk delineate boundaries between self and Other. Important questions include “Why are some dangers selected as risks and others are not? How does risk operate as a symbolic boundary measure?” and “What is the situated context of risk?” (Lupton 1999, p. 35).
Also drawing from the weak constructionist perspective is the “risk society” approach associated with the sociologists Anthony Giddens (1991) and Ulrich Beck (1992), who build on Marxist critical theory. Beck (p. 21) defines risk as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself.” He continues: “In the risk society the unknown and unintended consequences come to be a dominant force in history and society. They can be changed, magnified, dramatized or minimized within knowledge, and to that extent they are particularly open to social definition and construction.” This approach has been taken up by media scholars and sociologists studying youth, the Internet, and risks. For example, in her influential book Children and the Internet, Sonia Livingstone (2009) applies three aspects of the risk society—the identification, intensification, and individualization of risk—to studying the relationship between media, policy, children, and the Internet.
A third approach, and the one I largely draw from to structure my research, applies Foucault’s (1991) perspective of governmentality to notions of risk. Research employing this perspective argues that what we understand to be a risk is always already historically, socially, and politically constructed. According to Lupton (1999, p. 114), Foucauldian perspectives focus on “the ways in which the discourses, strategies, practices and institutions around a phenomenon such as risk serve to bring it into being, to construct it as a phenomenon. It is argued that it is only through these discourses, strategies, practices and institutions that we come to know risk.” Thus the key question is not what risk is or how it is identified and measured, but rather how is risk constructed in a particular context and at a particular historical moment?
Governmentality can be viewed as institutions which (attempt to) regulate citizens’ interaction with and relationship to potentially harmful or undesirable incidents (i.e., risks). Like Beck and Giddens, Foucault also believes expert knowledge plays an important role in shaping the ways in which populations are surveyed, compared and trained to conform to social norms. Disciplinary power and regulation is achieved through surveillance, monitoring, observation, and measurement of bodies and subjects. “From this perspective,” Lupton writes (1999, p. 87), “risk may be understood as a governmental strategy of regulatory power by which populations and individuals are monitored and managed through the goals of neo-liberalism. Risk is governed via a heterogeneous network of interactive actors, institutions, knowledges and practices.” It is easy to observe the role of governmentality in the lives of children and teens. Institutions readily monitor, surveil, test, compare, and train youth populations; such practices are justified within neoliberal goals of self-regulation and productivity. Thus my approach is to understand the ways risks are constructed and mobilized as a regulatory force in young people’s digital lives.