Content, loads of it. The Internet has given us this gift. It is a wonderful gift, representing a transformation of the information landscape perhaps as profound as the invention of the printing press. Like many gifts, however, there is a catch. Not all the content is of high (or even reasonable) quality, and not all of it is what it appears to be. The onus is on the consumer to make wise choices, to pick out credible content from the onslaught of the crassly commercial, the banal, the suspect, and the unsavory. The consumer must also learn to understand how intent and context influence meaning. For example, a riot may be the subject of a news article, a pundit’s blog, a local newspaper editorial, a video taken by a passerby, and Twitter messages that emanate from a variety of origins. Any one of these sources might be considered credible or useful in some way—or not—depending on a user’s interests and purposes.
The focus of this chapter is on the implications of open access to online information of all types and changing notions of credibility. How does a young person make choices in an information universe that is unvetted and without apparent structure? In their excellent overview of digital media, youth, and credibility, Flanagin and Metzger (2008) note that young people do not seem to be terribly concerned about credibility as it has historically been construed. Many teens feel that digital media are shattering traditional models of authority. In some circumstances young people can have more authority than adults, and in other cases nonexperts may be more credible than experts. Still, even with evolving perceptions of credibility, consumers of all ages need to be able to decode what they see and experience online. At first glance, every website in a list of search-engine results looks the same, with only the implicit rank order distinguishing one site from another. The Web has no fiction section, no nonfiction section, no biography section. Visual and contextual cues that do exist can be misleading or confusing. A search on “abortion” may lead to an advocacy organization’s website, a medical website, or a church website. Finally, purveyors of questionable content employ an arsenal of tactics to make their wares palatable, marketable, and ultimately acceptable to significant numbers of people, including (and maybe especially) teens.
It’s important to keep in mind that this information landscape is not divided into pure categories of “good” and “bad.” Not all credible content is equally credible, and not all questionable content is equally questionable. For purposes of discussion, I have sorted this continuum of material into somewhat arbitrary categories, followed by a similar sorting of the variety of techniques used by content providers to persuade and manipulate. Ultimately, young people need to be able to protect themselves by sharpening their media and information literacy skills and becoming savvy consumers of online information. Teaching these skills will be the subject of chapter 7.
No discussion of young people and online content can be conducted without addressing issues of “appropriateness.” Everyone has something to say about kids and what they should or should not be looking at online. First, it is important to acknowledge that terms like questionable and inappropriate have different meanings in different contexts. What is considered acceptable content at home may not be considered acceptable at school or in the workplace. Furthermore, there is disagreement about what constitutes inappropriate Internet content within formal schooling environments.
I appreciate the framework articulated by Doug Johnson (2003), in which he classifies the uses of technology in terms of place, audience, and purpose. Place is an issue of ethical resource allocation. Because the demand for technology has outpaced its acquisition, priority for its use must be given to academic needs. The inappropriate use of personal technologies also distracts from classroom activities. Cell-phone use in schools, for example, may need to be regulated to protect classroom learning. The issue of audience arises with concerns about the appropriateness of content. Johnson advises schools to define and teachers to help students understand the characteristics and conditions under which content becomes unsuitable for school use. Content and language that are used outside of school are not always appropriate in schools, where a wide range of value systems must coexist. Purpose has to do with how students use technology and how schools control that use. Although schools must respect students’ rights to personal expression and their explorations of identity, students must also understand when exercising those rights becomes harmful to themselves or others.
Johnson also reminds us that technology itself is neutral, that it can be used for constructive as well as destructive purposes. This admonition is important to keep in mind as technologies develop and become increasingly ubiquitous in a wide variety of settings. Views of technology tools should adapt as well. Scarcity of computing facilities in schools has become less and less of an equity concern and can no longer routinely be used as a sole reason for prohibiting use that is not directly related to the curriculum. Similarly, educational applications for handheld devices (including cell phones) now seem to be released on a daily basis, making it much harder to justify the outright ban of such devices in schools. It helps me to remember how, not so long ago, it was unthinkable to allow the use of e-mail on any library’s computers. Now e-mail is commonplace in libraries—may even be seen as a core service in public libraries—and is integrated into the functionality of research tools such as online databases.
sometimes it is tempting to fall back on policies that are either easy to enforce or are implemented merely to prevent situations that are difficult to control. For example, educators can be very prescriptive about what students are allowed to look at online while at school. Many school acceptable-use policies restrict all use of the Internet to academic purposes. The rationale for such policies can be a factor of limited computer resources, as Johnson notes, but I suspect it is at least as often a consequence of our own beliefs and prejudices about what students should be doing during school hours, in the school building, and, not inconsequentially, with taxpayer-funded resources. When a school board member is touring the school, it can be hard to justify a library scene in which students are browsing eBay, comparing electronics prices, or checking the latest NFL scores. From the student point of view, however, restrictive policies lump nonacademic websites in with the truly odious—the pornographic, the violent, the hateful. It does not appear to them that their teachers and administrators draw any distinctions among these wildly disparate Internet-based resources and activities. They have only to look at the print resources in the school library that are not curriculum ?related— the sports and car magazines, the teen girl magazines, even the fiction section, with its nonrequired reading choices—to have their impressions confirmed.
It is also important to remember that many topics that were once vilified have become mainstream, erstwhile taboos have insinuated themselves into the popular culture, and alternative lifestyles are well represented on the internet. Though much of this content is suspect, as will be discussed later in this chapter, a great deal of it is useful, legitimate, and well intentioned. The Internet has given curious teens the where-withal to dabble or to dive wholeheartedly into the esoteric, the avant-garde, and the unusual. Witchcraft is a good illustration of these changing mores. Though still a forbidden subject in some communities, witchcraft has otherwise become almost conventional, popularized by the Harry Potter books and by television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. Mattel even introduced a Secret Spells Barbie in the fall of 2003. Information about Wicca, the practice of witchcraft, has blossomed online. Teen Wiccans, most of them girls, congregate on the internet, where they swap e-mails, ideas, and spells (Hagerty 2004). They flock to the Witch’s Voice (www.witchvox.com), a “proactive educational network” that also links far-flung practitioners to like-minded groups and individuals. It even has a section for essays written by teen pagans.
One strategy for dealing with the disconnect between “inappropriate” content and the school environment is to deliberately incorporate nonacademic content into the educational process, where its use can be supervised and mined for pedagogical purposes. The examples above—online auctions, product cost and feature analysis, sports scores—all present opportunities for mathematics and economics instruction, at the very least. Even presumed nonacademic services like social networking and instant messaging can be put to academic use. In the next two chapters, I will discuss such options, along with techniques for teaching content evaluation. For now, suffice it to say that highly restrictive access policies can block a huge range of potentially valuable web resources and Internet services and create an institutionalized impediment to teaching students credibility assessment strategies (Harris 2008).
Ultimately, schools and libraries must define the principles and standards that best fit their individual settings and circumstances. In my own case, practices have emerged from some underlying personal philosophies. First, students shall do no harm, either to themselves or others. Next, the Internet is provided at school for learning. Last, personal growth and identity exploration are components of learning and literacy. In fact, notions of reading and literacy are evolving, partly in response to changes in technology. Reading and writing online, even for “nonacademic” purposes, are increasingly becoming understood as exercises in literacy, particularly when literacy is defined as reading and writing habits that connect to the reader’s/writer’s real world (Braun 2007). As an example, Lewis and Fabos (2005) found that IM literacy was, in part, an extension of schooled literacy practices, reflecting a level of literacy engagement educators may find encouraging.
A couple of examples illustrate how my perspectives play themselves out in practice. The first is my choice to allow students to use the computers in our library to pursue personal interests. David, who consults sports sites like ESPN (http://espn.go.com), is typical of these users. During baseball season, he navigates from ESPN’s major league baseball scores pages to its message boards site. From there, he selects “MLB teams,” then “Chicago Cubs.” by following the Cubs message board, he not only keeps up with the news of his favorite team but, more important, he learns the banter of this (largely adult) community, discovers what is important to its members, and gains a more nuanced understanding of baseball issues than he might pick up from traditional news sources. Though David posts a question every once in a while, he generally confines himself to reading and learning. If David were a student at a school that restricts computer use to curriculum-related purposes, he would not be allowed to further this aspect of his “education.” From my perspective, as long as others do not need his computer for school-related work, David can continue to follow the conversations on these message boards as much as he likes.
Although I defend the rights of the student who hones his baseball knowledge in my library, i prohibit most computer gaming. Why this distinction? The difference lies in the impact of the activity on the environment around it. Unless it is carefully managed (which can be done), gaming can turn the library, the computer lab, and the classroom into an arcade. My personal experience is that the space becomes loud and raucous, and eventually even smelly from the close congregation of agitated bodies. No one else who wants to use the space for its intended purpose has a chance. Picturing the scene without computers makes the differences more obvious. The Chicago Cubs fan would be using magazines and newspapers to conduct his research (although, apart from the letters-tothe-editor section, those sources would not provide him with the community dialogue he finds on the message boards). The game players would be chasing each other around the library, wielding sound-enabled toy laser weapons. The ground rules are evident: learn, and do no harm.
As we teach young people to evaluate online information, it is important to keep in mind that we are operating in a very different information environment than the one in which most of us grew up. Contemporary conceptions of authority and credibility have been profoundly affected by the wide-open nature of the Internet and the culture of sharing afforded by Web 2.0 tools. Internet users now seek answers from “the wisdom of the crowd” rather than from more traditional (and centralized) sources of authority. The judgment of the many is often regarded as equal to or even better than the judgment of any single individual or entity. This phenomenon plays out in a variety of ways. If a list of hits on Google turns up the same information multiple times, a user is inclined to accept that information at face value—without even having to click through to any of the links to the actual websites. This behavior is fueled by the assumption that if a lot of people say something is true, then it must be, and stems from the same thinking as the “satisficing” behaviors described in chapter 2. To the consternation of librarians, it is a strategy that may work more often than not. If I want to know the capital of North Dakota, the first screen of search-engine results clearly points to Bismarck.
More typically, “crowd wisdom” is defined as information that is provided by users or peers rather than by traditional information providers. Wikipedia is perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon. As the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, its self-correcting properties have earned it the respect of many. Links to the site from other reputable sources virtually guarantee it first-page (if not first-place) rankings on Google searches. The business world has gotten into the act through the practice of “crowdsourcing,” or outsourcing work to an unspecified work force or public by putting out a general call for input. Educators and others have followed suit by posting surveys, polls, or just open questions on blogs and professional learning networks. The information gathered through such exercises may not be considered scientifically valid, but it meets the needs of its intended purpose. At its heart, the phenomenon of crowd wisdom reflects the informal information-seeking practices described in chapter 2. It certainly comprises a significant way in which young people use the Internet for information gathering.
At its best, the wisdom of the crowd advances knowledge and has become the subject of serious research. The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (http://cci.mit.edu) was created for the purpose of studying how people and computers can be connected so that, as a collective, they have the potential to act with more intelligence than they would as individuals, separate groups, or computers. However, the involvement of the many drives both quantity and quality of content, which can be problematic. The same crowd origins that make Wikipedia so valuable also define its weakness. The “crowd” may be a corporate interest, a disgruntled politician, or a vandal. One of the most famous cases of Wikipedia inaccuracy was an anonymously written entry on writer and journalist John Seigenthaler (Seigenthaler 2005). Seigenthaler served as an administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, and the article falsely connected him to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an inaccuracy that went uncorrected for months. Likewise, information that is shared by citizen-journalists is hard to verify independently and does not undergo any kind of editorial review. Finally, crowd wisdom can be susceptible to various types of groupthink, including a pervasive sense of complacency (“someone else will take care of that”), peer pressure, and even hysteria. One of the more vocal critics of crowd-style democratization of the Internet is Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, who decries what he perceives as the loss of expertise and culture and predICTs an enormous drain on the economy as people refuse to pay for either (2007). He describes the current state of affairs as the “law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated” (2007, 8).
The Web is home to huge classes of information that have never been included in the traditional publishing models that libraries employ for building collections. Now, library collections are unlimited and virtual as well as selective and physical. Users blithely conduct web searches that retrieve information from a wide spectrum of origination, ranging from commercial sites to advocacy organizations to online communities. As an illustration, one of my students was delighted to find a map online of a river he was studying for a science project. As I helped him with the detective work of uncovering authorship for his bibliographic citation, he discovered that the map came from a brochure created by a riverboat tour guide company. The geographical markers on the map represented boat stops and other features of the tour, pitched to entice potential customers. As such, they did not really touch on the scientific perspective he needed for his project. The map—as an information artifact—was not lacking in intrinsic value. But its particular value lay in a set of informational data points that were selected and contextualized for an entirely different purpose and audience, making the map inappropriate for his needs. Still, it was hard for me to convince him that his “relevant” selection was not really relevant (even with its high placement on his results list and with all keywords present) and that he could find a more suitable source with a little effort and thought. In pre-Internet days, my library would not have had access to this brochure, and the student would not have been faced with determining its relevance to him. On the other hand, that same online access allowed him to renegotiate his search and locate the truly relevant material that in pre-Internet days also would not have been available to him.
A model I find useful when categorizing web content is one that was developed by the SUNY Stonybrook School of Journalism Center for News Literacy for its pioneering news literacy course (www.stonybrook.edu/journalism/newsliteracy). The course employs a “news neighborhood” metaphor, in which news is divided into six neighborhoods: news, propaganda, advertising, publicity, entertainment, and raw information. For example, “news” is defined as information that is gathered by journalists and can be verified by authoritative and independent sources, whereas “propaganda” is defined as information created by government or political entities using manipulation and deception in order to generate support or trigger action. Students are shown examples of news media stories and asked to sort them by neighborhood, an exercise that helps them better understand content and intent. It is not really realistic to try to devise a similar set of discrete categories for the broad spectrum of “information neighborhoods,” but the concept is very similar to what is already done on a smaller scale. For example, librarians and other educators have long asked students to distinguish between peer-reviewed journals and popular magazines. In the web universe, any number of rubrics could be designed to help young people better discern one information neighborhood from another.
Although I will not try to create such a rubric here, I will attempt to highlight some of the unique neighborhoods that make the online information world so challenging for consumers of all ages to travel through.
The Internet is a haven and a boon for advocacy activities of all types. The physical library hosts no parallel functionality, certainly not at a comparable level. In contrast, the online advocacy neighborhood hosts huge repositories of content that exists solely to represent specific interests, to persuade others of the merits of those interests, and to share information about them. Advocacy sites are as varied as the entire range of human interest and concern. Neighborhood residents include such diverse inhabitants as the National Rifle Association, La Leche League, the Animal Liberation Front, and the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
For young information consumers, the challenge is to recognize how the mission of these organizations might influence the nature of the content they deliver. As an example, whenever I see students searching the open web for environmental information, they invariably find themselves on the websites of advocacy organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. Whatever credible and authoritative information exists on these sites is contextualized to support the prime directive of the organizations. The National Confectioners Association’s website (www.candyusa.org) tells me what I want to hear about the benefits of candy and chocolate, drawing on reputable scientific documentation. But it minimizes the information I do not want to hear about the dangers of overindulgence. The site’s information may be absolutely factual, if not entirely complete. Even a site like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (www.thebulletin.org), with a board of sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates, filters information through its own lens. The discerning consumer will be tipped off to the organization’s perspective just by noting the name of its famous Doomsday clock, which appears on the cover of every issue of the periodical and as a “favicon” (URL icon) in the web browser’s address bar.
On the open web, commercial websites are given the same billing as the websites of education and government institutions, nonprofit advocacy organizations, hobbyists, and others. The science students who find themselves on the website of the World Wildlife Fund may then land on the website of a company that manufactures devices for water pollution control systems. They need to understand that the data such a company provides are selected to support the success of the commercial venture, not necessarily to contribute to broader scientific knowledge. Things get very sticky when residents of the commercial “neighborhood” masquerade as residents of other neighborhoods. This phenomenon is not a new one in contemporary media. When children’s television programs revolve around product lines, the advertising neighborhood is recasting itself as the entertainment neighborhood. These same programs have now moved online, along with their commercial messages.
The advertising neighborhood often portrays itself as either a research or news neighborhood. A web search on “alcohol statistics” retrieves a site called Alcoholstats.com, created by the Anheuser-Busch company. The site contains a rich collection of state-by-state data about alcohol use as well as numerous articles on subjects such as alcohol consumption, advertising, education, and health. The state data are compiled from various government agency reports and include statistics about teen drunk driving and related topics. The articles originate from a variety of external sources, with a healthy representation from survey research firms like Nielsen and Harris Interactive. Although all this information is independently collected and published, an interesting trend emerges when viewed in the aggregate on the website. Here is a sampling of the brief descriptions of the articles on alcohol advertising:
“Anheuser-Busch places beer advertising in magazines, on television, and on radio programs where at least 70 percent of the audience is expected to be adults of legal purchase age.”
“The majority of Americans (79 percent) support better education about alcohol and stricter punishment of offenders over raising taxes and limiting advertising of alcohol beverages.”
“The majority of youth … cite their parents as the leading influence in their decisions about whether they drink alcohol or not. Sixty-seven percent of college-bound youth (ages 13–17) identified their parents as the leading influence in their decisions about drinking alcohol.”
“Alcohol advertising on all media comprise 1.17 percent of all ads.”
Collectively, the message of these statistics-laden articles is that the advertising produced by Anheuser-Busch is not responsible for underage drinking, that the public understands this, and therefore that the company’s advertising should not be restricted in any way. The question is: are young people equipped to recognize this subtext and the way in which these messages are packaged? Or are they more likely to take (and use) this information at face value?
The underbelly of the commercial neighborhood is the unwanted content that arrives hidden in spam, pop-up advertising, spyware, and the like. It is one thing when young people actively look for trouble, but it is another to have trouble come marching in unbidden and unexpected. Consumers of all ages often share personal information online without considering the privacy practices (or “nonpractices”) that can precipitate this onslaught. My students respond to these aggravations with relative equanimity: “Yeah, sometimes spammers send me porn links and stuff . . . It’s so annoying.” Reactions like this one tell me that the shock value of spam has declined, as it has for flame wars. Instead, this generation has become accustomed to the intrusion and seems to regard it as a necessary evil of the online environment.
As sanguine as my students may appear to be about these invasive phenomena, their impact is likely to have a lasting effect on the future of communication technologies. Spam is rendering e-mail nearly useless in some cases. The deluge is frustrating and resource-draining at the least, and outright destructive at worst. At whatever level, spam can take the control of the online experience out of users’ hands.
Beyond any debates about appropriateness, the Web is host to an undeniably scary world. There is little quibbling about the unsuitability of the Internet’s seamiest neighborhoods—the hard-core pornography, the violent imagery, the place of refuge for scoundrels and villains of all types. For a variety of reasons that will be discussed later in this chapter, much of this content is hard to detect immediately. Or it arrives quite uninvited, invading our private online space. For these reasons and more, it is important to understand the nature of the Internet’s dark side. Let’s take a quick tour through some of these content types.
Pornography
Ah, pornography, the Great Evil of the internet. Our worries about it spring from two different areas of concern. First, we worry about intrusive pornography that arrives, like spam, without being summoned by the user. Online porn is more than accessible—it can sometimes actually be hard to avoid. As casual as teens may purport to be about invasive information and communication technology (ICT) phenomena, they are not always comfortable with it. Of Internet users ages ten to seventeen who encounter pornography online, the majority report that it is unwanted and unsolicited (Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2007). Peer-to-peer networks have become major conveyers of online pornography and are the source of much of the unwanted content. Teens can unwittingly acquire hard-core video clips, many of which have innocuous file names or names similar to something they might be looking for. Teens do not need credit cards to share these files, nor does most filtering software recognize or block them.
The second source of our worry about pornography has to do with our knowledge (and memories!) of the teenage mind. We all recognize that curiosity about sexuality is a normal part of growing up. When I was a teenager, boys were sneaking copies of their fathers’ Playboy magazines and girls were reading contraband copies of Peyton Place to find out about sex. These days, societal standards about sexual content in the public forum have loosened considerably, partly as a consequence of the mixed messages broadcast by today’s media. Teens need look no further than the nearest billboard, grocery-store magazine rack, music video, Calvin Klein ad—or even the current cover of Rolling Stone in their school library—to find rather explicit sexual imagery. Online, commercial websites targeted at tweens feature highly sexualized characterizations of young women (see figure 6.1). What was once taboo has become commonplace. Accessibility has dulled our shock meters, inevitably leading to new standards of acceptability.
Even though standards of sexual explicitness have relaxed, viewing hard-core pornography is still a stigmatized activity. The pornography industry has long taken advantage of technology to minimize the effects of that stigma. Videocassettes changed pornography access from a public affair to a private one, bringing it first to booths at the adult store and then to VCRs in the home. The Web provides this same privacy and convenience to teenagers, who are barred from the adult sections of video stores. The online environment reduces their fear of detection and encourages a sense of disinhibition. But the stakes are higher in the online environment because of the sheer availability of so much extremely explicit material. Online pornography can make Playboy and Penthouse look like Good Housekeeping magazine.
Figure 6.1
Sexualized image of teenage girl trying on clothes at Zwinky.com. The site shows different articles of clothing going on and coming off of the figure of the girl.
Crackpots, Wackos, and the Demons of Adolescence
Unfortunately, the Web is a mecca for old-fashioned and newfangled crackpots peddling questionable products, information, and solutions for all of life’s ills. Curious teens will discover ideas and instructions for body piercing, tattooing, and branding. Troubled souls will locate plenty of information on weaponry, military equipment, and spy gear. Occult interests are easily satisfied by the plethora of websites on satanism, voodoo, and demonology. The information found online about over-the-edge topics is by no means monolithic in opinion, tone, or intent. While perusing a discussion forum on tattooing, I was amused to read the outraged comments of principled tattoo artists condemning the “scabwrenchers,” “scratchers,” and “hepatitis vendors” who give tattoos to minors. But the same forum contained threads about whether or not to shave a body part that has been “inked” (yes, shave it for best effect), the pros and cons of tattooing feet, and one member’s link to his private gallery of pornographic, misogynistic tattoos. The question is whether or not teen observers and participants can sort these threads into the sane and the insane, the reasonable and the unreasonable, and the advice that is legitimately helpful and that which is self-destructive.
Teens who fall prey to the modern plagues of adolescence—eating disorders, self-injury, illegal drugs, and the like—now have unimaginable resources at their fingertips. They can join support groups for the anorexic “lifestyle,” they can consult how-to sites on cutting and other forms of self-injury, and they can look up formulas for prescription-drug cocktails. On a community “pro-anorexia” blog I found the following entry:
I want the fabric of my coat to drape over my shoulders, I want my collar bones to be apparent… I want my dress to not be able to stay on my body. I want to appear delicate … weak … only I will know just how strong I am.
In other entries on this blog, participants post lists of the foods they have eaten that day and ask questions about one another’s dieting and fasting techniques. Does the one-bagel-a-day diet work? Is water-fasting unsafe? Where do you get Dexatrim and how much does it cost? Will you be my Ana (anorexia) buddy? Without the Internet, such support and validation would be much more difficult to come by. Worst of all, parents, other knowledgeable adults, and friends face difficult odds in the face of such a formidable, omnipresent influence as an Internet-based community.
Hatemongering
The Internet is a great public square. The values that inspired its creation do not discriminate among belief systems. As a result, bigots have the same place at the table as those who work for social justice. Perhaps the most troubling by-product of the Internet era has been the new lease on life it has given to extremist hate groups. Although ethnic hatred and racism have always been with us, extremists once had to go to great lengths to find one another and organize their efforts. They have now found both community and platform through the internet, with teens as a particular target audience. Kindred spirits are a click away, and calls to action are easy to instigate with the help of social network sites and tools. Compare yesterday’s laborious distribution of racist leaflets on a few college campuses to today’s Internet-enabled delivery. Extremists create professional-looking websites that are hard to distinguish from those of reputable organizations. Their presence on mainstream social networking sites gives them a reach and kind of legitimacy that was once unimaginable.
In its 2009 annual “Year in Hate” report (Holthouse 2009), the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 926 active hate groups in the United States, up 4 percent from 2007 and a whopping 50 percent from 2000, when there were 602 groups. The national immigration debate drove much of the hate discourse during this time period, but the economic recession and Barack Obama’s successful campaign to become the nation’s first African American president raised the stakes to new levels of intensity. The Leadership conference on civil rights Education Fund, which represents nearly 200 national organizations, used part of its 2009 report on hate crimes in America to clarify how hate groups have exploited the Internet to spread their message and recruit new members. Besides hosting traditional websites, hate groups are active on social network sites like MySpace and Facebook and in online discussion groups hosted on such mainstream websites as Google, AOL, and Yahoo! their members take advantage of open online venues like newspapers to post anti-semitic or racist comments. The Florida-based Palm Beach Post had to disable its comments section because of the avalanche of anti-semitic comments that appeared in the wake of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund 2009). Hate groups post videos to social sites like youtube, often using misleading tags and titles to expose the content to those who would not otherwise seek it out. As have other information providers, they have adapted content so that it can be accessed on handheld devices. Hate groups have learned to harness the Internet to mask their “otherness” and assume positions as legitimate players in modern society.
Although it is startling to see the free-speech blue ribbons that adorn hate sites, they serve as reminders that the constitution protects most speech, even speech that is offensive and debasing. Only speech that is libelous, threatens individuals, or persistently harasses specific persons is prohibited. Regulating the protected speech of racists would require regulating everyone’s speech. In today’s environment, this approach is neither technically feasible nor ethically desirable.
Especially for Teens: Music as Message
Music is so important in teenage life that its potential as a tool of persuasion warrants separate discussion. Although we do not (yet) see concrete evidence that online hate speech has made significant strides in recruiting teens to extremist organizations, hate-based music might be another story. Music imprints our coming-of-age process with an indelible time stamp, differentiating each generation from the previous one. Those who understand this phenomenon have learned to manipulate it to their advantage. A National Public Radio story on the resurgence of hate crimes in Los Angeles reports that the relatively large number of skinheads in high schools may be based on the fact that kids are being recruited through music (Temple-Rastin 2008). Before the Internet, the white power music scene was an underground phenomenon, but now teens can simply play or download the music from the Web. Richard Eaton, who studies the white supremacist movement at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, describes the responses of young people who were asked about their impressions of the lyrics:
“And they said, ‘I only listen to it because I like the sound of the music,’ ” he says. “But when you are listening to this all the time and hear the lyrics, they stick with you.” (Temple-Rastin 2008)
Indeed, the teen demographic makes up a substantial proportion of the white power music fan base. “Hatecore” artists perform in popular genres like punk, electronic, and rap. Marketing focuses on teens, who are thought to represent the future of the white power movement.
Because standard music outlets like retail stores and chains do not carry these products, they are sold online, where teenagers already hang out. The website of Resistance Records (www.resistance.com), the commercial music arm of the white supremacist organization National Alliance, has the usual bells and whistles that appeal to teens—a searchable database of artists and titles, music clips to download, and online ordering. But there is much more to be seen. Teens can order T-shirts, jewelry, and “Aryan-wear boots” from the merchandise area of the site. They can participate in a forum that includes an active Resistance Youth discussion area with topics ranging from music, media, and history to religion. The “Street and Internet Activism” topic exhorts participants to “Come in here for computer discussion and ideas for spreading racial awareness through the Internet; our last medium of free speech!”
Grown-up white supremacists and their ilk recognize the Internet as an effective medium through which to advertise their mission, to persuade, and to recruit. The Internet is not the first medium to be used for propaganda purposes, nor are white supremacists the only group to discover the usefulness of various media types as tools of persuasion. Propaganda techniques apply to all modes of persuasive communication, not just the political. In fact, the same tactics are used by the good guys as well as the bad guys, from mainstream advertisers, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and political campaigns to hatemongers and terrorist groups. Only the modes of delivery have changed over time, influenced by technology and cultural habit. Broadsides gave way to newspapers, radio, and television in turn. Now the arsenal includes websites, social networks, media-sharing sites, online forums, electronic mailing lists, and even spam.
Contemporary scholars began a serious study of the techniques of persuasion during the twentieth century, as new modes of mass communication blossomed and war in Europe loomed. From 1937 to 1942, the independent institute for Propaganda Analysis published a series of books and newsletters to help Americans understand the tools of political propaganda. The journalists and social scientists who worked at the institute identified seven basic propaganda devices (Propaganda Analysis 1937), and their findings have since been adapted, expanded, and retooled for use in lectures, textbooks, and lessons on critical thinking and the mass media. I will add my own spin to theirs in describing several common tactics of persuasion. Though I illustrate these strategies with a variety of examples, I focus on hate groups as a case study simply because persuasion tactics are most obvious and egregious when used by extremists. This analysis is by no means comprehensive and is undoubtedly idiosyncratic. My goal is to provide an approach to understanding and deconstructing persuasive speech. This model and others like it can serve as a template for teaching students to conduct their own analyses.
The human psyche seems to crave outside authority, the secure feeling that someone else smarter or better is available as a guide in decision making. Knowing this human tendency, advertisers, propagandists, and others engaged in the business of persuasion often invoke images of authority. We are all familiar with the television commercials in which a figure dressed in a white lab coat refers to studies that prove the effectiveness of a household cleaner or a mouthwash or some other everyday product. The person in the lab coat is an actor, not a scientist, and the existence of bona fide, externally conducted research is doubtful. The elevated status of celebrities in modern society produces a similar aura of authority when the famous, and even the infamous, endorse product lines and political viewpoints for which they may have no particular claims to expertise.
Claims of authority may be misleading, misapplied, or outright false. For many years, Professor Arthur Butz of Northwestern University used his personal university web space for expressing his Holocaust revisionist views. Although he taught at a prestigious institution, his field was electrical engineering, not history. He capitalized on his title and the academic freedom afforded by Northwestern University to espouse beliefs that are based on prejudice and poor scholarship.
Another common strategy is to justify one’s position by claiming it emanates from a higher authority, typically in the guise of government or religion. Detractors do not wish to appear as though they are arguing against God or country. The discourse of white supremacists often includes religious vocabulary and references. A search-engine query on the phrase “white christian” brings up screen after screen of such examples. The implication, of course, is that a person cannot be a true Christian if he or she is either homosexual or nonwhite. Separatism has suddenly become a prescription from above. Some groups even claim authority from both religion and government, as in the Ku Klux Klan slogan “For God, Race, and Country.”
The Christian patriot movement is an interesting case of the religion-and-government argument. Ironically, the movement’s adherents are neither supporters of the contemporary U.S. government nor of mainstream Christianity. Sociologist James Aho (1990), who spent two years in northern Idaho studying the movement, noted that Christian patriots distinguish between Law and legality, Morality and legalese. They acknowledge only the “organic Constitution” (the original articles of the Constitution plus the Bill of Rights) and selected edICTs from the first five books of the Bible. Therefore, they feel no moral obligation to obey a secular law that is inconsistent with these texts. They get to have it both ways—the blessing of religion and government as well as the freedom to define each to suit a particular worldview. From the Christian patriot perspective, the present U.S. “Zionist Occupation Government” is biblically and constitutionally illegitimate, bent on promoting non-Christian religions, moral perversion, and equal rights for “unqualified” minorities. The Web provides an ideal platform from which to espouse these views.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
There are as many ways to misuse information as there are not to. We protect our children, our parents, and our friends by telling them the truth, but not always the full truth. Likewise, content providers learn to be selective with the information they report. They manipulate statistics and shape information through creative presentation. As long as there is a grain of truth in what is being said, the message sounds credible and authoritative. Statistics do not even have to be poorly conceived or manipulated to influence impressions. As noted earlier, the National Confectioner’s Association tells me everything I want to hear about sweets, and not much of what I don’t want to hear. Wholly different conclusions can be presented based on the same set of data. Cox Communications, in partnership with the National Center for missing and Exploited children, conducted a survey of teens on online and wireless safety issues (Cox 2009). The news articles that reported the results varied widely in their presentation of the data. The online USA Today article headline shouted “Survey: 1 in 5 teens ‘sext’ despite risks” (Leinwand 2009), in contrast to Internet safety expert Larry Magid’s blog title, “survey shows teens more safety savvy than thought” (2009a). Shaping a story is not new to the Web, but the Web magnifies and strengthens our ability to do so.
Consumers must also be aware of more sinister instances of the misuse of information. A lengthy essay titled “Who Rules America?” appears on the website of the National Alliance (www.natall.com/who-rules-america), a white power organization. This essay catalogs the ownership of the American mass media—from electronic news and entertainment media to print newspapers and magazines—and ties it to Jewish individuals or to those who have “sold out” to Jews or been “undermined” by Jews. Though dated, many of the facts in this story are indisputable. The names and companies mentioned are real. The historic role of Jews in Hollywood and the mass media is no secret, having been celebrated and documented in popular as well as scholarly writing.
But the National Alliance stacks the cards, using this information to draw conclusions that are not warranted by the facts. First, it asserts that the Jewish role amounts to conspiracy. “Despite a few prominent exceptions, the preponderance of Jews in the media is so overwhelming that we are obliged to assume that it is due to more than mere happenstance.” Then a call to action is issued:
But we must not remain silent on this most important of issues! The Jewish control of the American mass media is the single most important fact of life, not just in America, but in the whole world today. There is nothing—plague, famine, economic collapse, even nuclear war—more dangerous to the future of our people.
It is understood that “our people” are white Christians.
Looks Are Everything
The digital world is the ultimate makeover machine. The visual cues that help us categorize and otherwise process information may or may not be present online, or they may be packaged in such a way that vital associations either cannot be made or are misdirected. At first glance, the website of the Institute for Historical Review (www.ihr.org) presents an innocuous face, one that deflects attention from its mission as a Holocaust denial organization. The word institute in its name and the prominent link on its masthead to the Journal of Historical Review are designed to evoke scholarly associations. Never mind that the journal has been defunct since 2002 and that its contents were never indexed by reputable, scholarly databases. The “News and Comment” section, centrally placed, presents a stream of continuously updated article excerpts that link to the original sources. These sources represent all manner of mainstream news organizations, including Israeli newspapers and Jewish American publications. Their presence cannot help but leave an impression that the institute is endorsed by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, the Economist, and the New York Times. But the articles are selected to tell the story the institute wants to tell and are plucked, out of context, from sources that espouse the ideals of a free press and diversity of thought.
Co-opting Symbols and Traditions
A subtle way to evoke an aura of authority is to adopt the use of established symbols and traditions. Visual imagery and traditional practices are used to convey legitimacy, status, historical imprimatur, and other desirable qualities. For example, the logo of the National Recycling Coalition’s “America Recycles Day” campaign is an American flag made from red, white, and blue plastic bottles and other recycled items. The image of the flag conjures patriotic associations in the minds of those who consider participating in the event, despite the fact that no government agency sponsors it. As adoptions of such symbols occur, original meanings may change or even be lost. Few of my students can trace the contemporary origins of the various “awareness ribbon” campaigns to the yellow ribbons that were used to welcome home long-lost loved ones, most notably the hostages held during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–1981. A simplified form of the yellow ribbon later came to signify support of military troops, and in other colors, the ribbons now represent awareness of causes from AIDS and heart disease (red) to breast cancer (pink) to drunk driving and child abuse (blue).
It is easy to find examples of symbols that have been adapted by hate groups. In some quarters, the yellow ribbon honoring members of the armed forces has been changed to read “Bring our troops home and put them on the Mexican border.” American flags and patriotic color schemes adorn the websites of David Duke Online (www.duke.org) and the American Nationalist Union (www.anu.org). The National Socialist Movement (www.nsm88.com), which is the American Nazi Party, combines two iconic images—the American flag and the Nazi swastika (which, in turn, is an ancient symbol used by many cultures prior to the Nazis’ adoption of it). For good measure, it also throws in a bald eagle superimposed on an American flag (see figure 6.2). Betsy Ross would be astonished to see what has happened to her flag design.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) maintains a large visual database of extremist symbols, logos, and tattoos (www.adl.org/hate_symbols/ default.asp). Each item links to a table of information, which contains the type of group associated with the symbol (e.g., neo-Nazi, racist skinhead), a physical description of the symbol, alternate names, its traditional use and origin, the name of the organization associated with the symbol, and that organization’s background and history. Pagan symbols co-opted by extremist groups warrant their own section. Viking insignia and Norse mythological imagery now carry connotations their earlier users would never recognize or understand. Ironically, a number of swastika variants now exist because the traditional symbol, associated with the Nazis, has been banned in many countries.
Figure 6.2
The National Socialist movement combines imagery from the American flag, the bald eagle, and the Nazi-era swastika to portray the neo-Nazi perspective.
The traditions that are co-opted can be as simple as the shared experiences of childhood or common habits of community and family. One of the websites my students find most disturbing is the children’s section of the National Alliance online bookstore. Here they see treasured books from their own childhoods co-opted to represent “white values” and “white pride.” The collection includes standard editions of Blueberries for Sal, Anne of Green Gables, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, Little Men, and many other familiar titles. My students feel squeamish for sharing the love of these books with people whose values they find reprehensible. They also experience associative culpability, a sense that words and thoughts have been put into their mouths without their permission.
Cloaking
Scholar Jessie Daniels defines two broad categories of white supremacy online: that which is overt and that which is cloaked (2008). Overt hate sites openly target their audience, showcase racist propaganda, or offer online community for white supremacists. Cloaked hate sites intentionally seek to deceive the casual web user. Daniels includes the Institute for Historical Review website in the cloaked category because of its polished presentation and muted message. Its mission statement is “to promote peace, understanding and justice through greater public awareness of the past, and especially socially-politically relevant aspects of twentieth-century history.” The website Martin Luther King Jr.: A True Historical Examination (www.Martinlutherking.org) also uses a number of techniques to cloak its true intent. The first is its very official-looking domain name. Domain name deception occurs when someone grabs the rights to a domain name before the logical owner does. Pornography sites use similar trickery by buying domain names that are close enough to the real ones that unwitting users go to them in error. martinlutherking.org is operated by the white supremacist organization Stormfront and has the professional look of a reputable site, with its rollovers and sleek layout. The site is designed to attract the attention of young readers. It sports a bright blue link across the top of the page that reads “Attention Students: Try Our MLK Pop Quiz,” and an invitation at the bottom of the page to “Bring the Dream to life in your town! Download flyers to pass out at your school.” One or two clicks into the site, however, and its actual messages of defamation and hate become apparent.
Cloaking is not a strategy that is exclusive to hate groups. It is also used to satirize, spark social commentary, or distract users from immediately detecting a website’s agenda. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (www.cchr.org) is not, as one might expect, devoted to the rights of political prisoners or oppressed groups. Rather, it is an advocacy site “dedicated to investigating and exposing psychiatric violations of human rights.” Readers who delve further will learn that this organization is an arm of the Church of Scientology, which publicly opposes what it terms “the industry” of psychiatry. Clones R Us (www.d-b.net/dti), one of my favorite sites to use in teaching, pretends to be a commercial site where viewers can order a clone of themselves, a celebrity, or a beloved pet. The extensive price list, the FAQ page, the testimonials, the order forms, and the professional look make for a convincing commercial website experience. The purpose of the site is not to deceive but to stimulate critical thinking about cloning and the potential consequences of its legalization. Careful readers will eventually find the small-print disclaimer in the site. The hip-looking site Teenbreaks.com appears to be a teen health site, offering advice on topics like reproductive health, cutting, peer pressure, and self-esteem. In fact, its primary message is a pro-life one. The abortion section of the site is filled with testimonials from young women who regret having had abortions and from those who claim to be the surviving products of botched abortions.
A time-honored persuasion technique is the “plain-folks” approach, in which viewers see the faces of average citizens and read personal stories they can identify with. Advertisers make frequent use of the technique, showcasing before-and-after photographs of teens who use an acne-treatment product, or bald men who suddenly sprout luxurious shocks of hair. Advocacy group websites regularly feature personal stories and testimonials. America’s Voice (www.americasvoiceonline.org), an organization that advocates for immigrant rights, also invites viewers to submit their own stories, adding their experiences to those “of the millions of hardworking immigrants trying to make lives for themselves in the United States.” The website of the National Organization for Marriage (www.nationformarriage.org) employs a variant of the plain-folks technique. Because same-sex marriage is often portrayed as a threat to mainstream marriage, the “marriage talking points” page on the website instructs followers to frame the issue as one of common sense. When claims of bigotry are made, the suggested response is:
Do you really believe people like me who believe mothers and fathers both matter to kids are like bigots and racists? I think that’s pretty offensive, don’t you? Particularly to the 60 percent of African-Americans who oppose same-sex marriage. Marriage as the union of husband and wife isn’t new; it’s not taking away anyone’s rights. It’s common sense.
Advocates are instructed to always come back to the main message, which is that “Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose, they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us.” The phrases “people like me” and “all of us” are designed to trigger the plain-folks response.
Hate groups have acquired more mainstream public faces by participating in a broader range of community activities. Many members of the Ku Klux Klan now wear regular street clothes to public functions rather than white robes, and the organization is welcoming more women to the ranks. Extremists have recoined the vocabulary that is associated with the discourse of white supremacy, sprinkling their websites with terms like racialist instead of racist and separatism rather than supremacy. racialism is merely the practice of racial integrity. Separatism only signifies respect for the laws of nature, while the term supremacy implies control and subjugation—a goal Stormfront and other groups claim no interest in achieving. This tweaking of vocabulary turns the focus away from hate and places the emphasis on positive qualities like pride, heritage, and self-preservation. In most of this rhetoric, the tone is reasonable rather than strident, calm rather than defensive.
The plain-folks tactic does not always attract teenagers, who, more often than not, want to distance themselves from mainstream society. They already feel different and would rather embrace their status than suffer for it. It does not take long for them to discover that the Internet is a generous host to anyone and anything that is antiestablishment. Anarchists, militia members, cult followers, and peace activists all find a voice in its nonjudgmental bosom. A student of mine went to a demonstration and heard this statement in a speech: “The Revolution may not be televised, but it will be uploaded!” In other words, mainstream media may not cover the underground, but social networks and media-sharing sites surely will. Online, the extreme right meets the extreme left. All manner of strange bedfellows reside side by side, giving alienated teens a huge smorgasbord from which to sample.
Many teens are particularly attracted to online resources that have the potential to give their lives a larger and deeper meaning. For example, those who are interested in animal rights can sign on with organizations devoted to the excoriation of fast-food chains (e.g., www.kentuckyfriedcruelty.com). Teens can gravitate to YouthNoise (www.youthnoise.com), a social network site for people under the age of twenty-seven “who like to connect based on deeper interests than Paris Hilton’s wardrobe and want to get engaged within a cause.” Participants can join or start a cause; blog, discuss, and debate its issues; participate in online activities; and organize projects. Some teen-cause sites are actually created and maintained by adults, a strategy that might be considered a form of cloaking. Teens for Life (www.teensforlife.com), subtitled Join the Revolution, is an outreach initiative of Indiana Right to Life, a state-level affiliate of the National right to Life Committee It maintains presences on sites like Facebook, myspace, and twitter. The “Speak Out” section of the website has no authorship tags for postings, so it is hard to tell if teens or adults are providing the updates, and it’s equally difficult to assess the level of teen buy-in.
Despite their engagement in weighty moral issues, teens are still relatively powerless in our society. They reluctantly miss important concerts or protests or activist events because they cannot get permission to skip school or, even more frustrating, cannot arrange for transportation. They rail against world trade, capitalism, and other economic systems that, at some level of consciousness, they realize they benefit from. Activist teens cannot stop being their parents’ children. They cannot suddenly become self-supporting, independent beings. Yet their parents’ economic support provides them with the wherewithal to protest. They are not necessarily rebels without a cause, but their causes are undermined by their status.
Having antimainstream interests does not necessarily signify devotion to lofty humanitarian or political causes. The Internet provides teens with the means to engage in or document unconventional, underground, and even contraband activities. Teens find and exchange information related to rave culture, underground trance/dance clubs, “house” music, and popular DJs. There are online communities that exist solely for the purpose of sharing one’s drinking or drug-using exploits. At the end of the day, teens are still teens and many are, well, adolescent and rebellious. They throw one another off invitation-only group blogs for infractions like “pissing off the mod” (moderator). They complain in online forums about being required to take standardized tests, being grounded, or being told to make their appearance more conventional. In short, they find sanctuary in the opportunities for expression and community that the Internet bestows.
The new information and communication technologies are here to stay. We would not have it otherwise. But their fallout is undeniable. We cannot afford to sit back and just watch change happen. Our services must adapt, and particularly in the school setting, it is our job to teach teens to meet the challenges of the new environment. Part 3 of this book addresses these next critical steps.