3.In a survey of 276 adolescents aged fourteen to eighteen, Ozgur Erdur-Baker shows that 32 percent of students were victims of both cyberbullying and traditional bullying, while 26 percent of students bullied others in both cyber and physical environments. Male students were more likely to be bullies and victims in both environments. Multivariate statistical analyses show that cyberbullying and traditional bullying are related for male students but not for female students. See Ozgur Erdur-Baker, “Cyberbullying and Its Correlation to Traditional Bullying, Gender and Frequent and Risky Usage of Internet-Mediated Communication Tools,” New Media & Society 12, no. 1 (2010): 109–125. Also, in their survey of 2,186 middle school and high school students, Faye Mishna and colleagues show that more than 30 percent of respondents identified as being involved in cyberbullying as either victims or perpetrators, while one in four (25.7 percent) reported having been involved in cyberbullying as both bully and victim. Several risk factors were common among those involved in cyberbullying, including the number of hours per day students use the computer and giving passwords to friends. See Faye Mishna et al., “Risk Factors for Involvement in Cyber Bullying: Victims, Bullies and Bully-Victims,” Children and Youth Services Review 34, no. 1 (2012): 63–70. Finally, in 2006, the National Crime Prevention Council commissioned a study, in conjunction with Harris Interactive, Inc., to explore the issue of cyberbullying among middle school and high school students in the United States. The survey had four objectives: (1) explore teens’ experiences with cyberbullying; (2) understand teens’ emotional and behavioral reactions to cyberbullying; (3) probe what teens think would be the most effective ways to prevent or put a stop to cyberbullying; and (4) determine how teens define cyberbullying and what other terms they use to describe it. Results of the study showed that of the 824 students surveyed, 46 percent had experienced some form of cyberbullying, females were more likely than males to have been victims of cyberbullying (57 percent versus 43 percent, respectively), and the likelihood of experiencing cyberbullying tended to increase slightly with age. See National Crime Prevention Council and Harris Interactive, “Teens and Cyberbullying: Executive Summary of a Report on Research,” February 28, 2007.
4.For more on this study, see Sarah Konrath, Edward H. O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 15, no. 2 (2011): 180–198.
5.For many teens, there is a fine line between bullying and plain old drama, with cyberbullying occupying another category altogether. To read more on these distinctions and the importance of this terminology (and the ways that adults today tend to lump everything under the heading of “bullying” and “cyberbullying,” see Alice Marwick and danah boyd’s article, “‘It’s just drama’: teen perspectives on conflict and aggression in a networked era,” in Journal of Youth Studies 17, no. 9 (2014): 1187–1204. In It’s Complicated, boyd also spends a considerable amount of time discussing these categorical distinctions, as well as discussing the relationship between social media and adolescent cruelty/meanness. See boyd, It’s Complicated, 128–52.
Chapter 8
1.See Ilana Gershon, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. (Ithica: Cornell University, 2010) for an overview of how social media is affecting the way people experience breaking up.
2.For a look at how being public about one’s relationship on Facebook can affect men’s and women’s levels of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in a relationship, see the article by Lauren M. Papp, Jennifer Danielewicz, and Crystal Cayemberg, “‘Are We Facebook Official?’ Implications of Dating Partners’ Facebook Use and Profiles for Intimate Relationship Satisfaction,” from Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15, no. 2 (2012): 85–90.
3.In her article “The Limits of Friendship,” New Yorker, October 7, 2014, Maria Konnikova discusses how social media is affecting the size of our social circles and the strength of the ties we keep with our “friends.” Konnikova notes that while social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter allow us to connect with and be connected to more people than ever before, without investing in face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones.
Chapter 9
1.Many critics argue that mobile dating apps are changing (in a negative way) the very fabric of how we engage in courtship and develop intimate relationships. In Vanity Fair, journalist Nancy Jo Sales discusses how hookup culture has collided with mobile dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, Clover, and How About We, which, she argues, are transforming how we (and especially young people) meet, develop relationships, and have sex. Tinder executives did not respond well to the article, unleashing a thirty-tweet rant in which they criticized Sales for not touching on the positive experiences the majority of the app’s users have on a daily basis. Some critics view mobile dating apps in a more positive light, however, arguing that in addition to making hooking up easier, they have also leveled the playing field and that, for women, because of the ability to prescreen potential suitors, hooking up in the digital age is the safest and most liberating it’s ever been. Regardless of one’s take on these mobile dating apps, their popularity cannot be denied. Tinder, for instance, processes more than one billion swipes and matches approximately twelve million people each day. See Peggy Drexler, “Millennial Women Are Taking a Laissez-Faire Approach to Romance,” Huffington Post, January 30, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peggy-drexler/-millennial-women-are-tak_b_6578116.html; Molly Wood, “Led by Tinder, a Surge in Mobile Dating Apps,” New York Times, February 4, 2015; Nancy Jo Sales, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’” Vanity Fair, September 2015; and Charles Riley and Hope King, “Tinder Says It ‘Overreacted’ to Vanity Fair Story with 30-Tweet Rant,” CNN Money, August 12, 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/12/media/tinder-vanity-fair-twitter/index.html.
2.I write extensively about the nature of hookups, sex, and dating on college campuses in Donna Freitas, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America’s College Campuses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and also The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused about Intimacy (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
3.In Sexting: Gender and Teens (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015), Judith Davidson provides a close-up look into the intimate and gendered world of teens and those who live with and work with them. Drawing on interviews with teens, parents, and caregivers, Davidson explores the new digital world that is still permeated by the beliefs and patterns of earlier patriarchal structures. Davidson’s findings reveal that there are significant gendered differences among both teens and adults in their perspectives on sexting. Also, as reported in their article “Prevalence and Characteristics of Youth Sexting: A National Study,” Pediatrics 129, no. 1 (2012): 11–20, Kimberly J. Mitchell and colleagues conducted a cross-sectional national telephone survey of 1,560 youth Internet users aged ten to seventeen to determine their level of engagement with sexting. Their data revealed that 2.5 percent of youth had appeared in or created nude or nearly nude pictures or videos; however, when restricted to sexually explicit images, only 1.0 percent of respondents had engaged in this behavior. Of those surveyed, 7.1 percent stated they had received nude or nearly nude images of others, while 5.9 percent reported receiving sexually explicit images. In another survey, Donald S. Strassberg and colleagues interviewed 606 high school students and found that nearly 20 percent of respondents had sent a sexually explicit image of themselves via cell phone, and nearly twice as many had received such a photo from someone else. Of those who had received a sexually explicit photo, more than 25 percent had forwarded the photo to others. Nearly a third of students who had sent a sext did so despite believing there could be serious legal and other consequences attached to their actions. See Donald S. Strassberg et al., “Sexting by High School Students: An Exploratory a
nd Descriptive Study,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 42, no. 1 (2013): 15–21. Also, results from a Pew Research Center survey of youth aged twelve to seventeen conducted in 2009 showed that 4 percent of cell phone–owning teenagers have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else via text messaging, while 15 percent indicated that they have received such images from others. These percentages increase for older teens, with 8 percent of seventeen-year-olds sending such images and 30 percent having received sexually suggestive images. Teens who pay their own phone bills are nearly six times as likely to send sexually suggestive images as those teens who do not pay for or pay only a portion of their cell phone bill. Focus groups also revealed three main scenarios for sexting: (1) exchange of images solely between two romantic partners, (2) exchanges between partners that are shared with others outside the relationship, and (3) exchanges between people who are not yet in a relationship but where at least one person hopes to be. See Amanda Lenhart, “Teens and Sexting: How and Why Minor Teens Are Sending Sexually Suggestive Nude or Nearly Nude Images via Text Messaging,” Pew Internet & American Life Project (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2009). And finally, Michelle Drouin and Carly Landgraff surveyed 744 college students regarding how texting and sexting impacted attachment in their romantic relationships. Results showed that texting and sexting are relatively common in young adult romantic relationships, and texting and sexting are both significantly related to attachment style. Texting was more common among those with secure attachments, while sexting was more common among those with insecure attachments. For those exhibiting attachment avoidance, men were more likely than women to send sexts to their relationship partners. See Michelle Drouin and Carly Landgraff, “Texting, Sexting, and Attachment in College Students’ Romantic Relationships,” Computers in Human Behavior 28, no. 2 (2012): 444–449.
Chapter 10
1.That smartphones and the ease with which they connect us to social media is affecting college students’ study habits is not surprising. In “Distractions, Distractions: Does Instant Messaging Affect College Students’ Performance on a Concurrent Reading Comprehension Task?,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 12, no. 1 (2009): 51–53, Annie Beth Fox, Jonathan Rosen, and Mary Crawford show that students who instant-messaged while performing a reading comprehension task took significantly longer to complete the task than students who completed the reading comprehension assignment uninterrupted. Additional analyses also showed that the more time participants reported spending instant-messaging, the lower their reading comprehension scores and the lower their self-reported GPA. Also, in their article “Does Multitasking with Mobile Phones Affect Learning? A Review,” Computers in Human Behavior 54 (2006): 34–42, Quan Chen and Zheng Yan show that mobile phone multitasking is prevalent among students. Moreover, this multitasking proves to be a distraction to learning in various ways. Chen and Zheng look at both how and why it impairs learning and offer suggestions for how to prevent mobile phone distraction.
2.And, as everyone knows by know, staring at one’s smartphone in the middle of the night is about the worst thing we can do as far as getting our rest goes. In “How Smartphones Hurt Sleep,” Atlantic, February 24, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/how-smartphones-are-ruining-our-sleep/385792/, Olga Khazan discusses how, although smartphones may make our lives better in various ways, one way they may be hurting us is in the realm of sleep. Khazan points to a 2012 Time/Qualcomm poll of 4,700 individuals in seven countries, which showed that younger people were more likely to say that they don’t sleep as well because they are connected to technology all the time. This could be due in part to the fact that smartphones and tablets emit blue light, which communicates to the brain that it’s morning, whereas red light signals that it is time to sleep.
3.In “Millennials LOVE Their Smartphones: Deal with It,” USA Today, September 27, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/09/27/millennials-love-smartphones-mobile-study/16192777/, Lisa Kiplinger reports on a study by Zogby Analytics that found almost 90 percent of Millennials say their phones never leave their sides. For 80 percent of Millennials, the first thing they do when the wake up in the morning is reach for their smartphones, while 78 percent spend more than two hours per day texting, tweeting, talking, and searching online. Moreover, 47 percent of Millennials access businesses via their smartphones at least once a day, and 14 percent say they would not even do business with a company that doesn’t have a mobile site or app.
4.That is 5% (31) out of a total of 608 students who chose to answer this optional question.
5.Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 53.
Chapter 11
1.Students are not alone in quitting (often temporarily). It seems to be becoming a wider trend among all social media users. In her articles “Why I’m Quitting Social Media for 30 Days,” Huffington Post, January 1, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-turgeon/quit-social-media_b_4519567.html, and “I Quit Social Media (and I Don’t Miss It Yet),” Huffington Post, January 23, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-turgeon/quit-social-media_b_4655024.html, Jordan K. Turgeon discusses why she decided to quit social media and what she has learned from the experience. After a few weeks away from social media, like many of the students who participated in this study, Turgeon notes that the experience has been an enjoyable one—her stress levels have dropped, she has more time for other things, and she is sleeping better. In his article “The Anti-social Network: Users Are ‘Detoxing’ from Facebook, Twitter,” MarketWatch, August 1, 2015, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-anti-social-network-users-are-detoxing-from-facebook-twitter-2015-07-29?link=MW_home_latest_news, Charles Passy discusses the growing trend of people forgoing social media for the short or long term, noting that there is now a “National Day of Unplugging,” a digital detox camp for adults, and in 2014 upwards of 16 percent of individuals who observed Lent planned to give up sites like Facebook and Twitter. Passy states that many users are beginning to see social media as a distraction that keeps them from going about the business of their day, while others see it as a toxic environment that creates feelings of envy and resentment. In “Swear Off Social Media, for Good or Just for Now,” New York Times, July 2, 2014, Molly Wood discusses the different ways that one can “go dark” on social media, including deactivating or deleting accounts, as well as using apps like Xpire, DLTTR, and TweetDelete to limit one’s digital presence. Wood notes that people who are choosing to abstain from social media often do so because they feel it is addictive, invasive, manipulative, and a distraction from more important tasks. Also, in “I’m Quitting Social Media to Learn What I Really Like,” Wired, August 2, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/08/im-quitting-social-media-learn-actually-like/, Jessi Hempel discusses the pros and cons of how social media affects our day-to-day lives. Hempel notes that people are now engaging in digital detoxes, smartphone-free summer camps, and Facebook cleanses, citing as reasons the connection between social media use and anxiety, links between social media use and episodes of depression, and even legitimate questions about social media’s impact on our brains.
2.A total of 295 students chose to answer this essay question.
3.In her article “Behind the ‘Unlikes’: Understanding Why People Quit Facebook,” Time, September 19, 2013, http://healthland.time.com/2013/09/19/behind-the-unlikes-understanding-why-people-quit-facebook/, Maia Szalavitz discusses a study by Austrian researchers who looked into why people choose to quit the social networking site Facebook. Their data showed that roughly half of those who left the site did so because of fears about privacy and ethical concerns about how their personal data would be used; others quit because they feared they were becoming addicted to the site. Szalavitz also mentions other studies that point to links between social media usage and low self-esteem, increases in depression, and FOMO, all of which can also cause people to shut down their social media accounts. Also, in “Why
Facebook Makes You Feel Bad about Yourself,” Time, January 24, 2013, http://healthland.time.com/2013/01/24/why-facebook-makes-you-feel-bad-about-yourself/, Alexandra Sifferlin discusses a study conducted by German researchers which showed that one in three people who visited Facebook felt worse after spending time on the site. This was especially true of visitors who viewed other people’s vacation photos while on the site and of those who did not post any content of their own while on the site. The researchers also found that some of these dissatisfied people ended up reducing their use of the site, whereas others left it altogether. The most common causes of frustration and dissatisfaction for users came from comparing themselves socially to their peers and from having fewer comments and likes and less general feedback than their friends.
4.A total of 412 students chose to answer this optional essay question.
5.This reminds me of how college students are learning to prize ambivalence with regard to sex and their partners within hookup culture. I write about this extensively in The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused about Intimacy (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
Conclusion
1.The idea that the Facebooks and Instagrams of today are like the grand new boulevards of still nascent modern cities came from a serendipitously timed reading of Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982), and in particular, his chapter “Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets,” pp. 131–171.
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