The Imaginationless Generation : Lessons from Ancient Culture on Regulating New Media [1 ed.] 9789004398887, 9789004398870

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The Imaginationless Generation

The Imaginationless Generation Lessons from Ancient Culture on Regulating New Media

By

Nachshon Goltz and Tracey Dowdeswell

leiden | boston

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-39886-3 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-39887-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-39888-7 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To our loving families, and especially our mothers —wherever they may be

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Contents

Preface ix Introduction xi 1 Children and Challenges of New Media 1 Introduction: New Media Old Problems 1 The Media Diet 2 Bringing It All Together: Culture, Values & Moral Development 19 2 Understanding the Laws of Media Engagement 29 What Are the Laws of Media Engagement? 29 Introduction to Media Engagement 30 The Five Laws of Media Engagement 35 3 The Imaginationless Generation 48 Introduction 48 The Imagination 50 The Visualization Hypothesis 60 Conclusion 63 4 Internet Regulation: Could and Should the Internet Be Regulated? 70 Introduction: A Need for Internet Regulation? 70 Internet Infrastructure 73 Control of the Internet 74 Conclusion 82 5 Freedom of Speech and Online Harm to Children 91 Introduction 91 Canadian Law: Irwin Toy v. Québec 91 U.S. First Amendment Jurisprudence: Brown v. Entertainment 97 Conclusion 103 6 Parental Regulation 112 Introduction 112 Parents, Children and Media in the Home 113 Parental Mediation Styles 121 Conclusion 124

viii 7 The Cultural Regulation of Technology 132 Introduction: Technology and Spirituality 132 The Tower and the Image 133 Technology’s Commandments 135 8 Conclusion: Coming down from the Tower 148 References 151 Index 182

Contents

Preface The publication of this book is the culmination of a journey that began a quarter of a century ago when the first of the authors, Nachshon (Sean) Goltz, happened to undertake an unplanned ‘experiment’ on the effects of media. Sean spent the better part of a year sitting on a couch and carving wood, while avoiding all media, save only the radio—which he listened to every day, for most of the day. At the end of that year, Sean exposed himself to the very worst of cable TV—including the shopping channel—which he watched every day, for most of the day. This went on for several weeks, until Sean experienced an epiphany. He stood up, turned his back on the TV, and crossed into the other room where he wrote down the Five Laws of Media Engagement, much as they appear here in this book. As Sean wrote, he felt as if a higher power was dictating the words to him. Not long after, he described to me how he was riding on a bus, his thoughts so immersed in understanding the media laws that time itself slipped away, seemingly standing still. This enabled Sean to connect our subjective experiences of time with the ways that different media manipulate this. “I was so excited by this understanding that I immediately wanted to share the knowledge with others,” he explained, “I assumed that advertising agencies, dealing with the media, would be the natural audience. I faxed a one page description of theory to several advertising agencies.” Needless to say, none of them ever got back! Yet the Five Laws light a torch that led to many years of research for Sean, first a Master’s thesis and later a PhD dissertation at Osgoode Hall Law School, in which he explored the regulation of children’s video games and virtual worlds— focusing on the ways in which these media hamper children’s cognitive and imaginative development. Nevertheless, it was always a challenge to explain these ideas to others. There is a strong resistance in many quarters to any talk of how media can be harmful, even to young children. Being primarily a legal scholar, Sean was also a disciplinary ‘stranger’ to the field of media ecology. An expression of their resistance was delivered in the cold welcome he received on the Media Ecology Association list serve hosting hundreds of scholars in the field. There were many scholars who did not want to take on board new ideas, or tackle new problems, or disrupt their disciplinary comfort zone. But not me. When I first heard Sean’s ideas I knew that modern media was like junk food for children’s minds, but I also knew that the evidence exploring this topic was highly controversial. I heard the oft-repeated arguments from other scholars, “Haven’t people always said that any new media is harmful for children? Didn’t we say the same thing about Saturday morning cartoons?

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About the first motion pictures? About reading comic books in the early 20th century—or novels in the 18th?” Yes, of course, concerns have been raised about any new medium, and usually with some justification given the depth of changes that are wrought: new communications technologies change our culture, our values, our style and form of education. This is why they always require thoughtful and purposeful adaptation. This is the genesis for the ideas we present here. I was happy to come on board, and use my experience with scientific research to make the case that new media harms children—particularly the kind of harms that we call here ‘virtual’ or ‘intangible’—these are the harms done to children’s lifestyles, to the values and habits that media consumption cultivates, and how these shape the broader culture. And there is a case to be made that these are wholly novel challenges, that we are witnessing the introduction of media that subject us to psychological conditions we have never before experienced: video games and virtual words, fully immersive virtual and augmented reality, humanbrain interfaces, biohacking and Artificial Intelligence. It is impossible to underestimate the depth of the change these new technologies bring to our fundamental social systems: childhood, education, socialization, family life, economic participation, as well as regulation and the laws that govern these domains. In light of these new technologies, it is time to change our ideas about regulation. As in many other fields, new technology is forcing us to think differently as regulators and legal scholars, to look deeper into the conventions adopted in the field of regulation and move beyond prohibitive and commandcontrol-style approaches and towards relational and values-based approaches that see regulation as part of a vibrant cultural sphere. It is not a question of choice, but one of necessity. Failing to adapt, to employ creativity and innovation in the construction of new regulation for new technologies could have serious consequences for the coming phase of human adjustment they will bring about. At stake is what values we will hold, our notions of humanity and personhood—as well as our creativity, our imagination, and along with them our very ability to adapt to the coming changes.

Introduction Up until a few generations ago, children learned about the world around and beyond them—about their culture and people, about their imaginative and spiritual life—through direct personal experiences. They learned about their culture and history through tales, rituals, stories and advice as told by family members and wise elders. Children learned about their surroundings through exploring—touching, smelling, being outdoors, taking care of animals—all of which provided them valuable material for a generative and creative childhood imagination. Children were socialized through “the immediate experiences of their senses in a setting limited to the people of tribe and family, the livestock, wild animals, and physical characteristics of a narrow milieu.”1 This is how human culture has hitherto been built up and handed down. Each successive media technology has altered this primordial landscape. New media are not adopted in a vacuum, but are layered on top of the older media; they coexist with and are informed by the older forms of communication, cultural values, and social practices, even as they alter them.2 The adoption of the written word, beginning in the late forth millennium B.C.E.,3 changed how we communicate—allowing information to be stored and disseminated, but also eroding memory and oral culture.4 The invention of the printing press brought about a long revolution in reading, in books and education, one that allowed the majority of the world’s people to become literate only as recently the years following World War II.5 After the First World War, the widespread adoption of the first non-print media in the form of radio and cinema brought forth a whole new experience of popular culture and mass media.6 Information, entertainment, news, popular culture, were now disseminated with a ubiquity and a rapidity never before seen. Media came into our very homes, and became available around the clock. Television became a central focus of home life, and it changed our familial and social relationships—largely by diminishing them.7 We had barely begun to deal with the changes wrought by these media experiences when ‘new media’—the Internet, video games, virtual reality and social media—burst onto the scene. Children are routinely exposed to new media from birth, and they will grow up before we have time to reason through all the ways in which it impacts them. If this were an experiment, it would be one of colossal proportions: an experiment on connecting, monitoring, disseminating and controlling information, under conditions that humans have never before experienced. We do not know how this will affect children’s cognitive, social, emotional, and creative development, and the ways in which this will shape the human cultures of the future.8

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It is not only the nature of the changes that require our consideration, but also the sheer pace of the technological change. Internet users worldwide have grown at a speed that is unprecedented for any media platform to come before.9 The Internet and new media have now taken up a majority of our time, transforming our daily habits, exposing us to a new set of values, and displacing other activities. For the first time ever, American adults are spending eleven hours per day interacting with media—a clear majority of their waking hours.10 The situation is similar for children. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation on the role of media in the lives of children and youth tells us that 8- to 10-year-olds are exposed to media for almost eight hours a day, 11to 14-year-olds for nearly 12 hours a day, and 15- to 18-year-olds for about elevenand-a-half hours per day.11 The media children are using include television, music players, computers, and video games, with TV continuing to be the most-used medium across all age groups.12 People of all ages are playing video games on average a little over an hour per day.13 The authors found that the use of media was increasing, and that children aged eight to eighteen “spend more time with media than in any other activity besides (maybe) sleeping[.]”14 Within these broad categories, however, individuals have distinct ‘diets’ such that they are engaged in very different activities with their media time.15 Media exposure works much as our eating habits do—our health is shaped by patterns of use and habits that persist over the long term, with some media diets being associated with much better outcomes than others. After all, children use the Internet for a whole host of reasons, many of which are good ones: to learn about computers, to find information, to do homework, to explore hobbies and topics of interest, as well as for entertainment, games, and for social purposes—including connecting with loved-ones and making new friends.16 Computer use in the home is strongly linked to the educational and socioeconomic status of the parents, and many parents purchase computers for the purpose of better educating their children. The evidence shows that Internet use at home is indeed primarily for school and education.17 The Internet, being a repository for knowledge, contains plenty of beneficial content for learning and entertainment—books, videos, news—as well as violent, sexual, hateful, and other undesirable content. The bulk of human knowledge is either found online, or is indexed somewhere online.18 Not all Internet use is beneficial for child development. When it comes to screen time, about 39% of screen time is passive—watching or listening—while 26% is used for communicating.19 About 25% of screen time is taken up by interactive consumption, which includes such activities as browsing the Internet or playing games.20 Only 3% of screen time is classed as ‘creative,’ including activities such as writing, making digital art or music, or programming.21 This has significant impacts on the development of children’s imagination.

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In Chapter 1 we review the recent literature on the challenges that the Internet and new media pose for child development. Many of these harms are not direct ones; they do not work, for example, in the direct way that benzene causes cancer. Instead, they affect children’s emotional, social, and cognitive development in subtle ways that change long-term habits, orientations, and values in undesirable ways. These we term ‘virtual’ and ‘intangible’ harms. We discuss the ways in which violent content can harm children’s emotional development by promoting aggression and desensitizing children to real-world aggression. A constant barrage of advertising subjects children to worrying forms of manipulation, while promoting materialism and indoctrinating them into ‘brand’ culture and a life of surveillance. Much of this media manipulation is designed to promote unhealthy foods and habits, and to encourage lifestyles that are sedentary, unreflective, and uncreative. The Internet, particularly video games and virtual-world games like World of Warcraft and Fortnite, can result in what the DSM-V now terms Internet Addiction Disorder.22 Social media subject children to bullying, harassment, and exploitation—with the difference that a child bullied on the Internet is exposed to a much wider audience and confronted with defamatory material that is seemingly ineradicable. Children’s cognitive development can be impaired by the overuse of the Internet, while beneficial activities such as sleeping, reading, and exercising, are displaced. In Chapter 2 we introduce what we term the ‘Laws of Media Engagement,’ which provide a framework for understanding the effects of the Internet and new media. Media that is more immersive and interactive affects us more, while new media is especially adept at co-opting our perceptions to control what messages we receive, for how long we use the medium, and how hard it is to stop using. New media also shapes the kinds of information we understand to be ‘true’ and ‘reliable.’ One aspect of the Internet and new communication technologies is that it becomes exceedingly difficult for the user to perceive and thus to modulate the media’s effects. Much of the intangible harms of new media arise from this combination of manipulation and the lack of critical self-reflection with which we approach new media. Chapter 3 introduces the ‘imaginationless generation.’ Here, we describe the ways in which new media stifle and weaken their users’ imaginations. This is an entirely novel condition, one to which children have never before been exposed. Continuous exposure to imagination-suppressing media now begins at the very youngest ages. We argue that this can pose longterm consequences for the development of children’s creativity and creative imagination. In a world increasingly dominated by algorithmic thinking and artificial intelligence, we are encouraged to develop our essential ‘human’ qualities—like emotional intelligence and imaginative problem-solving—to help us compete in a marketplace dominated by Artificial Intelligence.23 But

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the Internet and new media sap precisely these emotional and creative aspects of our intellect. When the technocracy privileges artificial over human forms of intelligence, it risks turning us all into robots. In Chapter 4 we begin to address the issue of Internet regulation. Using regulation in its broadest definition, as that which ‘steers human behavior,’ we describe the present architecture of the Internet and traditional forms of legal, ‘command and control’ styles of regulation and discuss their limitations. We also look at technological forms of regulation, such as regulation by code, which is embedded directly in the technologies themselves as well as the popular filtering and blocking methods of content control. These forms of techno-regulation are imperfect and, paradoxically, they encourage us to trust filtered content all the more since it leads us to assume that the material we see has been vetted and approved. These forms of legal and technical commandcontrol lend many of their greatest benefits to authoritarian governments, and consequently pose some of the greatest threats to individuals and our rights and freedoms. Chapter 5 picks up this discussion, focusing specifically on freedom of expression. We examine some of the leading cases in Canada and the U.S. in which courts have ruled on the constitutionality of regulations that protect children from harmful media content. There is no magic solution to these challenges, nor do we believe that forced intervention or prohibition by any authority—whether it be the government, media corporations, police or parents—will ultimately be effective in moderating the harms of media consumption. In dealing with the subtle, psychological, and social harms of Internet use there is little place for command and control-style regulation. Compliance in this environment is increasingly contested, and punishment is often an incentive rather than a deterrence. Chapter 6 focuses on the regulation of children’s Internet use at home by parents, discussing the strategies parents use, what works, and how parents and families can be better supported in their quest to moderate children’s Internet use. Parental regulation has the potential to be more effective than either legal or technological forms of regulation for a number of reasons. Children learn best from role models, through modelling, imitation, and reinforcement. Parents’ media use, what they do and what habits they cultivate in the home on a day-to-day basis, is perhaps the biggest factor in the development of children’s own media habits.24 Unlike legal and technological regulation, parental regulation is a personal, immediate, culturally-sensitive, and valuesbased form of regulation.25 Parents are best placed to establish appropriate rules and guidelines for media use. They are the best teachers for their children about their family’s values, beliefs, and cultural practices, and how to interpret the images children see in the media.26

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The evidence shows that children who are most likely to suffer harms from media use are those whose well-being is suffering in other areas, as well. Children who experience psychological and socioeconomic deficits, including family breakdown, abuse or substance addiction, are also more likely to suffer the more serious harms of Internet use, such as addiction, bullying, and exploitation. The converse is also true: children and young people with high levels of well-being, who have strong familial and social relationships, who are doing well in school and participating in extra-curricular activities, have relatively few problems with their media use.27 As Hogan states, “for most children, living in a loving home with consistent messages, fair discipline, and strong attachments between family members lessens the potentially harmful effects of media.”28 Even online, what harms children is what has always harmed them, and what protects them from harm is what has always benefited them: close attachments, loving families, supportive communities, a good education, strong values, resilience and a sense of self. These relations and values are precisely the ones that are eroded by new media. While parents need more information and support to improve their regulation of children’s Internet use, what is most needed is a commitment to the well-being of children and families overall. In this book we argue that the best approaches are those that are personal, particular, and that focus on human relationships and individual well-being. The challenges of new media play out in the realms of identity, values, morality, culture, spirituality, and they will be solved there, as well. Accordingly, we have devoted Chapter 7 to a discussion of how ancient cultures can help us understand the challenges posed by new media. The problem of how to construct a successful culture, to cultivate productive values, and to socialize children have been solved many times over by successive human cultures: indeed, solving these problems is one of the main purposes for which human culture and its varied tools of communication were designed. Here, we focus on one example that we have drawn from our own culture, the ancient story of the Tower of Babel and its explication through Rabbinical Midrash. At base, this story is about relationships—with God as well as one another—as well as how communication affects cultural reproduction and political organization. Although this story will be most familiar to Jewish and Christian readers of the Bible, we aim to encourage reflection among all our readers on the ways in which their own customary myths and stories can inform these issues. In this book, our goal is to offer up a much-neglected discussion of the intangible harms of Internet use, and to explore a multi-disciplinary approach to the protection of children in the virtual world. We aim to build a bridge between the diverse fields that study children’s Internet use, including child development, social sciences, communication studies/media ecology, as well

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as law and regulation. We use the Laws of Media Engagement as an anchor to explore this complex and loaded discussion, striving to understand the media from multiple facets and thus draw lessons about effective regulation. Our ultimate aspiration is to be able to tell those students, academics, educators and parents reading this book that we have done our best to try and answer one question: how to protect children from the varied and intangible challenges they face in the virtual world. In this book, we find the most difficult challenges of all are the ones on the cultural front. These force us to ask what will become of a generation of children raised on a steady diet of digital media with its barrage of advertisements, its promotion of consumerism, violence and hostility, and its dumbing-down of intellectual exchange and civic life. The Internet and social media have reduced individuality to narcissistic identity performance, and the individual has become a mere substrate to be acted upon by the ambitions of others—to be manipulated for sales, exploited for sex, nudged for votes, and mined for data. In this book we ask what kind of adults will these children raised in this environment grow up to be? What values will they hold? What kind of culture will they create?

Notes 1 Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, “Introduction: Why a Handbook for Children and the Media?” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2000), xi. 2 Haejung Paik, “The History of Children’s Use of Electronic Media,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2000), 8. 3 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Spinoza, “Literacy,” Our World in Data (2013, rev. 2018), https://ourworldindata.org/literacy. 4 Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How it Works, and What it Can Do (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 51. 5 Roser, “Literacy.” 6 Singer, “Why a Handbook,” xiii. 7 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 8 Singer, “Why a Handbook,” xii. 9 Patti M. Valkenberg, Children’s Responses to the Screen: A Media Psychological Approach (London: Erlbaum, 2004), 117. 10 Fottrell, Quentin, “People Spend Most of Their Waking Hours Staring at Screens,” MarketWatch, August 4, 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/people-arespending-most-of-their-waking-hours-staring-at-screens-2018-08-01.

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11 Victoria J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010), 5. 12 Rideout, Generation M2, 5. 13 Rideout, Generation M2, 5. 14 Rideout, Generation M2, 1. 15 Common Sense, The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Teens and Tweens (San Francisco: Common Sense Media, 2015), 13. 16 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 118. 17 Paik, “History of Children’s Media,” 19. 18 Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia Greenfield, “Digital Media and Youth: Games, Internet and Development,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2012), 86–7. 19 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 16. 20 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 16. 21 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 16. 22 Groves, Christopher L., Jorge A. Blanco-Herrera, Sara Prot, Olivia N. Berch, Shea McCowen, and Douglas A. Gentile, “What is Known About Video Game and Internet Addiction After DSM-5,” in The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society, ed. Larry D. Rosen (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons), 502. 23 Natalie Rens and Juxi Leitner, “A Survival Guide for the Coming AI Revolution,” The Conversation, March 2, 2017, https://theconversation.com/a-survival-guide-for-thecoming-ai-revolution-72974. 24 Marjorie J. Hogan, “Parents and Other Adults: Models and Monitors of Healthy Media Habits,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2000), 671. 25 Hogan, “Parents and Other Adults,” 663. 26 Hogan, “Parents and Other Adults,” 664. 27 Steven J. M. Kirsh, Children, Adolescents, and Media Violence: A Critical Look at the Evidence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 14 of Chapter 12. 28 Hogan, “Parents and Other Adults,” 678.

CHAPTER 1

Children and the Challenges of New Media Introduction: New Media, Old Problems New technologies of communication have always been socially and culturally disruptive. As such, they have long been the subject of criticisms and calls to mitigate the harms that technological change poses for the existing order. Children have often been the focus of these concerns. Since the ready availability of pulp novels and ‘penny dreadfuls’ in the nineteenth century, adults have warned of the perils that new media pose for impressionable young minds.1 Going farther back, Socrates was concerned about the increasing literacy of his time; he feared that reliance on the written word would erode people’s memories.2 To a certain extent, of course, this turned out to be true. As with the cultural tussles that surround any new medium, where we have gained, so have we lost. The disruptions brought about by new media bring some benefits and pose some challenges, and they always usher in significant changes that require our thoughtful adaptation and acculturation to the new media. This chapter will review contemporary research into some of the challenges that new media pose for child development. Children’s health can be harmed by media that promote unhealthy food choices, that encourage sedentary behaviour, and that normalize the use of cigarettes and alcohol as well as illegal and prescription drugs. Children’s psychological well-being is challenged through violent media that cause aggression and hostility. New communication platforms facilitate addictive and compulsive behaviors, including problematic Internet use and gaming. Social media use has been linked with lower self-esteem, as well as cyberbullying, harassment, and sexual exploitation. Children’s intellectual and cognitive development can be impaired, particularly through the exposure of very young children to a steady diet of electronic devices and digital media. Some of these effects are already manifest in less reading, lower reading proficiency, and reduced knowledge of current events. All of these challenges have a greater impact on children who are already marginalized, and who possess psycho-social deficits in other areas of their lives. The children who are the most vulnerable have poor quality relationships with their family, low socio-economic status, low self-esteem, and have experienced abuse, anxiety, and mental illness. Fortunately, there are conditions that help to protect children from the worst effects of new media. The factors that protect children are those that © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004398887_001

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have always protected them—close attachments, loving families, supportive communities and schools, resilience, strong values, and a sense of self. This is why we assert that the challenges posed by new media will be solved with old approaches. We believe that the best approaches are those that are local, personal, and that focus on good interpersonal relations and individual wellbeing. The challenges of new media play out in the realms of identity, values, morality, culture, spirituality, and they will be solved there, as well.

The Media Diet Are new media all bad? Are there benefits to new communication technologies, games, the Internet? We believe that there are and this fact—combined with the central role that these technologies now play in modern society, culturally, politically, and economically—means that bans, regulations, and untailored top-down approaches are less likely to be effective in helping children navigate the landscape of new media. The American Academy of Pediatrics states that “important and positive prosocial effects of media use should also be recognized,” including enhanced knowledge, connectedness, and access to health information.3 Some of the prime uses of the Internet in homes today include completing school assignments, gaining information, accessing knowledge, and reading the news.4 Indeed, the Internet is a repository for the bulk of human knowledge, including all of the studies and information presented here. People, children not excepted, will always seek out entertainment; it comes as no surprise that the Internet will be used for this as well. Stories will be told, music will be heard, and games will be played, and digital technologies are going to be a key platform for these activities for the foreseeable future. This is why we take a public health approach to media effects. The evidence tells us that the ill effects of media consumption work in ways that are similar to the ill effects of consuming food, cigarettes, carcinogens, and other environmental hazards. Therefore, we adopt the concept of the ‘media diet.’ What matters most is our long-term patterns of behaviour, the habits and values we cultivate over time, and how both harmful and helpful effects accumulate over the longue durée. Understanding Media Effects Research It is important to state at the outset that research concerning media effects in general, and children in particular, is highly contested and controversial. We present the research below with a full recognition of this. Part of

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figure 1.1 Growth of online advertising revenue in the United States, 2000–2017. Source: Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/275883/onlineadvertising-revenue-in-the-us-by-half-year/

the reason for this controversy is that media effects research poses a challenge to the lucrative business models that digital technologies have created; another part of the reason is the complexities and ambiguities inherent in social science research itself, a full discussion of which is outside the scope of this chapter. Online advertising revenues have grown dramatically in the past decade. Figure 1.1 shows that online advertising revenues in the United States have grown 10-fold since 2000, to reach nearly $25 billion per quarter. Some of the key spenders are tech behemoths like Facebook, Google and Apple, entertainment companies—especially those who cater to children, such as Disney, Mattel, Nickelodeon, Lego—as well as food companies, who devote a large segment of their advertising to children. Children are also targeted by advertisements for cigarettes and alcohol, as well as pharmaceuticals. Companies benefit from targeting children and gaining positive feelings for their brands early in life. The interests involved here constitute a significant portion of the modern economy. It comes as no surprise then, that “Big Media derides critics and commonly suggests that media ‘effects research’ is flawed and that media harm no one.”5 Social sciences research into media effects is complex and can be difficult for laypersons to interpret. There are a number of different studies used to demonstrate media effects, each with its own strengths and limitations. Laboratory experiments can control for outside variables, and establish short-term causal relationships. It can be difficult, however, to extrapolate from laboratory results to complex behavior outside the laboratory; in order to examine

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relationships between various factors in the real world, we use surveys and longitudinal studies.6 Surveys ask a series of questions, and statistics are then used to check for correlations between different factors. Longitudinal studies follow a group of children over the long-term, often over several decades, and in this way they can show a relationship between exposure to a factor as a child, and how this affects them as an adult.7 Causal-correlational studies are longitudinal studies that go beyond this, as they attempt to control for different variables to see if there is an actual causal relationship between them.8 It is impossible, however, to perfectly control for variables outside of the laboratory. Also, when we look to see the effects of some variables, we necessarily exclude others. Longitudinal studies present an evolving picture of how complex relationships unfold over time, rather than a simplistic picture of cause and effect, and they should be used for this purpose. Another inherent limitation of laboratory experiments is that children will behave differently in the laboratory than they will in ‘real life’ situations.9 Kirsh notes that children’s aggression plays out differently in a laboratory setting, stating “not only is the nature of aggression different between laboratory, home, and other real-world settings, but the amount and nature of media violence exposure is different as well.”10 Media violence that is consumed as a matter of preference may have quite different effects than media that is exposed to a child in the lab, for a short time, and that is not of their own choosing.11 Ethical concerns prevent many types of experiments that might otherwise yield good answers to valid research questions. We cannot, of course, randomly select cohorts of children, expose some of them to extreme media violence over a number of years, and then look to see if they grow up to commit more violent crimes, suffer from higher rates of obesity, or experience greater rates of conduct disorder or depression.12 To answer these questions, we must look to longitudinal studies that looks at past behavior—and because they are so expensive, time-consuming and difficult to perform, there are relatively few of them. Methodological limitations, therefore, are inherent in each study, and the full picture is obtained only by piecing the results from a variety of studies together.13 This is what is social scientists refer to as ‘triangulation.’ As Bushman describes, “each research method has its unique strengths and weaknesses, yet across the different methods there is a convergence of evidence. Scientists call this convergence triangulation.”14 Since all studies have limitations, all studies need to be interpreted so as to determine just what we can conclude from them, or how we might extrapolate the results beyond the lab or the confines of the study, or how we might apply those results to different groups.15

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When it comes to media effects, McCannon reminds us that the nature and purpose of all media is precisely to have an effect on us. He states, “all communication is media. Media are always propaganda; that is, they are constructed by someone with a point of view, using techniques of persuasion.”16 We are all vulnerable to being shaped and suaded by these techniques. After all, that is what they are for. Violent Content Violent Content Causes Harm to Young Viewers The triangulation of a variety of research studies does indeed show that viewing violent content has adverse effects on children. One notable critique is given by the authors of Grand Theft Childhood, who deny a direct and simplistic relationship between violent video games and violent behavior, but who agree that some children are clearly at greater risk.17 As Kutner and Olson state: For most kids and most parents, the bottom-line results of our research can be summed up in a single word: relax. While concerns about the effects of violent videogames are understandable, they’re basically no different from the unfounded concerns previous generations had about the new media of their day. Remember, we’re a remarkably resilient species.18 These are comforting words, and while we would agree that few children are going to be seriously harmed by violent video games—mainly because few children consume large amounts of video game violence, and even fewer go on to develop behavioral disorders19—this certainly does not mean that no steps need to be taken to counteract the negative effects of media. Bushman states plainly that “over five decades of scientific data lead to the irrefutable conclusion that exposure to violent media increases aggression.”20 The American Academy of Pediatrics in their policy statement on the issue states that the “evidence is now clear and convincing: media violence is 1 of the causal factors of real-life violence and aggression.”21 Bushman also points out that the campaign to discredit media effects research has largely been successful, stating that “most Americans aren’t even aware that the U.S. surgeon general issued a warning about TV violence in 1972. Perhaps this is because most Americans get their information from the mass media, and media officials are reluctant to admit that they are marketing a harmful product[.]”22 The section below describes some of the key studies by which this conclusion was reached.

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Media Violence Promotes Aggression The use of violent media frequently accompanies a variety of other risk factors in a young person’s life: unstable family life, poverty, mental illness, physical and sexual abuse as well as substance use.23 This is also true for the bulk of the harmful effects we discuss in this chapter; a poor media diet goes along with, and in many ways is a consequence of, psycho-social deprivations in a number of areas in the life of a young person. The effects of media violence have been most studied for television and film, but the research indicates that violent video games may have the same negative effects as violent television shows and films.24 The AAP notes that newer forms of interactive media, such as video games and virtual worlds, are less studied than television, yet they may have a greater impact on children’s mental and physical well-being than more traditional forms of media, due to their immersive nature.25 Media violence has been linked with a number of physical and mental health problems in children and youth, including “aggressive and violent behavior, bullying, desensitization to violence, fear, depression, nightmares, and sleep disturbances.”26 One harmful effect that media violence has on children is to increase aggression. Aggression is defined as “any behavior that is intended to harm another person who wants to avoid the harm.”27 Aggressive acts are overt, they are necessarily social, and they are intentional.28 Violence is aggression that is intended to cause significant bodily harm.29 The accumulated research tells us that violence and aggression in the media is indeed a significant contributor to violence and aggression in the real world.30 Aggressive behavior is caused by factors that accumulate over time, in a way that is analogous to the way in which smoking or poor diet, or exposure to industrial chemicals, will accumulate and lead to disease.31 Most, but not all, research reports at least some negative effect in terms of aggression and decreased empathy from playing violent video games.32 As Funk states, “video games are now much more realistic, with much more graphic violence, and many include the option of personalizing the images of game characters.”33 He states that “support continues to grow for the contention that exposure to violent video games is associated with less prosocial behavior in children, including increased aggression and lower empathy.”34 Two significant causal-correlational studies were performed in the early 2000’s, both of which supported a causal relationship between consuming media violence and aggressive behavior.35 In Huesmann et al.’s 2003 study, children who watched high levels of violent TV as children were found to be more aggressive as young adults.36 An earlier study had observed 557 children growing up in Chicago in the 1970s; the present study examined them again 15 years later, when they were in their early 20s.37 Several variables were

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controlled for, such as the child’s IQ, the parent’s viewing habits, and an aggressive home environment.38 The researchers found that the effects of “childhood exposure to media violence last into young adulthood and increase aggressive behavior at that time for both males and females.”39 The aggressive behaviors in adulthood that were examined included physical aggression, spousal abuse, criminal activities, and driving violations.40 Men who were high consumers of TV violence as children were significantly more likely to engage in these behaviors, at three times the rate of other men; for women who were high consumers of media violence, their rate of aggression was four times that of other women.41 The authors conclude that, “both males and females from all social strata and all levels of initial aggressiveness are placed at increased risk for the development of adult aggressive and violent behavior when they view a high steady diet of violent TV shows in early childhood.”42 This effect was found to operate on all types of children and families, not only on those children who are at highest risk.43 The effects are both developmental and cumulative—like diet or smoking. Johnson et al. found that “childhood neglect, growing up in an unsafe neighborhood, low family income, low parental education, and psychiatric disorders were significantly associated with time spent watching television at 14 and with aggressive behavior reported at mean age 16 or 22.”44 In 2002, Johnson et al. published a causal longitudinal study that examined 707 individuals over a period of 17 years to determine whether aggressive children prefer violent media, or whether watching violent media causes aggression.45 This study, published in Science, shows that media violence can increase aggressive behavior,46 and that consuming media violence was often one of many deprivations in a child’s life.47 Meta-analyses also show that media violence is positively associated with aggressive behavior. Valkenburg defines meta-analyses as “studies in which the results of dozens, or even hundreds, of empirical studies are summarized and re-evaluated by means of sophisticated statistical techniques.”48 These surveys show a statistical association between media violence and aggressive behavior.49 One of the largest is the 1994 analysis by Paik et al.50 The most recent meta-analysis was performed by Prescott et al. who examined 24 studies involving 17,000 participants, and found a significant effect of video game violence on aggression; they also addressed some of the key criticisms against this finding, and found that the studies were methodologically sound, and there was no publication bias.51 Since consuming media violence is only one of several risk factors present in a child’s life, we should ask just how large is media violence as a risk factor when compared with these other variables. Kirsh states that in terms of the

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size of its effect, media violence presents a larger risk factor than many other risks we take more seriously: It is worth noting that the effect sizes for media violence and aggression are stronger than the effect sizes for condom use and sexually transmitted HIV, passive smoking and lung cancer at work, exposure to lead and IQ scores in children, nicotine patch and smoking cessation, and calcium intake and bone mass. Only the effect size for smoking and lung cancer was greater than the effect size for media violence and aggression, but that difference was less than 0.10.52 Therefore, the effects of media violence on aggression is similar in magnitude to other public health issues that concern the public.53 Risk and Protective Factors One factor that exacerbates the effects of consuming media violence is the way violence is depicted and interpreted. Not only are children exposed to large amounts of violence from TV, movies, music and video games, but aggressors are often portrayed as heroes whose use of violence is a “justified means of re-solving conflict and prevailing over others.”54 The most significant effects do not stem from the most extreme depictions of violence, but from the violence that is socially approved-of—violence that is realistic, that depicts real life, that seems justified.55 Another category of risk factors involves the characteristics of the child who is consuming the media. Kirsh discusses a number of contributing factors— genetics, temperament, attachment and upbringing, the child’s developmental level, as well as environmental factors such as parenting styles, sibling and peer relationships, and levels of neighborhood violence.56 Kirsh found the four largest risk factors for producing aggression to be peer relationships, gender (i.e. being male), viewing TV and movie violence, and playing violent video games.57 On the other hand, protective factors can reduce the likelihood of children becoming aggressive. Having secure attachments, positive relationships with parents and siblings, achieving developmental goals, and having a “harmonious family dynamic” in which conflicts are resolved without aggression, anger and irritability all contribute to lower levels of aggression.58 Both risk and protective factors tend to work together and reinforce one another.59 Media Violence Causes Desensitization Desensitization theory posits that “repeated exposure to media violence causes a gradual blunting of emotional responses to displays of aggression, both in

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the media and in real life.”60 Children do appear less emotionally affected by real-life depictions of aggression after watching media violence.61 Research has shown that violent media has a conscience-numbing effect, whereby those who “consume a lot of violent media become less sympathetic to victims of violence. They become numb to the pain and suffering of others.”62 This numbing effect reduces the empathy the individual goes on to express in realworld situations.63 A recent experiment performed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison adds to the growing evidence that video game play can be used to train middle school children to develop empathy and perspective-taking, reaffirming that when it comes to media effects the content that children are consuming matters greatly.64 Not All Media Have the Same Effect The research demonstrates that not all types of media have the same effect. Evidence is beginning to accumulate that the more immersive and realistic the medium, the better it teaches—whether this is empathy, flight simulation, or dehumanizing violence.65 At the same time, older media platforms, such as print and comics, have smaller effects. Since at least the 1950s, media critics have raised concerns that violent imagery in comic books damaged youths and promoted delinquency.66 However, the evidence that comics increase aggression in children and youths in the same way that other media do has been lacking, and studies have generally not supported this.67 There have also been concerns whether violent and frightening stories in print media adversely affect children and adolescents. We could not find any research to date on whether violent imagery in print produces aggressive or hostile feelings or behaviors in children and youth. Reading for fun is clearly associated with positive overall outcomes for children,68 and so researchers have not inquired into the content of what young people are reading, to see if some types of content are more harmful or more beneficial than others. An imagination filled with fearful or violent imagery may not be the best kind to cultivate, but to date there is little evidence that print media is associated with any harm.69 Similar claims have been made regarding aggressive, or war-like toys. There is evidence that they do tend to increase aggressive behavior, particularly in boys,70 although these effects operate in the shortterm only.71 Therefore, there appears to be little evidence that toys, books, and comics increase long-term aggression in the same way that violent media and video games do.72 These effects may be explained by the immersive and realistic nature of the media, with more realistic depictions of violence increasing their

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effect. This should lead us to have serious concerns over exposing young people to violence in the emerging virtual reality platforms. Advertising and Marketing Children are especially vulnerable to the effects of advertising.73 This is very concerning, as children are exposed to tens of thousands of advertisements per year from the very youngest age.74 The children’s advertising market is a lucrative one. In the U.S alone children’s advertising has been estimated to be worth at least 15 billion dollars per year; children on the Internet are exposed to a fast-growing global advertising market as well.75 Over the last two decades, children’s influence over family shopping and spending habits has increased.76 Young people influence their parents’ purchasing decisions, and they are receiving spending money of their own from as young as eight years.77 Companies wish to create loyal consumers for life, and children as young as two are able to recognize popular brand identities.78 Children begin to distinguish advertising from non-commercial content after about 5 years of age.79 Children younger than 8 are not able to recognize that commercial advertisements have a persuasive purpose, and that the interests of the advertiser might not be the same as the recipient.80 However, an understanding of the nature and purpose of advertising does not necessarily protect us from its effects; this, after all, is the purpose of advertising.81 Even for adults, advertising is generally effective in inducing product recognition and recall, generating positive feelings about the product, and influencing purchase decisions.82 Children’s websites and online games provide a commercialized and product-rich environment.83 Most websites designed for children promote advertisements, and for about two-thirds of websites this is their main source of revenue.84 Many of the top websites for children are from top media and toy corporations: Nickelodeon, Disney, Mattel, Lego, etc. Many of these sites are not profitable; their main purpose is fostering brand familiarization and cultivating a ‘branded community.’85 Children can play for hours on a branded website, which gives the companies far greater exposure at a far lower cost than a televised or print commercial. This makes the Internet a prime outlet for companies to market to children. Children also fail to perceive the persuasive purpose of these web sites, even more so than print and TV, likely because of the lack of distinction between the advertising and the entertainment.86 Another goal of children’s websites is to collect marketing data. Cookies, browsing behavior, clicks, and other meta data are routinely collected, as are the results of anonymous surveys.87 In the U.S., the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) makes it illegal to collect personal information

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from children under thirteen years without parental consent, but browsing behavior and meta data is not considered personal information.88 Does all of this advertising promote the values of consumerism and materialism? This question has been less studied than media violence, but several studies do show a positive relationship.89 Marketers are certainly expending a good deal of time and research to learn how to best target children. As one children’s marketing expert explains, “marketing teams invest substantially in the development of product identities that penetrate our limbic brain, the area that deals with our physiological and psychological needs.”90 Marketers target ads to children with a keen understanding of child development.91 To be most effective, for example, they are taught that ads should be familiar and likable, they must be imitable—slogans, jingles, dances or actions—and they must be repetitive, as “children absorb the world through observation and imitation.”92 This in turn raises some significant ethical issues concerning marketing research versus scientific research. Focus groups are not science: marketers may study children, but they do not have to design experiments, control for relevant variables, collect data, analyze statistics, and publish results as do scientists. Nor do marketers have to obtain ethical approval and submit to institutional oversight of their research on children the way that scientists do. Still, marketers can study children, and they can use and profit from the ‘knowledge’ they gain thereby—knowledge that may be more or less reliable, but is certainly more lucrative and gained with much less time and expense than what scientists must contend with. Health and Well-Being Not only are children and youth consuming large amounts of advertising, but the messages they are receiving may be harmful for their health and well-being. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a policy statement cautioning that media use among children and adolescents is a contributing factor to a number of health risks, stating “the evidence is now clear that they can and do contribute substantially to many different risks and health problems and that children and teenagers learn from, and may be negatively influenced by, the media.”93 These risks include long-term health consequences that result from habits and patterns of behavior that accumulate over time, such as the effects of sedentary behavior, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and a poor diet. Unfortunately, these are the very behaviors that advertisers seek to promote. Unhealthy Food Choices When it comes to advertising for children, there is plenty of junk food to go along with the junk science, as much of children’s advertising is designed

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to promote unhealthy foods, which are defined as low-nutrient, caloriedense foods.94 Kunkel states that it is now widely accepted that “marketing unhealthy food products contributes to childhood obesity[.]”95 Children are even targeted by advertisers in schools, especially for food items such as drinks and snacks in vending machines and cafeterias.96 Childhood obesity has grown substantially in recent years; it has become a leading cause of hospital visits, and ill health among children, and it has long-term health consequences.97 Conversely, healthy foods are almost never advertised to children.98 The American Academy of Pediatrics finds that the media is playing a role in the etiology of obesity among children and adolescents: media use promotes sedentary behavior and displaces healthier activities, encourages snacking while viewing, promotes unhealthy eating practices through ads and programming, and interferes with normal sleeping patterns.99 Increased media use leads to less time being physically active.100 All of this has contributed to obesity and related health problems among children and young people. As a result of public pressures, the food industry has made several pledges to reduce the marketing of unhealthy foods to children around the world.101 It remains to be seen whether this will be effective in reversing the trend of media consumption and negative health outcomes for children. Promotion of Cigarettes and Alcohol Children are exposed to advertisements for alcohol and tobacco, even when there are restrictions against directing these ads specifically at children.102 In fact, children are exposed to “more than $20 billion worth of cigarette, alcohol, and prescription drug advertising annually that has worked very effectively to get them to just say yes to smoking, drinking, and other drugs.”103 This advertising is also effective, such that youth who see positive media depictions of smoking and drinking are more likely to feel positively about these activities and to want to do so themselves.104 Most drinkers and smokers begin these habits when they are underage—a fact that is not lost on advertisers.105 Youth between the ages of 12 and 17 are most likely to abuse alcohol over other drugs, and in the United States, where underage drinking accounts for about one fifth of all alcohol consumption, alcohol causes about 5000 deaths of under 21s annually.106 There is evidence not only of a correlation between watching depictions of drug use and subsequent drug use, but Strasburger states that “exposure to drug advertising and to scenes of smoking or drinking in movies may be one of the leading causes—if not the leading cause—of early adolescent experimentation with cigarettes and alcohol.”107

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Promotion of Illegal and Prescription Drugs Media depictions of legal and illegal drugs also abound, and research is starting to show that they have the same effect of promoting these drugs to children. Peer use, family drug use, personality and biology are also important contributors to drug use—both prescription and illegal.108 Advertising is an important part of the picture, however, as it can make the consumption of drugs seem normal, and this is particularly true for legal drugs.109 Prescription drug companies have some of the largest advertising budgets.110 Strasburger tells us that pharmaceutical ads teach young people that “there is a pill to cure all ills, and a drug for every occasion[.]”111 Watching screen depictions of marijuana use can also increase its consumption,112 an effect that may intensify now that marijuana is legal in an increasing number of jurisdictions. Cyberbullying and Self-Esteem ‘Cyberbullying’ is defined as “an aggressive, intentional act or behavior that is carried out by a group or individual, using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself.” 113 The Internet and social media provide platforms where bullying can reach deeper into the child’s home and personal environment, thus rendering childhood bullying more pervasive, and seemingly harder to escape. Comments written online reach a wider audience, and are difficult if not impossible to eradicate. Cyberbullying has played a role in the suicides of young people in several countries.114 Some of these stories have received a good deal of media attention. Thirteen year-old Ryan Halligan committed suicide after severe bullying, both online and off; this tragedy raised awareness of a particularly vicious form of cyberbullying in which another child appeared to encourage and counsel the suicide.115 In another case, 13-year old Megan Meier committed suicide due to persistent cyberbullying on social media, shockingly at the hands of the mother of a former friend.116 As more youth go online, the number at risk for aggressive social interactions also increases. Fortunately, research shows that the majority of youth report that their online experiences are positive.117 In a recent survey of online harassment among children and youth, Ybarra and her research team found that 15% of youth report engaging in harassing or shaming behavior on the Internet in the previous year; 7% reported being harassed themselves.118 Victimizers were more likely to have experienced abuse and to use substances; they also reported higher levels of delinquency, failing at school, as well as much higher rates of being targeted by bullies themselves, both on and offline.119 Harassers spent more time in chatrooms.120 Males and females are

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equally likely to report being harassers, with older youth being more likely to harass others than younger children.121 Females are as likely as males to bully online, whereas they are less likely to bully face-to-face.122 Bullying is positively associated with certain measures of social status, with Caucasian children being 46% more likely to report harassing others, while children from families with more than $75,000 in income were 45% more likely to report harassing others.123 A poor emotional bond with one’s main caregivers is significantly associated with bullying.124 Youth who were bullying online reported “multiple psychosocial issues necessitating intervention.”125 All of this parallels traditional bullying patterns.126 The Youth Internet Safety Survey was conducted in 2000, 2005, and 2010, and collected data about online harassment for youth between the ages of 10 and 17. Online harassment nearly doubled in that decade, from 6% to 11% of youth.127 Distressing harassment increased from 3% to 5%, while repeated harassment increased from 2% to 5%.128 Those who reported posting “rude or nasty” comments against another child increased dramatically from 14% to 40%, whereas those who admitted harassing or embarrassing someone they were angry with increased from 1% to 10%.129 Harassed youth used the Internet more often overall, and were also more likely to use chat rooms and social networking sites; most incidents of harassment took place on social networking sites, and involved school friends.130 Fortunately, the authors found that unwanted sexual solicitations had decreased over the decade.131 The authors also note that it can be difficult to compare digital harassment over time: since the technology has changed a good deal; the questionnaires have also changed, making longitudinal comparisons less useful.132 There are concerns that social media and Internet use is impacting young people’s self-esteem. Social self-esteem refers to “adolescents’ evaluation of their self-worth or satisfaction with three dimensions of their selves: physical appearance, romantic attractiveness, and the ability to form and maintain close friendships.”133 Social self-esteem is very important to youth, especially in early adolescence when a young person is preoccupied with developing a sense of self.134 Self-esteem is strongly correlated with feelings of well-being, and many scholars in the field believe there is a causal relationship.135 The results of the Common Sense Census of youth and media use showed that reports of well-being were high; the vast majority of young people reported being happy at school, having a lot of friends, and getting along well with their parents.136 Those who reported being unhappy spent more time using media, with the most unhappy tweens using about 2 hours more screen media per day, and the most unhappy teens spending about 2 ½ hours more

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on screen time.137 Teens reporting lower social and emotional well-being also read much less, and this was one area in which there was a significant difference.138 Similarly, children of lower socioeconomic status, as well as black and Hispanic children, are spending more time on media—particularly screen media—and less time reading, although we do not yet know why this relation holds.139 Valkenburg’s study on social media use and self-esteem found that young people visited friend networking sites an average of three days a week for about a half an hour at a time.140 About 78% of participants found their interactions to be always or generally positive, but for about 7%, these interactions were always or predominantly negative.141 Youths who had positive reactions found it enhanced their self-esteem, but those 7% of young people who had negative experiences found their feelings of self-esteem decreased.142 Valkenburg encourages us to do more to identify and assist those youths who are being targeted online.143 Some studies of Facebook use among youth show that it is associated with lower feelings of self-esteem, as well as an increase in narcissism.144 Social media activity is also associated with an increase in depression.145 Other studies show that checking social media often was related to having a less positive mood.146 On a positive note, other studies have found that social media can be an effective means of engaging with youth, and relaying important health information to them.147

figure 1.2 Children’s increasing use of social media in the UK Source: Statista, https://www.statista.com/chart/13405/ uk-kids-friendships_-always-online/

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Video Game and Internet Addiction Disorder Along with the rise of the Internet there has also been a concomitant rise in problematic behaviors related to its use, even among children.148 This has given rise to an increasing amount of research into what has alternatively been called “video game and Internet addiction disorder,” or “problematic Internet use disorder,” which encompasses playing video games as well as other forms of compulsive Internet use. The last decade has certainly witnessed a rapid increase in video game use among all ages.149 Shapira explains that consequences of gaming can include “seizures, childhood neglect, and deaths after marathon sessions of game play during which people played for days at a time without sufficient sleep or food.”150 In South Korea, a young man killed his mother over his video game addiction151; another young couple were arrested after their three month-old baby starved to death while the couple obsessively played a video game in a nearby café—one in which they raised a virtual child.152 As with many who develop Internet and gaming addictions, this couple experienced a number of psycho-social deficits in their lives, and were poorly supported as new parents. Problematic Internet use is also associated with mood disorders, social phobias, and lower performance in work and school.153 Internet Addiction Disorder was included for the first time in the most recent version of the DSM-V.154 The disorder is included in Section 3 of the DSM. This section describes disorders for which further research is necessary, and which may be included in future editions as diagnostic criteria in a clinical setting.155 Pathological activities taking place on the Internet are covered elsewhere in the DSM-V, such as gambling, shopping, paraphilias, etc.156 Shapira et al. propose that Internet addiction be characterized as an impulse control disorder, defined as “a disorder in which individuals usually experience rising tension or arousal before an action(s) and subsequently experience a sense of relief or pleasure after completion of the behavior(s).”157 Internet addiction should be considered when the behavior is not explained by another disorder, when it is being used for excessive periods of time, when the preoccupation seems irresistible, and when its use is causing “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”158 There are broadly four components to Internet addiction: compulsive use; withdrawal; tolerance, “that necessitates the need for better equipment, more software or more usage hours”; and negative repercussions, such as “arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue.”159 Negative repercussions also include losing interest in other activities, using to relieve negative mood or as a vehicle for escape from everyday problems or negative

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feelings, and when using has “jeopardized or lost a significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of participation in Internet games.”160 Most people who use the Internet and who enjoy gaming are not at risk for Internet addiction disorder. Risk factors include one’s temperament and character, particularly traits involving “obsession/absorption, novelty seeking/ impulsivity, and harm avoidant/dependent traits,” as well as a poor mood, anger and aggression.161 These are all traits that are positively associated with physiological addiction, as well.162 A poor parent-child relationship is a significant risk factor, particularly for elementary school children.163 On the other hand, those who suffer from Internet addiction but not physiological addictions are more likely to demonstrate sensitivity and avoidant behavior.164 There is a definite tendency for addicts to have multiple or overlapping addictions; people with Internet addictions tend to be diagnosed with other psychiatric disorders and compulsive behaviors.165 Significant protective factors include taking part in non-Internet leisure activities, which is associated with lower levels of stress and less Internet addiction. Intellectual Development The use of new media can also harm children’s intellectual development, including language and vocabulary skills, as well as creativity and imagination—a subject that will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. As Zhao states, “childhood is a critical period for the development of the brain and learning abilities; therefore, their experience with social media could have long-term impact on their cognitive development.”166 Actual research in this area has been scarce.167 A recent cross-sectional survey by Walsh et al. found that those children who spent more than 2 hours a day on screen time had lower global cognition, performing worse on mental tasks involving memory, language, and thinking than those who spent only the recommended 2 hours per day.168 Longitudinal studies investigating the effects of social media use on child development are just beginning,169 and we will know more when they are completed. Very Young Children and Cognitive Development Does media use have a negative impact on the development of infants and young children? Studies performed to date show a correlation between media use and developmental problems, although they cannot prove causation.170 Wartella et al. note that very little is known about the impacts of new media on the development of children under the age of five, stating that the “striking dearth of empirically based knowledge stands in stark contrast to popular,

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policy, parental, and academic interest in the impact of media on young children.”171 More research on this issue is needed as well.172 The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has recently reissued a caution concerning what may be one of the most harmful yet least understood issues concerning children and the media: the use of media by children under the age of 2 years.173 The AAP note that claims made concerning the educational and developmental benefits of media in children under 2 continue to be unsupported by the evidence, and specifically that media use does not promote early language skills.174 Children under the age of 18 months have difficulty distinguishing between information presented in a video and the same information presented in reality, and they learn better through real-world interactions.175 Reading Print is the only medium for which children’s use has declined.176 When children do read, they are shifting away from print and towards the screen—as are many adults.177 A 2007 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts found that half of Americans reported reading no books for pleasure.178 Only 30% of 13-year-olds read almost every day, and only 22% of 17-year-olds; reading appears to be decreasing with age.179 For college seniors, just less than 70% read either nothing or less than an hour per week for pleasure.180 Youth aged 15–24 years old read voluntarily on average 7–10 minutes per day.181 Similarly, the Common Sense Census found that only 43% of tweens and 29% of teens are reading for any amount of time on any given day outside of school and homework activities.182 When asked how many are reading a day for homework, the results were similarly disappointing: only 46% of tweens and 44% of teens stated that they read for homework on any given day.183 A recent review found that about a third of adolescents had not read any books for pleasure in the past year—a number that has risen rapidly since 2009.184 We should be concerned that many children who are not reading in school are not reading at all.185 It should not be surprising that reading proficiency is down overall.186 The National Endowment for the Arts found that only 13% of adults were reading at a proficient level.187 Only 31% of bachelor degree holders were proficient readers.188 A lack of reading proficiency is correlated with many social and economic deficits for poor readers, as well as an increase in crime and a decrease in civic participation, although the causal relationships are not clear.189 Reading on the Internet is not the same as reading print, as the reading level is much lower, and the narrative elements are absent.190 Indeed, merely using the Internet is not enough to develop the critical skills necessary to locate and evaluate the credibility of information contained on the Internet. Desmond

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states that unsophisticated users “lack critical skills to evaluate information, and they are inefficient searchers; they typically take many more ‘clicks’ to locate information than capable readers, and they do not understand which information to ignore.”191 Untutored Internet users are not picking up the different skills they need to process online information—searching, filtering, and evaluating.192 An increasing amount of teens and tweens are using social media while doing their homework, fueling concerns that many kids are giving in to distractions while completing homework.193 Multitasking is common in an online environment, and there is evidence that this reduces comprehension and recall in young people.194 There is not enough research to understand the effects of multitasking, and how this affects studying and completing homework.195 Desmond has found that many adolescents who get their news on the Internet are not adequately prepared to participate in civic life, stating that their “evaluations of their knowledge of current events reveal that they don’t know very much about the institutions and developments that determine their world.”196

Bringing It All Together: Culture, Values and Moral Development Quite apart from children’s intellectual development and their ability to participate in civic life, the Internet and new media are changing how children are socialized, and what values they are learning. Socialization is the “complex process of adaptation of the individual (child) to rules and norms of the surrounding society[.]”197 Socialization and enculturation take place through “mythology, legends, story-telling and songs” through which children learn “beliefs and knowledge about social order and authority, about social structure, the origin of the group (ethnic, national, religious, etc.), the prevalent roles and their characteristic constituents.”198 Heller states that the rapid adoption of digital media has “blundered into a traditionally established system of socialization which was mainly realized through direct personal experience[.]”199 The ways that new media are impacting children’s socialization and enculturation encompass all of the elements discussed above: how children’s intellectual and linguistic development proceeds; how young people read and evaluate information; what they are taught to eat; what they are taught about using cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and medications; how susceptible they are to bullying and harassment from their peers; what addictive behaviors are placed in their path; what they are taught about their value to their community; how they are being prepared to participate in public life.

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In addition, young people’s use of the Internet is acclimatizing them to a loss of privacy, and an increase in surveillance. Information shared online and gleaned from browsing habits—even for children—is shared with commercial entities, who use it for marketing purposes or resell it to others, often without the child’s knowledge or consent. Social media, too, encourage a surveillance culture. As Fulton cautions, “social media is an omnopticon where the many watch the many.”200 She found that for young people, there is a tension between personal privacy and public “identity performance,” in which the latter often wins out.201 The Australian university students she interviewed were likely to think that “giving up some information is necessary to use social media, applications and games, and a reduction in privacy is part of contemporary life.”202 Almost ¼ were not concerned at all with Facebook providing anonymized data to consumer data companies.203 Indeed, many saw the use of their data as a kind of payment for using the sites for free. They were more concerned with the government having access to the data.204 Fulton states that “there is the perception that surveillance is a normal part of taking part in a digital society—they accept that surveillance is going to occur, but they also accept that they have a right to watch others.”205 Privacy is more likely to be seen as a commodity that can be traded for social capital, services, and other commercial benefits.206 Relationships become more about surveillance than a mutual communication or exchange.207 New social media platforms arise and are adopted much faster than their effects can be analyzed by social scientists: Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat— we have not yet begun to investigate these sites and their impact, let alone the new ones that will arise.208 A generation of children will grow up on media messages delivered on media platforms for which we have no reliable information regarding the effects they produce, or the best ways to cope with the challenges they create. As McCannon laments, how can we create a media education that counteracts a “debt-laden, addicted, aggressive, sexualized, time-wasting, hedonistic” culture?209

Notes 1 Sonia Livingstone and Kirsten Drotner, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture, ed. Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage, 2008), 10. 2 Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How it Works, and What it Can Do (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 51.

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3 Victor C. Strasburger and Marjorie J. Hogan, “Children, Adolescents, and the Media: Policy Statement,” Pediatrics 132, no. 5 (2013): 958. 4 Haejung Paik, “The History of Children’s Use of Electronic Media,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2000), 19. 5 Robert McCannon, “Media Literacy/Media Education,” in Children, Adolescents, and the Media, ed. Victor C. Strasburger, Barbara J. Wilson, and Amy B. Jordan (London: Sage, 2009), 520. 6 Jeanne B. Funk, “Video Games,” in Children, Adolescents, and the Media, ed. Victor C. Strasburger, Barbara J. Wilson, and Amy B. Jordan (London: Sage, 2009), 451. 7 Brad J. Bushman and Rowell Huesmann, “Effects of Violent Media on Aggression,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2012), 233. 8 Valkenburg, Patti M, Children’s Responses to the Screen: A Media Psychological Approach (London: Erlbaum, 2004), 42. 9 Kirsh, Steven J. M., Children, Adolescents, and Media Violence: A Critical Look at the Evidence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. Online), 10 of Chapter 1. 10 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 11 of Chapter 1. 11 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 11 of Chapter 1. 12 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 10 of Chapter 1. 13 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 10 of Chapter 1. 14 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 233. 15 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 12 of Chapter 1. 16 McCannon, “Media Literacy,” 549. 17 Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson, Grand Theft Childhood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 139. 18 Kutner, Grand Theft Childhood, 229. 19 Peter J. Etchells, Suzanna H. Gage, Adam D. Rutherford, and Marcus R Munafò, “Prospective Investigation of Video Game Use in Children and Subsequent Conduct Disorder and Depression Using Data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children” PLoS ONE 11, no. 1 (2016): e0147732. 20 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 233. 21 Victor C. Strasburger, “Media Violence: Policy Statement,” Pediatrics 124, no. 5 (2009): 1495; but see Etchells, “Prospective Investigation,” that not all researchers agreed with this statement, and the controversy is not yet settled. 22 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 236. 23 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 234. 24 Patti M. Valkenburg, “Television and the Child’s Developing Imagination,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2000), 131.

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25 Strasburger, “Media Violence,” 1498. 26 Strasburger, “Media Violence,” 1497. 27 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 232. 28 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 232. 29 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 232. 30 Bushman and Rowell Huesmann, “Effects of Violent Media,” 232. 31 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 3 of Chapter 12; see also Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 244. 32 Funk, “Video Games,” 449. 33 Funk, “Video Games,” 450. 34 Funk, “Video Games,” 453. 35 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 43. 36 L. Rowell Huesmann, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podowlski, and Leonard D. Eron, “Longitudinal Relationship Between Children’s Exposure to TV Violence and their Aggressive and Violent Behavior in Young Adulthood: 1977–1992,” Developmental Psychology 39, no. 2 (2003): 201–221. 37 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 203–4. 38 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 201–221. 39 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 201. 40 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 210. 41 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 210. 42 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 218. 43 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 218. 44 Jeffrey G. Johnson, Patricia Cohan, Elizabeth M. Smailes, Stephanie Kasen, and Judith S. Brook, “Television Viewing and Aggressive Behavior During Adolescence and Childhood,” Science 295, no. 5564 (2002): 2469. 45 Johnson, “Television Viewing,” 2468. 46 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 43. 47 Johnson, “Television Viewing,” 2469. 48 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 43. 49 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 43. 50 Haejung Paik and George Comstock, “The Effects of Television Violence on Antisocial Behavior: A Meta-Analysis,” Communication Research 21, no. 4 (1994): 516–546. 51 Anna T. Prescott, James D. Sargent, and Jay G. Hull, “Metaanalysis of the Relationship between Violent Video Game Play and Physical Aggression Over Time,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 40 (2018): 9882–9888. 52 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 7 of Chapter 13. 53 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 7 of Chapter 13. 54 Strasburger, “Media Violence,” 1496. 55 Huesmann, “Longitudinal Relationship,” 218.

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56 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, Chapter 12. 57 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, Figure 13.1. 58 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 14 of Chapter 12. 59 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 14 of Chapter 12. 60 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 48. 61 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 48. 62 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 235. 63 Bushman, “Effects of Violent Media,” 235. 64 Tammi R. A. Kral, Diane E. Stodola, Rasmus M. Birn, Jeanette A. Mumford, Enrique Solis, Lisa Flook, Elena G. Patsenko, Craig G. Anderson, Constance Steinkuehler, and Richard J. Davidson, “Neural Correlates of Video Game Empathy Training in Adolescents: A Randomized Trial,” npj Science of Learning 3, no. 1 (2018): DOI: 10.1038/ s41539-018-0029-6. 65 Bailenson, Experience on Demand, 65. 66 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 4 of Chapter 7. 67 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 6 of Chapter 7. 68 See: Common Sense, The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Teens and Tweens (San Francisco: Common Sense Media, 2015), discussed further below. 69 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 11 of Chapter 7. 70 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 12 of Chapter 7. 71 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 14 of Chapter 7. 72 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 14 of Chapter 7. 73 Katherine Battle Horgen, Jennifer L. Harris, and Kelly D. Brownell, “Food Marketing: Targeting Young People in a Toxic Environment,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2012), 456. 74 Dale Kunkel and Jessica Castonguay. “Children and Advertising: Content, Comprehension, and Consequences.” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2000), 410. 75 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 410. 76 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 89. 77 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 408–9. 78 Horgen, “Food Marketing,” 461. 79 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 404. 80 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 404. 81 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 406. 82 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 407. 83 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 401. 84 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 401. 85 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 109. 86 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 110.

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87 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 110. 88 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 111. 89 Valkenburg, Children’s Responses, 99; for a thorough discussion see: Moniek Buijzen, and Patti M. Valkenburg, “The Effects of Television Advertising on Materialism, Parent-Child Conflict, and Unhappiness: A Review of Research,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 234 (2003): 437–456. 90 Urbick, Bryan, “Make a Big Impression on Kids,” Brand Strategy 224 (2008): 46. 91 Urbick, “Make a Big Impression,” 46. 92 Urbick, “Make a Big Impression,” 47. 93 Strasburger, “Children, Adolescents, and the Media,” 958. 94 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 399. 95 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 410. 96 Horgen, “Food Marketing,” 461. 97 Horgen, “Food Marketing,” 455–6. 98 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 400. 99 Victor C. Strasburger, “Children, Adolescents, Obesity and the Media: Policy Statement,” Pediatrics 128, no. 1 (2011): 201. 100 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 75. 101 Horgen, “Food Marketing,” 465. 102 Kunkel, “Children and Advertising,” 400–1. 103 Victor C. Strasburger, “Children, Adolescents, Drugs, and the Media,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2012), 419–420. 104 Kirsh, Children and Media Violence, 10–11 of Chapter 15. 105 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 427. 106 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 422. 107 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 420. 108 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 426. 109 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 425. 110 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 439. 111 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 440. 112 Strasburger, “Children and Drugs,” 438. 113 Megan Moreno, “Cyberbullying,” JAMA Pediatrics 168, no. 5 (2014): 500. 114 Deborah Richards, Patrina H. Y. Caldwell, and Henry Go, “Impact of Social Media on the Health of Young People,” Journal of Pediatrics & Child Health 51 (2015): 1153. 115 Frontline, Growing up Online, January 22, 2008, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/kidsonline/. 116 U.S. v. Drew, 259 F.R.D. 449 (C. D. Cal. 2009).

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117 Michelle L. Ybarra and Kimberly J. Mitchell, “Youth Engaging in Online Harassment: Associations with Caregiver-Child Relationships, Internet Use, and Personal Characteristics,” Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004): 320. 118 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 326. 119 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 330. 120 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 330. 121 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 331. 122 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 332. 123 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 332. 124 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 332. 125 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 334. 126 Ybarra, “Youth Engaging in Harassment,” 332. 127 Lisa M. Jones, Kimberly J. Mitchell, and David Finkelhor, “Online Harassment in Context: Trends from Three Youth Internet Safety Surveys (2000, 2005, 2010),” Psychology of Violence 3, no. 1 (2013): 53. 128 Jones, “Online Harassment,” 60. 129 Jones, “Online Harassment,” 60. 130 Jones, “Online Harassment,” 61. 131 Jones, “Online Harassment,” 64. 132 Jones, “Online Harassment,” 65. 133 Valkenburg, Patti M., Jochen Peter and Alexander Schouten, “Friend Networking Sites and their Relationship to Adolescents’ Well-Being and Social Self-Esteem,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 9, no. 5 (2006): 585. 134 Valkenburg, “Friend Networking Sites,” 585. 135 Valkenburg, “Friend Networking Sites,” 585. 136 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 77. 137 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 77. 138 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 77. 139 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 86. 140 Valkenburg, “Friend Networking Sites,” 587. 141 Valkenburg, “Friend Networking Sites,” 587. 142 Valkenburg, “Friend Networking Sites,” 589. 143 Valkenburg, “Friend Networking Sites,” 589. 144 Richards, “Impact of Social Media,” 1153. 145 Richards, “Impact of Social Media,” 1153. 146 Yiran Wang, Melissa Niiya, Gloria Mark, Stephanie Reich, Mark Warschauer, “Coming of Age (Digitally): An Ecological View of Social Media Use among College Students,” Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (2015): doi:10.1145/2675133.2675271.

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147 Richards, “Impact of Social Media,” 1154. 148 Nathan A. Shapira, Mary C. Lessig, Toby D. Goldsmith, Steven T. Szabo, Martin Lazoritz, Mark S. Gold and Dan J. Stein, “Problematic Internet Use: Proposed Classification and Diagnostic Criteria,” Depression & Anxiety 17 (2003): 207. 149 Shapira, “Problematic Internet Use,” 208. 150 Shapira, “Problematic Internet Use,” 208. 151 Park Si-soo, “Video Game Addict Kills Mother,” Korea Times, February 21, 2010, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/02/117_61178.html. 152 Mark Tran, “Girl Starved to Death While Parents Raised Virtual Child in Online Game,” The Guardian, March 5, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/ mar/05/korean-girl-starved-online-game. 153 Groves, Christopher L., Jorge A. Blanco-Herrera, Sara Prot, Olivia N. Berch, Shea McCowen, and Douglas A. Gentile, “What is Known About Video Game and Internet Addiction After DSM-5,” in The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society, ed. Larry D. Rosen (Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley & Sons), 502. 154 Groves, “What is Known about Internet Addiction,” 503. 155 Groves, “What is Known about Internet Addiction,” 504. 156 Groves, “What is Known about Internet Addiction,” 504. 157 Shapira, “Problematic Internet Use,” 212. 158 Shapira, “Problematic Internet Use,” 213. 159 Groves, “What is Known about Internet Addiction,” 504. 160 Groves, “What is Known about Internet Addiction,” 504. 161 Hoon Jung Koo and Jung-Hye Kwon, “Risk and Protective Factors of Internet Addiction: A Meta-Analysis of Empirical Studies in Korea,” Yonsei Medical Journal 55, no. 6 (2014): 1705. 162 Koo, “Risk and Protective Factors,” 1705. 163 Koo, “Risk and Protective Factors,” 1705. 164 Koo, “Risk and Protective Factors,” 1705. 165 Shapira, “Problematic Internet Use,” 208. 166 Yong Zhao, Wei Qiu, and Naiyi Xie, “Social Networking, Social Gaming, Texting,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2012), 106. 167 Zhao, “Social Networking,” 106. 168 Jeremy J. Walsh, Joel D. Barnes, Jameason D. Cameron, Gary S. Goldfield, Jean-Philippe Chaput, Katie E. Gunnell, Andrée-Anne Ledoux, Roger L. Zemek, Mark S. Tremblay, “Associations Between 24 Hour Movement Behaviors and Global Cognition in U.S. Children: A Cross-Sectional Observational Study,” The Lancet: Child & Adolescent Health (2018): https://doi.org/10.1016/S23524642(18)30278-5. 169 Zhao, “Social Networking,” 103.

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170 Ari Brown, “Media Use by Children Younger than 2 Years: Policy Statement,” Pediatrics 128, no. 5 (2011): 1043. 171 Ellen A. Wartella, Elizabeth A. Vandewater, and Victoria J. Rideout, “Electronic Media Use in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers,” American Behavioral Scientist 48, no. 5 (2005): 501. 172 Brown, “Media Use,” 1043. 173 Brown, “Media Use,” 1041. 174 Brown, “Media Use,” 1041. 175 Brown, “Media Use,” 1041. 176 Roger Desmond, “The Role of Reading for Children in a Digital Age,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2012), 45. 177 Desmond, “The Role of Reading,” 45. 178 National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2007), 7. 179 National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read, 8. 180 National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read, 9. 181 National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read, 9. 182 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 49. 183 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 52. 184 Jean M. Twenge, Gabrielle N. Martin, and Brian H. Spizberg, “Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ Media Use, 1976–2016: The Rise of Digital Media, the Decline of TV, and the (Near) Demise of Print,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture (2018): 14. 185 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 52. 186 National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read, 12. 187 National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read, 13. 188 National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read, 14. 189 Desmond, “The Role of Reading,” 58. 190 Desmond, “The Role of Reading,” 52. 191 Desmond, “The Role of Reading,” 53. 192 Desmond, “The Role of Reading,” 53. 193 Common Sense, Common Sense Census,” 41. 194 Desmond, “The Role of Reading,” 56. 195 Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia Greenfield, “Digital Media and Youth: Games, Internet and Development,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2012), 86. 196 Desmond, “The Role of Reading,” 58. 197 Maria Heller, “Games and Media: The Acquisition of Social Structure and Social Rules,” in The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture, ed. Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage, 2008), 271.

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198 Heller, “Games and Media,” 272. 199 Heller, “Games and Media,” 272. 200 Janet M. Fulton, and Marjorie D. Kibby, “Millennials and the Normalization of Surveillance on Facebook,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 31, no. 2 (2017): 190. 201 Fulton, “Millennials,” 190. 202 Fulton, “Millennials,” 191. 203 Fulton, “Millennials,” 193. 204 Fulton, “Millennials,” 194. 205 Fulton, “Millennials,” 196. 206 Fulton, “Millennials,” 198. 207 Fulton, “Millennials,” 189. 208 Richards, “Impact of Social Media,” 1155. 209 McCannon, “Media Literacy,” 545.

CHAPTER 2

Understanding the Laws of Media Engagement What Are the Laws of Media Engagement? The theory behind the Laws of Media Engagement is grounded in the literature of ‘medium theorists,’ to use Meyrowitz term.1 This term is a variant of the more common and widespread term ‘media ecology,’ which Meyrowitz studied, but renamed in his writing. The ‘media ecologists’ do not suggest that the means of communication wholly shape culture and personality, rather that changes in communication patterns are one very important contribution to social change and one that has generally been overlooked.2 Medium theorists argue that the form in which people communicate has an impact beyond the choice of specific messages. Marshall McLuhan, describes media as extensions of the senses and claimed that the introduction of a new medium to a culture, therefore, changes the “sensory balance” of the people in that culture and alters their consciousness.3 Medium theorists such as Joshua Meyrowitz criticize media ecology on the grounds that it merely provides a perspective for studying media and behavior, rather than a detailed theory that describes the ways that media shapes behavior. As Meyrowitz states, the “insights, observations, and evidence they [media ecologists] collect point to the need to study media environments in addition to studying media messages, but they do not form a clear set of propositions to explain the means through which media reshape specific behaviors.”4 An attempt to explain the means through which media reshape behaviors was done by Marshal McLuhan in his media laws.5 However, the discussion held among media ecology scholars in the Media Ecology Association list-serve with regard to McLuhan’s laws illustrates Meyrowitz’s point.6 While some derided McLuhans’ laws in their entirety, others argued that they help structure our understanding of media, with some even claiming that they create a ‘new science.’ Some theorists construe McLuhan’s laws as applying to any object that conveys meaning. We argue that the vagueness of McLuhans’ laws, supports Meyrowirtz’ criticism on one hand and creates this broad spectrum of responses on the other hand. The Laws of Media Engagement we present here draws upon those media ecologists that see the hazards of new media. Both the nature of the technologies, as well as the unprecedented speed of their adoption, pose hazards for human psychology, cognition, culture, and well-being that we have not yet had © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004398887_002

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time to study or assimilate. This situation necessarily creates criticisms of a lack of empiricism to ground these claims. Some of this difficulty is inherent in the nature of empiricism itself: it is not only that there has been insufficient time for new media to be adequately studied, but that there is a fundamental disconnect between empirical studies—which are measured in years and even decades—and new media technologies, whose life spans are measured in months and even days. This is particularly true of longitudinal studies, discussed in Chapter 1, which are the studies that are most needed to ground media ecology empirically. By the time we understand these technologies, they will have become long obsolete. While we seek to ground our theory of the Laws of Media Engagement in empiricism to the extent that this is possible, we also recognize the need to move beyond empiricism to deal with the present novelty and pace of technological advancement. Presenting empirical evidence whenever possible, we also ground the theory in linear, logical, and empirically supported laws that are easy to appreciate and apply, hopefully producing clear insights and understanding of the media and its effects. Neil Postman has described the Technopoly as the age in which: Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress… Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down.7 Empiricism is but one of our defenses that break down at the edge of the Technopoly. In general, the theory of the laws of media engagement deals with the media and our defenses; more precisely, the vulnerabilities of our defenses facing new media. Understanding these vulnerabilities, overcoming them and strengthening our defenses is the purpose of this book, as Postman wrote, “for no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.”8

Introduction to Media Engagement For the purpose of the Laws of Media Engagement, we define ‘media’ as any fabricated mechanical or electronic object of communication that transfers information using photos, sounds, moving photos, time and interaction.

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Radio, television, films, the Internet and virtual reality are a few examples, but so are print media, books, and newspapers. We refer to ‘electronic media’ as any medium that requires electricity to be operationalized, and ‘digital media’ as any medium that requires a binary code in order to be operationalized, whereas ‘screen media’ are those media that are consumed using a screen. An e-book, for example, would fall under all three categories. The theory of the laws of media engagement presented here includes two components: the perceived psychological dimensions and the five media laws. The theory should be treated as a whole, working both as a framework for understanding the engagement between the user and the media and as a method to draw insights regarding the future of media influence on humans and society. The laws and the perceived dimensions to which they refer are intertwined, such that each medium engages one or more psychological perceptual dimensions. For example, a newspaper or a comic book would have a perceived visual or pictorial dimension, whereas radio would have a perceived sound dimension. Television, on the other hand, is perceived through the dimensions of sound and moving picture, whereas the Internet incorporates all of the above, plus time and interaction. Novel forms of virtual reality add to the mix even more immersive and tactile sensory dimensions.9 We propose that there is a hierarchy of perceived psychological dimensions, such that visual and sound media have less influence on the individual than higher dimensions of moving picture, time and immersion, and that media with fewer dimensions have less impact than those with more. The picture, sound and moving picture dimensions are simple and are received in a direct way through our senses, the eyes and the ears. However, the time and interaction dimensions are much more complex and are not a direct experience of the eyes or the ears. A print book will thus have a very different effect on an individual and how they engage with the medium than a fully-immersive, state-of-the-art virtual reality program that assaults all of the senses at once. A thorough discussion of the perceived dimensions is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nonetheless, a basic description of the time and interaction dimensions is needed, as they will not be self-evident for most readers. Next, we will explain each law in turn, demonstrated through examples. The first law, ‘The Truth in the Medium is Context Dependent,’ argues that it is the context that defines the credibility of the message and that the more dimensions the media possess, the more difficult it becomes for the user to define and reliably assess the context. This will be illustrated through two examples of false news stories that ended up being treated as reliable news. The second law, ‘The Stronger Dimension Prevails,’ argues that given the hierarchy of the perceived dimensions, the combination of a low level

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dimension (sound) with a higher level dimension (interaction) will result in the supremacy of the higher dimension in its influence on the user. There is a complex interaction system between the dimensions that could bring powerful results; these interactions have yet to be worked-out by psychologists through empirical studies, and it is likely that they are non-linear rather than additive in their effects. The second law will be illustrated through the example of the YouTube video KONY 2012, arguing that while the sound dimension described Joseph Kony’s war crimes in Uganda, the moving picture tells a quite different story about the power of social media. It is suggested that this combination of dimensions made this video the most watched moving picture ever up until that time, with an astounding 99 million views within a week.10 The third law, ‘The Medium’s Time Dimension Determines its Usage Length,’ argues that the more psychological dimensions a medium engages, the more it is that the determination of time of usage will shift from the user to the medium. This law will be illustrated through the correlation between Internet addiction and usage time. Moreover, it will be demonstrated that this correlation is even more alarming when measured in a higher-dimension medium: virtual world video games. The fourth law, ‘The More Psychological Dimensions the Medium Engages, the Weaker it will Engage the User’s Imagination,’ will be illustrated through the research done on creative imagination and television. We describe the visualization hypothesis that explains the effects of television on the imagination, and extend this to media with higher dimensions, such as the Internet and virtual worlds. This topic will be explored further in Chapter 3. The fifth and final law, ‘The User is Bound to All the Laws,’ argues that the user of the media is inherently bound to the above laws. Furthermore, when the user is involved in creating the content, the influence is even stronger. We illustrate this by examining the high rate of suicide among reality TV participants, which suggests that the urge to bridge the gap between the real and the virtual is taking its toll. The Perceived Psychological Dimensions Time Beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have developed an indifference to the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. As Lewis Mumford states, “Abstract time became the new medium of existence.”11 Media can be further divided into time-binding and space-binding types.12 Time-binding media are persistent, consisting of such durable materials as

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clay or stone tablets. Space-binding media are more ephemereral, including such modern media as radio, television, and mass circulation newspapers. Innis argues that time is also a political construct, and that media ‘biases’ toward time or space affect the complex interrelationships needed to sustain an empire.13 Building on Innis’s work, Strate argues that while, “oral cultures looked to the past and literal cultures have the potential to turn around and look towards the future, our electronic culture seems to be fixated in the present.”14 We are repeatedly being told to ‘live in the moment’ and are “losing distinction between sacred and profane time, losing the distinction between night and day.”15 The psychologist Robert Ornstein pointed out in his classic book On the Experience of Time that we perceive time as part of a cognitive process, and that time is therefore highly subject to cognitive illusion.16 In general, the more cognitive processing you perform within a given period, the more time you judge to have passed. The perception of time is also a biological process. From a biological point of view, while every cell of the human body contains a simple clock, the master internal clock is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a small cluster of about ten thousand brain cells located at the base of the brain.17 The primary role of the SCN is to control our internal circadian rhythms. Over fifty circadian rhythms—including those of blood pressure, digestive enzymes, fertility cycles, mood, and sleep/wake cycles—are regulated by the SCN.18 Natural environmental cues—or zeitgeber (literally, ‘time givers’ in German)—reset our internal clock each day so that our bodily processes continue to be in harmony with the world around us. For people and animals, light is the most important zeitgeber. Light passes directly through our eyes and is carried to the SCN by the optic nerves. Once it reaches the SCN, light resets the internal clock and, among other functions, inhibits the production of a hormone called melatonin, which makes you sleepy when it gets dark, thus encouraging sleep. The Internet, TV, TiVo, twenty-four-hour stores, international travel, and ordinary hundred-watt light bulbs constantly push and pull at the hands of your internal body clock.19 The blue light emitted from electronic devices, such as smart phones and tablets, is particularly disruptive of sleep when used in the hours before bed time. Turning off devices and blocking blue light during this time can prevent sleep disturbances20; sleep loss is a growing concern for children and adolescents who routinely use these devices at night.21 Much like the over-arching argument of this book, in the age of digital technology time is detached from its original source—nature, sunrise and sunset— and moulded instead into an artificial, manipulable perceived dimension.

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With no anchor in nature it is just another subjective variable, vulnerable to manipulation by media. Interaction Until recently, ‘interaction’ has been the essence of personal relations. Starkey has defined interaction as that which “takes place in the moment when actions of two people or more are observed as dependent one in the other, mutually.”22 Meaning, “it can be said that interaction is working when every one of at least two participants is aware of the presence of the other, and each one have a reason to believe that the other is aware in the same level,” and in this way the participants create a “state of mutual awareness.”23 The Internet, new media, and artificial intelligence have altered the basic processes of interpersonal interaction. One relatively simple model defines the interaction as “the ability of new communication systems (usually including computer as one element) to ‘talk back’ to the user, almost like a person participating in a conversation.”24 The level of interaction is a variable; according to this model, some information technologies are relatively low in the interaction level they require of users—cable TV for example—whereas others—such as chat rooms and online bulletin boards like Reddit—demand much more interactivity form users. Based on this definition, we formulate a hierarchy of interaction levels of some selected media.25 A more complex model of interaction in two dimensions consists of a matrix containing two variables: ‘vividness’—defined as “the ability of a technology to produce a sensorial rich mediated environment,” and ‘interactivity’—defined as “the degree to which users of a medium can influence the form or content of the mediated environment.”26 While the Internet provides a level of interactivity expressed in social media and other online services, in virtual worlds the level of interactivity increases in two ways: firstly, since the user is embodied in the virtual world by an avatar, the embodiment itself is being added to the interaction, as well as the characteristics of the avatar itself, such as its appearance and body language, that do not exist in other online applications. Secondly, in some virtual worlds the user can create items, even an entire virtual environment, as he or she wishes, and in doing so interact with the virtual world itself. In addition, the advent of artificial intelligence has altered the nature of social interaction over the Internet and with so-called ‘smart’ objects that are connected to the Internet. One recent study found that children were much more likely than adults to be influenced by the opinions of a robot with whom they were interacting socially, raising significant concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to manipulate and produce conformity in vulnerable individuals.27

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The Five Laws of Media Engagement The theory we present here of media engagement contains five laws. While the first, fourth and fifth laws relate to any media, the second applies only to media that have more than one psychological dimension, whereas the third applies to those media that have a time dimension. The fourth and fifth laws predict the most striking results with the most advanced media, i.e., those media that combine the greatest number of psychological dimensions with the highest quality. The First Law: The Truth in the Medium Is Context Dependent Postman argued that “philosophers may agonize over the questions ‘What is truth?’ ‘What is intelligence?’ ‘What is the good life?’ But in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity.”28 It is increasingly difficult for users to determine if the information they are accessing on the Internet is true, false, or to what extent it is in any way reliable. Postman explains this by claiming that the concept of ‘truth’ is “intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.”29 He states that “truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the ‘truth’ is a kind of cultural prejudice.”30 According to Postman, “truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.”31 In the Internet and new media we have invented techniques of communication that make truth at best impossible, at worst irrelevant, and almost always for sale. Negotiating a frame for a message involves the user possessing knowledge of its point, topic, and relevant background information.32 As Goffman and others have pointed out, the impact of experience is a function of how that experience is interpreted, or framed.33 Bransford and McCarrell provided a classic demonstration of this notion when they showed that what people learn from narratives depends on the interpretive frame they are given.34 Wartella et al. conclude that, “the general rule for communication theory, then, is that the effects of communication content are mediated by the frames people use in processing that content.”35 Movies, television, entertainment and news have all moved closer and closer together, giving rise to significant and increasing difficulties in telling the difference between them. McAllister argues that when TV news is routinely used to promote commercial entertainment, then it becomes more and more problematic to identify and determine the context of the message.36 Similarly, Brooker laments that “news reports are looking more like movies—and movies

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are looking more like news reports. How are we supposed to tell them apart?”37 In one example, an audience of cult movie buffs reacted badly to test footage from Peter Jackson’s forthcoming Hobbit movie. As Child states, “The Hobbit is shot at 48 frames per second—twice as many frames as standard films. The studio claims this gives it an unparalleled fluidity. The viewers complained it was too smooth—like raw video. Some said it looked like daytime TV. What they meant, I guess, is that it seemed too ‘real,’ and therefore inherently underwhelming.”38 Much that counts as news nowadays is gleaned directly from press releases or written by public relations professionals.39 Business Insider recently dropped all pretense, inviting public relations professionals to send them news stories directly: “Please stop sending us emails with STORY IDEAS and EXPERTS and just contribute directly to Business Insider. You’ll get a lot more ink for yourself and your clients, and you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted work.”40 (As will the staff writers at Business Insider.) A national survey by Cision found that an “overwhelming majority” of reporters and editors depend on social media for research, with 89% using blogs and 65% using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter; a majority relied on public relations professionals for access to sources, research, and background information.41 These findings means that there is much less original reporting and fact-checking in the news than we have been led to believe, which can fundamentally undermine its credibility in the eyes of the public. In turn, this process makes it all too easy for so-called ‘fake news’ to become accepted and amplified over the Internet and through social media. One news story about North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un ordering his uncle to be eaten by 120 wild dogs likely began as a satirical tweet and was traded up through blogs and social media until it finally appeared on such national news heavyweights as NBC and Fox News.42 Similarly, Sweden’s justice minister Beatrice Ask took a good deal of criticism for posting an article to her Facebook page about marijuana-linked deaths that was widely known by social media users to be a spoof.43 Another example can be found in a fictional blog set up by an activist group that depicted a blond-haired, 12-year old Norwegian girl planning her wedding to a 30-something year old man. The blog was created to promote awareness of the very real phenomenon of child marriages around the world, but the staged nature of the posting was not made clear to viewers.44 Another popular soft drink advertisement pretended to be a campaign to stop police brutality and unite the races that was based on news footage of real protests—only starring social media celebrity Kendall Jenner.45 All of this serves to blur the lines between reporting and entertainment, further undermining the credibility of the media as a whole.

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Gibbons et al. have shown empirically that what they term to be ‘unbelievable’ headlines culled from tabloids become more believable over time, whereas believable headlines culled from newspapers became less believable.46 This was particularly true when people are given “a long period of time to evaluate a limited amount of ambiguous information,” and the headlines are attentiongrabbing.47 Spohr has recently shown that we choose to believe news that accords with our identity and ideological preferences, and our growing consumption of news over social media platforms has given rise to increased ideological polarization.48 An even more disturbing example is the viral ‘hero boy’ video created by Norwegian activists that portrayed a Syrian boy saving a little girl from gunfire.49 The film was elaborately staged on set in Malta, but the filmmakers intended it to be portrayed as genuine news footage from the conflict. The video garnered 5 million views before it was discovered to be a hoax—and one that was publicly funded through the Norwegian Film Institute. The filmmakers came clean only after significant pressure, claiming that they did it to increase awareness of children’s suffering in the war in Syria.50 Not only does this do a disservice to real children who are suffering in the war and whose stories do not get told (as well as the journalists who risk much to cover them), but it further blurs the line between promotion and propaganda while lending fodder for those who claim that no news concerning controversial topics can be at all trusted. It is easy for media professionals to engage in weak fact-checking, emotional manipulation, and even out-and-out fabrication in order to bypass our normal mental guards. We are especially susceptible to believing information for which we lack context, cannot situate in time and place, and cannot verify for ourselves. This constitutes much of the news that we consume on the Internet today. We are much more likely to believe news that is highly contentious and emotional, and that accords well with our pre-existing ideological beliefs and preferences. This, combined with not only the proliferation of news on social media, but also the fact that most journalists glean their story ideas and research from that same social media, can give rise to polarized ideological bubbles fueled by ‘fake news,’ and which are self-reinforcing, rather than selfcorrecting. The Second Law: The Stronger Psychological Dimension Prevails Postman acknowledges the dangers embedded in media manipulation by stating that “information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves.”51

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What happens when we watch a television or video sequence in which the message conveyed by the moving picture is at odds with the message conveyed by the soundtrack? Which message will prevail? Will the user interpret the discordant media as a mixture of the two messages? In fact, there are complex mechanisms according to which it is possible to create a desired unconscious effect in the user by deliberately combining disparate messages in different perceived psychological dimensions delivered simultaneously. A simple example for this manipulative use of parallel dimensions can be seen in certain TV shows, such as the Jerry Springer Show,52 in which illustration videos are shown in black and white to enhance the psychological effect of the sound dimension. During these videos, certain objects appear in color to lend emphasis to them and create ‘breaks’ in the sound dominance, in favor of moving picture. A more advanced example can be seen in the ‘KONY 2012’ phenomenon. While the video narrator is talking about Joseph Kony, the Ugandan war criminal, and his atrocities the moving picture is telling a completely different story—the story of social media and its power to change the world.53 We posit that this powerful combination brought this video to be watched by almost 100 million people worldwide. Yet another example is a viral video put out by the organization ‘FCKH8’ that depicts young girls in pink tutus and tiaras, using graphic profanity to raise awareness of discrimination against women, and discussing such issues as workplace discrimination and sexual assault. This video contrasts a cuss-laden narrative about serious issues, with a stereotypical visual depiction of girlhood.54 This lack of coherence between perceived psychological dimensions does not exist anywhere in nature, and is unique to the media. We are wired to assume coherence between perceived dimensions (e.g., sound and vision), and thus are especially vulnerable to this form of media manipulation. This is equally true whether that manipulation is declared or concealed. The Third Law: The Medium’s Time Dimension Determines Its Usage Length Postman has argued that the computer “subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience… Marvin Minsky has been quoted as saying that the thinking power of silicon ‘brains’ will be so formidable that ‘If we are lucky, they will keep us as pets.’”55 The computer, through video games, the Internet, and virtual reality does this in a way that is both unconscious yet powerful by manipulating our perceptions of time. We frame this as the third law of media engagement, which claims that the manner in which a medium manipulates our perceptions of time determines how long we use that medium. One simple example is the cable television of

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old, which scheduled certain shows at certain times, compelling a mass audience during ‘prime-time,’ and then went off the air at the end of the broadcast day. Compare this with online streaming of videos over such services as YouTube or Hulu, as well as ‘on demand’ TV services, which pose no limits to what or when—or for how long—we can watch them. The growing phenomenon of Internet addiction illustrates this law as well. As discussed in Chapter 1, Internet addiction resembles other behavioral addictions in that it consumes addicts’ time and energy, harms their personal relationships, restricts their academic, professional and social potential; it may result in physical problems stemming from self-negligence, such as lack of sleep, little exercise, malnutrition and more.56 Researchers have found that 90–95% of self-defined Internet addicts reported mild to severe distress at work, in school, and in financial matters.57 Internet addiction is a cross-culture syndrome and the amount of time the user spends online is its best predictor. A number of studies indicate a significant correlation between the amount of time spent surfing the Internet and the risk of developing Internet addiction amongst students in America, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Pakistan, and Australia.58 However, the results found in a study of Italian Internet users did not support this.59 A number of studies have tracked the prevalence of Internet addiction. One study by Armstrong et al. examined 1,078 college students and found that 9.8% of the participants possessed characteristics consistent with Internet addiction diagnoses.60 Similar results were found in a study of 576 students by Kubey et al., that revealed a 9.26% addiction rate.61 However, a conservative research study conducted using double diagnoses characteristics (the Diagnostic Questionnaire and Internet Related Addictive Behavior Inventory (IARBI)), found a 6% addiction rate.62 These results were further reinforced by the result of a U.S. nationwide survey of 17,251 Internet users visiting abcnews.com, which also indicated a 6% addiction rate.63 Recently, Kuss and Lopez-Fernandez have reviewed 46 studies conducted in the last 15 years on internet addiction.64 They conclude that about 0.8% of young people in Italy65 and about 8.8% of all Chinese adolescents66 are affected. Other studies have found that 20.3% of adolescents and 13.8% of children in a South Korean sample were classed as addicted to using the Internet,67 while Internet addiction prevalence rates ranged from 1.7% of boys and 1.4% of girls in a representative sample of Finnish adolescents68 to 26.4% and 26.7% at wave one and wave two in a longitudinal sample of adolescent students in Hong Kong.69 While many negative effects result from Internet addiction, as discussed in the previous chapter, it seems that addiction to virtual world-type video games is an even more serious problem. Research conducted on 3,989 users of

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the virtual world Everquest.com indicated that 15.4% of the subjects reported experiencing symptoms of withdrawal when not able to use the virtual world, 23.8% experienced mood modification while using the virtual world, 28.8% used the virtual world even when they did not enjoy the experience, and 18.4% reported problems in academics, health, finances or relationships.70 A followup survey of 2,237 MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) users concluded that 40.7% of the subjects considered themselves addicted to the game experience.71 There are several documented cases in which death has occurred as a result of fatigue due to extended and continuous use of MMORPGs. Li Syong Saup of South Korea died after using the virtual world Starcraft for more than 50 hours continuously.72 Another Chinese individual died after gaming for 3 days straight in February of 2011.73 A teenage boy in Russia died after gaming almost continuously for 22 days, from what doctors suspect to be a blood clot from not getting up and moving around.74 Hu Bin, a 16-year-old Chinese teenager from the province Anhuvi at Lujiang County died two days after he swallowed an insecticide he brought with him to the Internet bar.75 Before Hu committed suicide he had gamed at the Internet bar for 11 days straight. According to reports, he wrote the words “even the gods cannot save me,” on the family door.76 Hu’s father reported his son stating, “I drank it [the pesticide] because I wanted to make sure that you could not save me. I have played enough.”77 In South Korea, a 22-year-old reportedly clubbed his 53 year-old mother to death after she criticized his gaming habit.78 In Taiwan, 23 year-old Chen Rong-yu lay dead in an Internet café for 9 hours before anyone noticed; he had been playing virtual games for 23 hours straight.79 Finally, 3-month-old Sa-rand (meaning “love” in Korean) died as a result of her parents neglecting her in order to raise a virtual baby in a virtual world.80 They were reportedly new parents living in poverty with very few social supports. The Fourth Law: The More Dimensions in the Medium, the Weaker the User’s Imagination Postman uses the term “agentic shift” borrowed from Stanley Milgram81 so as to “name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent.”82 When we construct an agentic shift, “we have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-advised or even inhuman goals because the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them.”83 Because the effect of new media on our creative minds and creative imagination is such an important, yet overlooked, topic in new media we have dedicated Chapter 3 to a discussion of this phenomenon.

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The Fifth Law: The User Is Bound to All the Laws Postman states that the Technopoly removes the moral center, and replaces it with an elusive promise of utopia: The Technopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption.84 As Postman points out, we rarely doubt the reality of what we see in the media, and are largely unaware of the frame of reference it imposes upon us.85 This is exemplified in the media law that states that the user is bound to all the laws imposed on them by the media—irrespective of whether the user is consciously aware of these laws or not. In its simplest form we might say that an actor is using the media to elicit an emotional response in a passive viewer; the success of this use is exemplified by the zeal with which we have been watching actors for thousands of years. As discussed in the previous chapter, advertising is equally effective, whether we are aware of its techniques or not. This fifth law speaks to the interactive and iterative nature of the dialogue that takes place between the user and the medium, and the difficulties we have in extricating ourselves from the laws of media engagement. One particularly tragic application of this law is the very real psychological harm imposed on those who get caught up in a viral media bubble. The director of the ‘KONY2012’ YouTube sensation mentioned earlier, suffered a very public breakdown as a result of the criticisms leveled at him through social media; of course, the video of him running naked through the street went viral.86 Kaufman has explored the suicide rate of participants on U.S. reality TV shows and compared it to the nation average suicide rate.87 The national average rate for suicides is 12.4 per 100,000 people, whereas the suicide rate for reality show participants is more than three times this.88 Blair has also found that the physical and mental toll imposed on reality TV contestants is significant, and there is little legal redress for any harms they experience as a result of their participation.89 This reveals the destructive and exploitative relationship between the producers, the participants, and the audience in a viral mediascape. Another example that illustrates the dystopic relationship between new media and big data is the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) first

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described by Epstein and Robertson in 2015. The SEME is such that the ranking order of search results has a powerful and robust impact on consumer preferences, including voting behavior.90 People place a significant amount of trust in search engine page rankings and the companies that provide them, finding the highest-ranked pages to be the most reliable.91 It is very easy to mask a bias in search rankings, which makes SEME “especially dangerous as a means of control, not just of voting behavior but perhaps of a wide variety of attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.”92 This study also confirmed previous findings that even when participants were aware of the biases, they were still manipulated by them in the intended way.93 Is there truly no escaping the laws of media engagement? Mere knowledge of our manipulation and exploitation by new media seems to be insufficient to escape its effects. As Postman states, “the problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch.”94 For it is only through “a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.”95 We propose that critical reflection and collective engagement with new technologies of communication can help us to resist the perceptual and behavioral manipulations they impose on us, and in the pages that follow we pose a number of suggestions we hope will work toward this goal.

Notes 1 Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 2 Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 18. 3 Marshall McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (Concord, ON: Basic Books, 1995), 234. 4 Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 22. 5 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 6 On file with the author. 7 Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 69–70. 8 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 166. 9 Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How it Works, and What it Can Do (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).

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10 Polly Curtis and Tom McCarthy, “Kony 2012: What’s the Real Story?” The Guardian, March 8, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/reality-check-with-pollycurtis/2012/mar/08/kony-2012-what-s-the-story. 11 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 17. 12 Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (London: Oxford University Press, 1950). 13 Innis, Empire and Communications. 14 Strate, Lance, “A Public Lecture Given at Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan,” YouTube, September 21, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=24oaWPApedE. 15 Strate, “A Public Lecture.” 16 Robert E. Ornstein, On the Experience of Time (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970). 17 David C. Klein, Robert Y. Moore, and Steven M. Reppert, Suprachiasmatic Nucleus: The Mind’s Clock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 18 Meir Kryger, Thomas Roth, and William Dement, Principles and Practices of Sleep Medicine, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Saunders, 2005). 19 Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd, The Time Paradox (New York: Free Press, 2008), 193. 20 Masahiko Ayaki, Atsuhiko Hattori, Yusuke Maruyama, Masaki Nakano, Michitaka Yoshimura, Kazuno Negishi, and Kazuo Tsubota, “Protective Effect of Blue-Light Shield Eyewear for Adults Against Light Pollution from Self-Luminous Devices Used at Night,” Chronobiology International, 33, no. 1 (2016): 134–139. 21 Stéphanie van der Lely, Silvia Frey, Corrado Garbazza, Anna Wirz-Justice, Oskar G. Jenni, Roland Steiner, Stephan Wolf, Christian Cajochen, Vivien Bromundt, and Christina Schmidt, “Blue Blocker Glasses as a Countermeasure for Alerting Effects of Evening Light-Emitting Diode Screen Exposure in Male Teenagers,” Journal of Adolescent Health 56 (2015): 113–119. 22 Duncan Starkey, “Interaction, Face-to-Face,” In International Encyclopedia of Communications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 325. 23 Starkey, “Interaction,” 325. 24 Everett M. Rogers, Communication Technology: The New Media in Society (New York: Free Press, 1986), 34. 25 Rogers, “Communication Technology,” 34. 26 Jonathan Steuer, “Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence,” Journal of Communication 42, no. 4 (1992): 80. 27 Anna-Lisa Vollmer, Robin Read, Dries Trippas, Tony Belpaeme, “Children Conform, Adults Resist: A Robot Group Induced Peer Pressure on Normative Social Conformity,” Science Robotics 3, no. 21 (2018): eaat7111 DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aat7111. 28 Postman, Technopoly, 93. 29 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 22. 30 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 22.

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31 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 24. 32 Ellen Wartella, Barbara J. O’Keefe, and Ronda M. Scantlin, “The Role of Interactive Media in Children’s Cognitive Development,” in A Companion to Media Studies, ed. Angharad N. Valdivia, 461–479 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 33 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 34 John D. Bransford and Nancy S. McCarrell, “A Sketch of a Cognitive Approach to Comprehension: Some Thoughts About What it Means to Comprehend,” in Cognition and the Symbolic Processes, ed. W. B. Weimer and D. S. Palermo, 299–303 (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1974). 35 Wartella, “The Role of Interactive Media,” 472. 36 Matthew P. McAllister, “Selling Survivor: The Use of TV News to Promote Commercial Entertainment,” in A Companion to Media Studies, ed. Angharad N. Valdivia, 209–226 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 37 Charlie Brooker, “What is the Difference Between The Hobbit and the News? Not as Much as there Should Be,” The Guardian, April 29, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/29/differencehobbit-news-not-much. 38 Ben Child, “The Hobbit: First Glimpse Gets Mixed Response,” The Guardian, April 25, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/apr/25/the-hobbit-first-screening-cinemacon. 39 Ryan Holiday, Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2017) Online. 40 Henry Blodget, “Dear PR Folks: Please Stop Sending Us ‘Experts’ and ‘Story Ideas’—Here’s What to Send Us Instead,” Business Insider, April 15, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/pr-advice-2011-4. 41 Don Bates, “National Survey Finds Majority of Journalists Now Depend on Social Media for Story Research,” Cision, January 20, 2010, https://www.cision.com/us/ about/news/2010-press-releases/national-survey-finds-majority-of-journalistsnow-depend-on-social-media-for-story-research/. 42 Adam Taylor, “The Story About Kim Jong-un Having His Uncle Eaten by 120 Wild Dogs May Have Started with a Satirical Tweet,” Business Insider, January 6, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jang-song-taeks-execution-rumors-2014-1. 43 Associated Press, “Sweden’s Justice Chief Left High and Dry Over Spoof Marijuana Deaths Story,” The Guardian, January 7, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/jan/07/sweden-justice-minister-spoof-marijuana-deaths-story. 44 Cate Matthews, “This Norwegian Preteen is ‘Marrying’ a 37 Year-Old for One Important Reason,” Huffington Post, October 9, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ entry/thea-norway-child-bride-plan-international_n_5954802. 45 Roisin O’Connor, “Kendall Jenner and Pepsi Face Backlash Over Advert Showing Model Giving Can to Police Officer Mid-Protest,” The Independent UK, April 5,

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2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/kendall-jennerpepsi-advert-backlash-police-officer-model-can-protest-a7667251.html. 46 Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Angela F. Lukowski, and W. Richard Walker, “Exposure Increases the Believability of Unbelievable News Headlines via Elaborate Cognitive Processing,” Media Psychology 7 (2005): 279. 47 Gibbons, “Exposure Increases Believability,” 289. 48 Dominic Spohr, “Fake News and Ideological Polarization: Filter Bubbles and Selective Exposure on Social Media,” Business Information Review 34, no. 3 (2017): 150–160. 49 Anne-Marie Tomchak, and Charlotte McDonald, “#BBC Trending: Syrian ‘Hero Boy’ Video Faked by Norwegian Director,” BBC News, November 14, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-30057401. 50 Tomchak, “Syrian Hero-Boy.” 51 Postman, Technopoly, 63. 52 Jerry Springer, The Jerry Springer Show, http://www.jerryspringertv.com. 53 Curtis, “Kony 2012”; see also Daily Mail Reporter, “Jason Russell Arrested: New Footage of Kony 2012 Video Director ‘Ranting While Naked’ Emerges,” The Daily Mail, March 18, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116981/JasonRussell-arrested-New-footage-Kony-2012-video-director-ranting-nakedemerges.html. 54 Angie Aker, “Nothing More Shocking Than Little Girls Dropping the F-Bomb Except the Words that Come After,” UpWorthy.com, October 21, 2014, https://www.upworthy.com/nothing-more-shocking-than-little-girls-droppingthe-f-bomb-except-the-words-that-come-after. 55 Postman, Technopoly, 111, quoting from Hunt, Morton M., The Universe Within: A New Science Explores the Human Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 318. 56 J. J. Kandell, “Internet Addiction on Campus: The Vulnerability of College Students,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 1, no. 1 (1998): 11–17; T. M. Eppright, Allwood, B. Stern, and T. Theiss, “Internet Addiction: A New Type of Disorder?” Missouri Medicine 96 (1999): 133–136; Kimberly Young, “What Makes the Internet Addictive: Potential Explanations for Internet Use,” Paper Presented at the 105th Annual Conference of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, Il, 1997. 57 Kimberly Young, “Internet Addiction: Emergence of a New Clinical Disorder,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 1, no. 3 (1996): 237–244. 58 Viktor Brenner, “Psychology of Computer Use: Parameters of Internet Use, Abuse, and Addiction: The First 90 Days of the Internet Usage Survey,” Psychological Reports 80, no. 3 (1997): 879; Sunny S. J. Lin and Chin-Chung Tsai, “Sensation Seeking and Internet Dependence of Taiwanese High School Adolescents,” Computers in Human Behavior 18, no. 4 (2002): 411–426; Kausar Suhail and Zobia Bargees, “Effects of Excessive Internet Use on Undergraduate Students in Pakistan,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 9, no. 3 (2006): 297–307; Wei Wang, “Internet Dependency and Psychosocial Maturity Among College Students,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 55, no. 6 (2001):

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919–938; Guo Liang, Surveying Internet Usage and Impact in Five Chinese Cities: The CASS Internet Survey Report (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2005). 59 Giovanni Ferraro, Barbara Caci, Antonella D’Amico, and Marie Di Blasi, “Internet Addiction Disorder: An Italian Study,” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 10, no. 2 (2007): 170–175. 60 Lynette Armstrong, James G. Phillips, and Lauren L. Saling, “Potential Determinants of Heavier Internet Usage,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 53 (2000): 537–550. 61 Robert Kubey, Michael J. Lanvin, and John R. Barrows, “Internet Use and Collegiate Academic Performance Decrements: Early Findings,” Journal of Communication 51, no. 2 (2001): 366–382. 62 Viktor Brenner, “Psychology of Computer Use: Parameters of Internet Use, Abuse, and Addiction: The First 90 Days of the Internet Usage Survey,” Psychological Reports 80, no. 3 (1997): 879. 63 David N. Greenfield, “Psychological Characteristics of Compulsive Internet Use: A Preliminary Analysis,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 2, no. 5 (1999): 403–412. 64 Daria J. Kuss and Olatz, Lopez-Fernandez, “Internet Addiction and Problematic Internet Use: A Systematic Review of Clinical Research,” World Journal of Psychiatry 6, no. 1 (2016): 143–176. 65 R. Poli and E., Agrimi, “Internet Addiction Disorder: Prevalence in an Italian Student Population,” Nordic Journal of Psychiatry 66 (2012): 55–59. 66 Xu, Jian, Li-xiao Shen, Chong-huai Yan, Howard Hu, Fang Yang, Lu Wang, Sudha Rani Kotha, Li-na Zhang, Xiang-peng Liao, Jun Zhang, Feng-xiu Ouyang, Jin-song Zhang, and Xiao-ming Shen, “Personal Characteristics Related to the Risk of Adolescent Internet Addiction: A Survey in Shanghai, China,” BMC Public Health 12 (2012): 1106. 67 Jee Hyun Ha, Hee Jeong Yoo, In Hee Cho, Bumsu Chin, Dongkeun Shin, and Ji Hyeon Kim, “Psychiatric Comorbidity Assessed in Korean Children and Adolescents Who Screen Positive for Internet Addiction,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 67, no. 5 (2006): 821–826. 68 Riitakerttu Kaltiala-Heino, Tomi Lintonen, and Arja Rimpela, “Internet Addiction?: Potentially Problematic Use of the Internet in a Population of 12–18 Year-Old Adolescents,” Addiction Research and Theory 12, no. 1 (2004): 89–96. 69 Daniel T. L. Shek, and Lu Yu, “Internet Addiction Phenomenon in Early Adolescents in Hong Kong,” Scientific World Journal 2012, article no. 104304 (2012): 1–9. 70 Nicholas Yee, “Ariadne—Understanding MMORPG Addiction,” NickYee.com, October 2002, http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/home.html. 71 Nicholas Yee, “The Deadalus Project: Addiction,” NickYee.com, July 9, 2004, http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000818.php. 72 BBC, “S Korean Dies After Games Session,” BBC News, August 10, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm.

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73 BBC, “Chinese Gamer Dies After Three-Day Session,” BBC News, February 22, 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12541769. 74 Kirstie McCrum, “Tragic Teen Gamer Dies After ‘Playing Computer Games for 22 Days in a Row,’” The Mirror, September 3, 2015, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ world-news/tragic-teen-gamer-dies-after-6373887. 75 Shen Ying and Chen Peng, “The Death of a Young Online Gamer,” EastSouthWestNorth.com, March 4, 2006, http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060304_1.htm. 76 Ying, “Death of a Young Gamer.” 77 Ying, “Death of a Young Gamer.” 78 Si-soo Park, “Video Game Addict Kills Mother,” Korea Times, February 21, 2010, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/02/117_61178.html. 79 Rob Cooper, “Gamer Lies Dead in Internet Café for 9 HOURS Before Anyone Notices,” The Daily Mail, February 3, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096128/ Gamer-lies-dead-Taiwan-internet-cafe-9-HOURS-notices.html. 80 Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korea Expands Aid for Internet Addiction,” New York Times, May 28, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/world/asia/29game.html. 81 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 82 Postman, Technopoly, 179. 83 Postman, Technopoly, 179. 84 Postman, Technopoly, 179. 85 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 80. 86 Daily Mail Reporter, “Jason Russell Arrested: New Footage of Kony 2012 Video Director ‘Ranting While Naked’ Emerges,” The Daily Mail, March 18, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116981/Jason-Russell-arrested-Newfootage-Kony-2012-video-director-ranting-naked-emerges.html. 87 Bill Hoffmann, “Reality TV Suicides: 14 Celebrities Have Died by Own Hand Since 2005,” Newsmax, April 8, 2013, https://www.newsmax.com/thewire/reality-tvsuicides-celebrities/2013/04/08/id/498382/. 88 Hoffmann, “Reality TV Suicides.” 89 Jennifer L. Blair, “Surviving Reality TV: The Ultimate Challenge for Reality Show Contestants,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 31 (2010): 1–24. 90 Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson, “The Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) and its Possible Impact on the Outcomes of Elections,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 33 (2015): E4512–E4521. 91 Epstein, “Search Engine Manipulation Effect,” E4512. 92 Epstein, “Search Engine Manipulation Effect,” E4519. 93 Epstein, “Search Engine Manipulation Effect,” E4519. 94 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 165. 95 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 166.

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The Imaginationless Generation Introduction The previous chapter discussed the laws of media engagement, including the fourth law—when the medium engages more of the user’s psychological dimensions, the weaker will it engage the user’s imagination. When it comes to developing children, there may be long-term consequences when they are repeatedly engaging in media that suppress their imagination. This chapter will focus on the harm to children’s creative imagination, focusing on one of the most dangerous components of children’s media diet—the prolonged use of virtual world video games. Child development researchers Dellinger-Pate and Conforti illustrate the harmful influence of virtual worlds through the following story: She [the author’s colleague] and her family were traveling for Christmas and unable to get to a computer easily when her son wanted to play on Webkinz. When her son was finally able to log on he became instantly panicked and cried uncontrollably over the fear that his pet was dying. He saw that his beloved avatar was very ill and in the hospital due to malnutrition. The mother knew the pet was, indeed, not going to die; the website makes that clear to parents in its introduction. Yet her son was distraught over having neglected his poor pet during the Christmas season. He vowed never to let that many days go by without caring for the animal’s needs.1 A child of this age is unable to distinguish between reality and the virtual nature of the Webkinz pet. His perception of the virtual world’s persistence is derived from his experience in the real world: he reacts normally to an abnormal environment. This is to the child’s psychological detriment, and to the website operator’s financial benefit. There are those who argue that the growing number of virtual worlds geared toward young children is a benefit, one that can “provide young learners with experiences that scaffold skills needed for community building and civic engagement,”2 while interconnecting with people and issues they confront in real life.3 A broad-based review of the literature did show that virtual worlds can have a positive impact in creating communicative spaces for remote users, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398887_003

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as well as in assisting experiential skills learning, although this review focused on older children and university-level learners.4 Another study found that virtual worlds had a positive impact on primary students’ achievement and motivation in learning geography facts.5 Other scholars disagree, citing evidence of the negative effects of virtual worlds on child development. Many of these critiques point to the narratives embedded in the virtual worlds themselves and demonstrate their harmful effects on children. For example, Marsh states that while virtual worlds are a space in which children can engage in make-believe and narrative-related play,6 this is impeded by the ways in which virtual worlds restrict children’s choices.7 Similarly, Hannaford found that children engaged imaginatively with one another and the virtual environment, and that they took the narratives they learned there back with them into the outside world.8 Both Marsh and Hannaford discuss children’s imagination and make-believe play in terms of identity practice; one might be tempted to conclude from their work that we only need to construct better and more inclusive narratives for children in their virtual worlds. However, the problems go deeper than mere narrative content; they are embedded in the structure of the game itself. Dellinger-Pate and Conforti’s study of Webkinz led them to conclude that the game harms children’s developing communication skills and social connectivity. They state, “there is no scenario where cooperation between players takes place. There is no true community in this playground. Although the site visuals offer the illusion of community—a village with shops and friendly, furry characters waving to each other, with open, green fields to run and play in—they are fleeting images and never experienced by the player.”9 Grimes also finds that the narratives in children’s virtual worlds promote consumer culture.10 Children are instructed to acquire and display items and to construct social hierarchies based on acquisition, where restrictions based upon a lack of funds are taught as ‘fair play.’11 Respecting copyright and other corporate rules is embedded in the very structure of the game itself,12 as is the practice of “immersive advertising,” which “enables interactive and deeply embedded forms of product placement.”13 Children are invisibly co-opted into performing forms of immaterial labour, such as data mining and market research, as well as less tangible forms of labour, like chatting, posting, and content-production.14 After all, it is the participation of the children themselves that actively constructs the virtual environment, and it is their interactions with and emotional connection to the game that lend it its meaning, its entertainment value and—ultimately—its immense monetary value as well.15 Grimes concludes that virtual worlds provide very limited opportunities for children to exercise their imagination in make-believe play, since adults

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ultimately shape and impose an idealized play environment on the child.16 She states: By restricting opportunities for children to create their own UGC [usergenerated content], reappropriate branded content, or even speak freely about the commercial content encountered, these worlds have excluded some of the most potentially valuable dimensions of children’s play.17 We conclude that, even if adults could design ‘suitable’ or ‘educational’ narrative content into the virtual world, its use would continue to have harmful effects on children’s developing imagination. The virtual worlds would continue to displace children’s true imaginative interaction with adult-generated rules and constructs—ones whose weaknesses cannot easily be discerned or simply switched off.

The Imagination The essence of imagination lies in its generativity, in the fact that through our imagination we conjure up experiences and representations that are wholly novel to our lived experience. Imagination is critical to children’s mental development and ability to learn, as we discuss further below. Despite its importance, ‘imagination’ remains intangible and difficult to define. Cohen and MacKeith describe psychologists’ ambivalence towards the concept of imagination, stating “on the one hand, it fascinates. Just as no other species can speak, no other species can imagine or invent. On the other hand, it is extremely hard to study imagination experimentally.”18 Despite this ambivalence, there have been numerous attempts to define and classify the imagination, none of which have yet received widespread consensus. Vygotsky defined imagination as “a new formation which is not present in the consciousness of the very young child, is totally absent in animals and represents a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like all functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action.”19 One can imagine, for example, a bird turning into a snake while flying over a lake without ever having seen such a transformation actually taking place. One can produce novel representations in the mind by generatively combining past perceptions and representations. Elaborating on this definition, Singer and Singer define imagination as a form of human thought characterized by the ability of the individual to reproduce images or concepts originally derived from the basic senses, but now reflected in one’s consciousness as memories, fantasies, or future plans. These

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sensory-derived images, ‘pictures in the mind’s eye,’ mental conversations, or remembered or anticipated smells, touches, tastes, or movements can be reshaped and recombined into new images or possible future dialogues.20 But this raises for us the question of whether ‘images or concepts’ that are artificially mediated—and which are usually the product of the imaginary process of a TV show or video game creator—will function in the same way as basic building blocks for the user’s imagination. Other authors have defined the imagination in the context of the human spirit. For Watkins, the imagination is “the intermediate universe—the universe between pure spirit and the physical, sensible world—which is the world of the symbol and of imagining.”21 According to Latham, “imaginative capacity thus underpins our species’ ability to make sense and guide us beyond egodirected aims and conditions that life brings our way. Creative fantasy freely expressed is our key to balance and wholeness.”22 Dubos has argued that “man’s propensity to imagine what does not yet exist, including what will never come to pass…most clearly differentiates him from animals. The more human he is, the more intensely do his anticipations of the future affect the character of his responses to the forces of the present.”23 The imagination bridges the time from the present to the future. Ulanov and Ulanov point out that there is no life of the spirit without imagination. “Properly understood and pursued,” they state, “the imagination is perhaps our most reliable way of bringing the world of the unconscious into some degree of consciousness and our best means of corresponding with the graces offered us in the life of the spirit.”24 In our spiritual lives, the imagination enables paths that cannot be travelled in any other way, and its absence detaches us from the unconscious and the spirit. This is in stark contrast to the superficial and artificial representations of children’s virtual worlds, with their flat and fleeting images, a world in which everything is offered, but nothing can actually be gained. A more prosaic definition of the imagination claims that imagination is an activity of the human brain, operating much like memory or logic or any other cognitive process.25 In this view, there is nothing mystical about the imagination: it is simply working on the material present in the brain.26 The critical character of the imagination lies in its generative and transformative abilities, to take existing ingredients and bring them together to generate something novel. It is perhaps for this reason that imagination is critical to learning. As Egan states, “all learning that is to be of educational value seems necessarily to involve an imaginative-finite creative component. The imagination is the making, composing, vivifying power that is required if the student is to reconstitute codes into living knowledge.”27

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Generally, imagination has not been studied as a single concept. Valkenburg et al., reviewing the research on the influence of TV on daydreaming and creative imagination, found three closely related but distinguishable imaginal processes, which they define as follows: ‘imaginative play’ is play in which children transcend the constraints of reality by acting ‘as if’; ‘daydreaming’ is a state of consciousness characterized by a shift of attention from external stimuli to internal thoughts and images; and ‘creative imagination’ which is defined as the capacity to generate many different novel or unusual ideas.28 This chapter will not deal with daydreaming, and will focus instead on imaginative play, the creative imagination, and the negative effects of media on the imagination as expressed in dreams. Virtual worlds differ in many ways from authentic imaginary experiences, and these differences may actually impede the development of imagination in young children. According to Cobb, the psychological distance between the self and the object of desire “is the locus in which the ecology of imagination in childhood has its origin.”29 In virtual worlds, the distance between ‘the self and the object of desire’ is vague since the self is portrayed as a virtual avatar; the object of desire is always at hand in the virtual environment but cannot be reached in the real one. Scholars have defined four key characteristics of children’s imaginary worlds: first, the child must be able to distinguish between what they have imagined and what is real; second, the child’s interest in the fantasy world persists for months or years; third, the child will be proud of the world and consistent about it; lastly, the child will feel that the world matters to him or her (these worlds usually disappear by the age of ten).30 As with the tale of the child whose Webkinz pet fell ill from his disuse of the game, virtual worlds can mimic the last three characteristics. However, it is on the first characteristic that virtual worlds fall short: the child has not imagined the world, and is not in control. The child may, therefore, have significant difficulties distinguishing the virtual world from the real one. The development of the imagination is critical not only to our individual, but also to our collective development. Jung, already cognizant of the pressures of modern life in 1933, warns us not to abandon our species’ hard-fought accomplishments in our spiritual development. “The wheel of history,” he states, “must not be turned back, and man’s advance toward a spiritual life, which began with the primitive rites of initiation, must not be denied.”31 The consequences of losing or not developing our imaginative capacities can have serious and as yet unforeseen repercussions and, as Jung warns us, our collective accomplishments can be rolled back. The imagination is unique to humans, and it is critical for our learning and for children’s proper intellectual development. It is also a key part of what

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makes us human. In addition, the imagination is a learned ability, one which is not yet present in young children. It is originally derived from the basic senses; it begins working on the material that is already present in the brain and it bridges the gap between the self and the object of desire, as well as the time from the present to the future. The development of the imagination appears necessary in order to be able to distinguish between the imagined and the real. In children, the imagination develops through expression in imaginative play and creative imagination. This process involves the novel reshaping of already-familiar images and experiences. These skills are essential for both understanding and creating stories. But the question that we wish to raise in this chapter is whether the images and concepts that children receive from playing online and in virtual worlds function as building blocks for the development of the child’s imagination in the same way as images and concepts derived from lived experience, or even traditional forms of non-digital media. For example, the images a child perceives from having a book read to them come from his or her own mind’s eye, but the images they see from watching a show on TV come from the TV creator and are imposed upon the child, crowding out the images in the mind’s eye the child would otherwise create. Because a virtual world is an even more fully-immersive experience for the child than a television show, even more of the images and concepts that child users receive are imposed upon them, thus increasing the ill effects of the digital media. Below, we describe good reasons why we think this is the case, and why further research needs to be done in this area. The Development of the Imagination Imagination is critical to children’s learning and development. Vygotsky states that a “child’s play is not simply a reproduction of what he has experienced, but a creative reworking of the impressions he has acquired. He combines them and uses them to construct a new reality, one that conforms to his own needs and desires.”32 When the child is rehearsing a situation from his life with toys, he is not only duplicating the situation in reality but is creating a scenario that exceeds that reality and portrays what will or may happen, according to the child’s fears, hopes and other internal drives. Winnicott further states that “it is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”33 These two steps are essential: first, imaginative playing will enable creativity, and it is only in creativity that we will then discover ourselves. While many animals engage in play, it lacks the generativity of children’s play. Cobb contends that “while other animals do play, the human child’s play

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includes the effort to be something other than what he actually is, to ‘act out’ and to dramatize speculation.”34 As Wittgenstein pondered, “could one imagine a world in which there could be no pretend?”35 Play is essential for the imagination, but it is pretend play that most deeply express and develops our creativity and imagination. According to Piaget’s influential developmental theory, there are three main types of children’s play that direct and foster a child’s mental development: practice games, symbolic games and games with rules. When a child jumps over a stream for the fun of jumping, she is engaging in a practice game. Games with rules are: [G]ames with sensory-motor combinations (races, marbles, ball games, etc.) or intellectual combinations (cards, chess, etc.), in which there is competition between individuals (otherwise rules would be useless) and which are regulated either by a code handed down from earlier generations, or by temporary agreement.36 Symbolic games imply representation of an absent object, since there is a comparison between a given and an imagined element. For example, a child pushes a box and imagins it is a car. It is the symbolic, or pretend, games that are most important in the context of the development of imagination. Piaget argues, “while mere practice play begins with the first months of life and symbolic play during the second year, games with rules rarely occur before stage II (age 4–7) and belong mainly to the third period (from 7–11).”37 Piaget theorizes that from ages 4 to 7, symbolic games begin to lose their frequency, but continue to appear in the same intensity. From the age of 7 to 11 or 12, symbolic play declines and games with rules, i.e. social games, emerge. According to Piaget, symbolic play takes place mainly from about age 2 to 7. Singer and Singer agree that “imaginative play emerges toward the end of the child’s second post-partum year, struggles fitfully toward a flowering well into the third year, and in the fourth, fifth, and sixth years is a significant factor in the child’s behavioral repertory.”38 However, they claim that while “Piaget seemed to suggest that imaginative play fades by the early school years as ‘operational’ thought takes over, we shall suggest that it is merely submerged in the interest of the changing demands of school decorum and other social pressures.”39 In their view, it is not an internal psychological force that propels the shift, but external ones. We posit that the use of virtual worlds may spur on this shift, making the symbolic play period shorter and thus impairing the process of imagination development.

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Recognizing the developmental importance of the imagination, Singer and Singer propose that “our human stream of consciousness emerges gradually in childhood from children’s play and from their pretend games.”40 As explained by Grossman and Degaetano: The brain of the child is not a miniature version of the adult brain…the young brain is an organ that will change considerably as it matures over the course of childhood and adolescence. As it builds neural structures for optimal development, the young brain is very vulnerable to stimulus from its environment.41 Without pretend play, the imagination will not properly develop in young children, and the literature suggests that some of the deficits created thereby may be life-long. We posit that another mechanism whereby virtual worlds may be harming this development by misleading the child’s brain to think he is engaged in imaginative pretend play, while he is actually engaged in a combination of practice and rule games. Cobb’s findings seem to support this proposition. She writes: The sense of wonder is spontaneous, a prerogative of childhood. When it is maintained as an attitude, or a point of view, in later life, wonder permits a response of the nervous system to the universe that incites the mind to organize novelty of pattern and form out of incoming information. The ability of the adult to look upon the world with wonder is thus a technique and an essential instrument in the work of the poet, the artist or the creative thinker.42 The digital media and the mediated stimulus it sends to the senses curtail this sense of wonder. Instead of experiencing the world in wonder, the child is experiencing the virtual world where the alleged wonder is mediated, misleading, and masks the ‘true’ imaginary universe with the ready-made and mediated one. The Role of Play The chief value of play in child development lies in the child’s total control over their imaginary universe, free from external constraints—an accomplishment that is simply not possible in the mediated virtual world. Piaget argued that “unlike objective thought, which seeks to adapt itself to the requirements of external reality, imaginative play is a symbolic transposition which subjects things to the child’s activity, without rules or limitations.”43 Although

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Piaget and Vygotsky experienced a theoretical controversy about the nature of imagination,44 they both agree that “the symbolic game as a whole is again a practice game, but a practice game which exercises (and more particularly ‘pre-exercises’) the specific form of thought which is imagination.”45 Symbolic games develop the imagination free from any external constrains, a freedom which is not possible in virtual worlds that are inherently bound to some rules. Mitchell explains, “pretense or make-believe is a mantel activity involving imagination that is intentionally projected onto something.”46 More elaborately, make-believe is “the use of…props in imaginative activities,”47 where props are “objects of imagining.”48 Props include the pretenders themselves and the objects. Pretence in play is called ‘symbolic play,’ but pretending also occurs outside play, and need not be ‘playful.’49 Pretence is essential for the imagination development either in play or outside it. But it is only possible when there are no external constraints forced on the child. Adults and other children might force external constraints, the same as do virtual worlds. The difference is that external constraints in the real world are obvious and apparent, and inherently shared and social, whereas virtual worlds actually enforce external constraints, while pretending to provide props for imaginative play. For example, a child can dress its penguin in Club Penguin—which is allegedly imaginative play—but cannot use the penguin as a chair, i.e. the child is prevented from using the penguin as a symbol for some other object or idea, which constitutes true imaginative play. Singer and Singer support the developmental value of symbolic games, stating that when “children engage in symbolic games they are practicing mental skills that will later stand them in good stead, just as practice in walking, balancing, or swimming aids the development of motor skills.”50 In a follow-up study of children aged eight to twelve, twenty years later, Shiner et al. found that those children who scored high in social skills, academic attainment, and work competence maintained these patterns as adults.51 These kinds of skills are the same as those found to emerge from imaginative play in the earlier years.52 Therefore, deficits in imagination in early years are correlated with long-term deficits in other social skills. Symbolic play enables children to have a clear sense of what is real and what is fantasy.53 Russ has conducted a number of studies on creativity and child development.54 She states, “children who play imaginatively in their early years are more likely to think creatively…good early play skills predicted the ability to be creative and generate alternative solutions to everyday problems.”55 Therefore, children who substitute their imaginative play with the rule-bound play in virtual worlds may not fully develop these skills.

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Make-believe play produces other important outcomes. Spiegel argues that it develops the ability to self-regulate.56 Singer and Singer posit that imaginative play is associated with more positive emotions in children.57 Other studies have shown how children engaging together in make-believe play demonstrate advances in recognizing others’ thoughts, or in differentiating fantasy representations from reality.58 Children engaged together in play in virtual worlds are not involved in make-believe play; rather, they are playing games with rules, and these are the rules set by the creators of the virtual world. An illustration of the negative effects of the lack of pretend play was made by Wulff, who found that autistic children have severe early deprivations in symbolic play.59 Harris states, “the study of early pathology shows that it is the absence of early imagination, and not its presence, that is pathological.”60 He continues, stating that “one of the major characteristics of the syndrome of early childhood autism is an absence or impoverishment of pretend play… The long term social and cognitive restriction of people with autism suggest that the capacity for pretence is an important foundation for lifelong normality.”61 The imagination, the ability to think symbolically, and therefore the development of normal cognition are all closely linked. This can clearly be seen in children who have serious deficits in symbolic thinking and cannot engage in symbolic or pretend play, as occurs in children who are on the severe end of the autism spectrum. Children playing in virtual worlds might, therefore, interact with the virtual world as though they are engaged in make-believe play, while they are really engaged in rule-bound play. We argue that this interaction with the game removes the benefits children would otherwise receive from their play. First, children are not receiving the benefits from symbolic play when they play in virtual worlds, and second, because they may acquire a learned deficit in the ability to distinguish the real world from the fantasy. The Creative Imagination It should be noted that this chapter deals with the creative imagination rather than the broader concept of creativity itself. The commonalities and differences between the two are beyond the scope of this chapter. Singer and Singer have noted some of the differences between the two concepts, stating that “imagination seems freer and broader, since our thoughts may remain as private and as fanciful as we may want them to be, with no constraints. Imagination may take the form of visual imagery with no obvious outcome other than the pleasure it affords us.”62 It is the creative imagination in this sense that we discuss below.

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Vygotsky saw creativity as a way of adapting to the challenges posed by our environment. “A creature that is perfectly adapted to its environment,” he states, “would not want anything, would not have anything to strive for, and, of course, would not be able to create anything.”63 Rogers points out that, with the kaleidoscope of changes that are occurring at a geometric rate, the development of genuine, creative adaptation may represent the only way forward to build a constructive continuity. As Rogers states, “unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish. Not only individual maladjustment and group tensions but international annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of creativity.”64 There may be a heavy price to pay, therefore, if genuine creative adaptation cannot be fostered. At the same time as our real environment is changing rapidly, our virtual environment is changing in the opposite direction, becoming more and more convenient for us and adapting to our whims, rather than posing challenges to our creativity. In this context, Winnicott argues, “everything that happens is creative except in so far as the individual is ill, or is hampered by ongoing environmental factors which stifle his creative processes.”65 When the child is spending time in the pre-designed environment of the virtual world, his creativity is stifled in this manner. Cobb states that “a major clue to mental and psychosocial health lies in the spontaneous and innately creative imagination of childhood, both as form of learning and as a function of the organizing powers of the perceiving nervous system.”66 As can be seen in children with severe autism, the lack of symbolic thinking and the creative imagination presents itself as a severe cognitive pathology. Winnicott states that “many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.”67 However, children have not yet experienced enough creative imagining of their own to realize they are ‘caught up in the creativity of someone else,’ or ‘of a machine.’ Vygotsky concludes that “the entire future of humanity will be attained through the creative imagination… The development of a creative individual, one who strives for the future, is enabled by creative imagination embodied in the present.”68 But what if there is no ‘creative imagination embodied in the present’ because of the influence of an all-encompassing virtual environment? The Senses The argument that technology alters our sensory perception is not new. McLuhan remarked on the changes in the senses as a result of the introduction of technology, stating that “if technology is introduced from within or from

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without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our eyes and ears and other senses remain the same.”69 Advanced technologies, such as virtual worlds, provide more powerful sensory output, like time and interaction, and which were not present at the time of McLuhan’s writing. We ought, therefore, to think carefully about how our sensory perceptions are being altered by these developing virtual cultures. In an interview given by Rudolf Arnheim in 1969, he discusses a generation that had already lost touch with its senses: If you look at television for hours every day, you must grow up with the ghostly feeling that you live in a world of wraiths. You see, Jim, the mind finds it hard to grasp images that do not have significant form, and in grasping an object the mind finds meaning in that object… The visual sense in most men and women has been reduced to an economic minimum—the effort it takes to tell that the piece of paper is not a piece of bread…70 We have lost the human ability to taste the feast of meaning that each event and object offers to our senses.71 The mind cannot fully develop its imagination based on sensory input coming from digital media, and this is more so for virtual worlds than it was in Arnheim’s time. Pearce states that abstract imagery is not innate; rather, “it must be created from within. We must then process that imagery, transfer it into images available to the senses out there. If we cannot, we have no imagination, and if we have no imagination we are automatically grounded in sensory-motor imagery.”72 When the mind is bombarded with sensory input from digital media, there is no place for acquiring and manipulating abstract imagery. There is no creation of images from within, and therefore no imagination. In his warning about the dangers of children’s exposure to digital media, Latham concludes that “young children’s spontaneous imaginative capabilities may be neurologically foreclosed and become increasingly impoverished as exposure to screen-based electronic entertainment rises.”73 The internal process of imagination is replaced by the outside exposure to the digital media. Kline summarizes this shift as one in which “marketing, rather than entertainment, considerations dominate the design of children’s characters, the fictions in which they appear, and hence the way children play.”74 At the same time, “play, the most important modality of childhood learning is thus colonized by marketing objectives making the imagination the organ of corporate desire. The consumption ethos has become the vortex of children’s culture.”75

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Virtual worlds may therefore pose a fundamental harm to the development of children’s imagination through the ways in which they distort children’s sense perceptions. However, the harm posed to children’s imagination by the use of virtual worlds is challenging in two ways: it is intangible, and there is a paucity of research into children’s experiences with virtual worlds.

The Visualization Hypothesis Most, if not all, of the empirical research regarding media and the imagination was conducted during the 1980s and therefore focused on television. For several reasons—undoubtedly the problem of quantifying imagination being one of them—this line of research has not been pursued further to other, more advanced digital media. Therefore, we will review the existing research in this field, and the effects of more advanced digital media will be drawn by analogy. Two competing theories have been introduced regarding the effects of TV use on creative imagination: stimulation theory posits that TV stimulates creative imagination through its content; reduction theory, on the other hand, posits that TV hinders the development of creative imagination.76 While five types of reduction hypotheses have been proposed in the literature,77 only the visualization hypothesis is relevant and will be discussed here.78 The visualization hypothesis posits, in essence, that the visual nature of TV is responsible for the reductive effect that TV has on creative imagination. Unlike verbal media, such as radio and print, TV presents the viewer with ready-made visual images and thus leaves little room for forming one’s own. When engaged in creative thinking, it is hard to dissociate oneself from the images supplied by TV, with the result that one has greater difficulty generating novel ideas and images from TV.79 Valkenberg et al. have found some support for the visualization hypothesis. They reviewed a number of studies which indicated that children who watched a TV story more often used visual content as a basis for drawing story related inferences, whereas children who had heard the same story on a radio more often based their inferences on the verbal content, as well as information from outside of the story, such as personal experience.80 Goldberg, too, found that “TV supplies the same image to millions of people at the same time. We process those images rather than create them.”81 Goldberg and Latham support this line of thinking: With images that are processed through the sensory system, rather than created in the mind’s eye, we take in what Giegerich (1985) refers to as a

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‘distillation of image’ (p. 17)…82 In the case of young children, neuronal pathways are being wired and shed according to their use patterns. When concentrated representational electronic images are observed through the visual sensory system, other body and sense modalities consequently receive less stimulation.83 Further support for the visualization hypothesis was provided by Lang et al.,84 as well as Conway and Siegelman, who found that “heavy viewing destroys the natural ability of children to form mental images from what they hear or read. With too much TV, the young child’s basic capacity of imagination, like an unused muscle, never reaches a level adequate for performing even the most elementary of creative acts.”85 Mander writes that “more than any other single effect, television places images in our brain. It is a melancholy fact that most of us give little importance to this implantation, perhaps because we have lost touch with our own image-creating abilities, how we use them and the critical functions they serve in our lives.”86 This can have a negative effect on the development of creative imagination in children. Pearce argues: Television feeds both stimulus and response into that infant-child brain, as a single paired-effect, and therein lays the danger. Television floods the brain with a counterfeit of the response the brain is supposed to learn to make to the stimuli of words or music. As a result, much structural coupling between mind and environment is eliminated; few metaphoric images develop; few higher cortical areas of the brain are called into play; few, if any, symbolic structures develop.87 Pearce concludes that “failing to develop imagery means having no imagination.”88 In their research on video game users and dreams, Gackenbach et al. found that high-end users were associated with the lucid dream type, had more dead and imaginary characters in their dreams, and were coded as containing more incongruent and vague elements than were those of low-end gamers.89 Gackenbach et al. assume that dream bizarreness in high-end video game users is a result of a more developed creative imagination.90 Similarly, a study conducted among users of the virtual world Everquest found that 80.6% of the female and 58.4% of the male players reported dreaming of the virtual world or having a dream taking place in the virtual world environment.91 However, these findings may rather indicate the deep influence of video games (and consequently, virtual worlds) on the user. It might

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be said that the most ‘sacred’ space of the imagination—dreams—has been ‘invaded’ by the digital media, and that this is a warning sign as to its deep and embracing influence. In a recent study, Calvert and Valkenburg support this argument by stating that overall, “the data support a reductive effect of media exposure.”92 According to Edwards, the first way of understanding the connection between reality and imagination draws on elements, “taken from reality, from a person’s previous experience.”93 This is where a child might take an old sheet and use it to represent a cave or a pond, for playing a game about woolly mammoths. But what happens when that sheet is a toy manufactured by a large company with the intention that it be “consumed” to create profit? Children can take a small, wooden Thomas the Tank Engine train produced by HIT Entertainment, and they can locate it within their experience of existing Thomas the Tank Engine movies, television shows, DVDs, online games, magazines, books, toys, clothing, and accessories. Yet, the train’s potential to be anything other than a “Thomas the Tank Engine” is greatly limited, when compared to an old sheet’s potential to become a cave or pond. According to Edwards: ‘[R]eality’ experienced by children operating in digital–consumerist orientated worlds is lacking in the richness necessary for fostering a productive imagination as a means of supporting play as a leading activity. This interpretation of the role of play as a leading activity in contemporary contexts echoes those arguments regarding the ill effects of digital technologies and consumerism on children’s development by positioning the social context children inhabit as destructive to a particular view of ‘normal’ development.94 Finally, Calvert and Valkenburg conclude that while only a few studies have been conducted in the field of creative imagination and interactive media, “there is reason to expect that even exposure to newer media can disrupt creative behaviours.”95 The Displacement Hypothesis and New Media Digital media call upon us to extend the visualization hypothesis further, from the senses of vision and sound to higher psychological dimensions of perception—including time, interaction and associated aspects as a narrative construction—and judgments concerning reality versus fantasy. We posit that these are weak and almost irrelevant in TV, stronger in video games and predominant in virtual worlds, as the user becomes more and more immersed in

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the medium, and as more and more of the material is supplied for the user by the medium. Accordingly, we propose to rename this phenomenon the ‘displacement hypothesis’ in order to capture these new cognitive and sensory dimensions that are being displaced by the immersive virtual environment, and to emphasize that when manufactured content is supplied ready-made to the individual, it displaces the creative imaginative processes that the individual would otherwise supply for him or herself. In children whose creative imagination is still developing, such continuous displacement could have permanent effects on the creative imagination.

Conclusion It is no longer the visual only that is displacing the images that could have been created by the imagination; time, space, interaction and narrative— even presence and being—are being projected onto us. We consume them from the digital media, and so they replace the natural pace and creation of these mental processes within our person. This has much more significant effects on the individual than when only the visual sense is being displaced. The most internal object, the mind, is becoming externalized, nourishing itself falsely from the digital media dimensions, and leaving little space for the flourishing of the imagination. But when this operates not only on adults, but on children from the very youngest ages—when it forms the basis of the development of their cognition and creative imagination—then we risk producing permanent deprivations in thinking and imagining. We risk producing the imaginationless generation—and we do not know what effects this will have on human cognition and culture as we move into a future increasingly dominated by digital media, virtual reality simulations, and artificial intelligence.

Notes 1 Charlie Dellinger-Pate and Rosemarie J. Conforti, “Webkinz as Consumerist Discourse: A Critical Ideological Analysis,” in High Tech Tots: Childhood in a Digital World, ed. Ilene R. Berson and Michael J. Berson. (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2010), 267. 2 Ilene R. Berson and Michael J. Berson, “Panwapa: Global Kids, Global Connections,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 21, no 4 (2009): 28.

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3 Christine X. Wang, Ilene R. Berson, Candace Jaruszewicz, Lynn Hartle and Dina Rosen, “Young Children’s Technology Experiences in Multiple Contexts: Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory Reconsidered,” in High Tech Tots: Childhood in a Digital World, ed. Ilene R. Berson and Michael J. Berson (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2010), 32. 4 Khe Foon Hew and Wing Sum Cheung, “Use of Three-Dimensional (3-D) Immersive Virtual Worlds in K-12 and Higher Educational Settings: A Review of the Research,” British Journal of Educational Technology 41, no. 1 (2010): 33–55. 5 Hakan Tüzün, Meryem Yilmaz-Soylu, Tüurkan Karakuş, Yavuz Inal, and Gonka Kizilkaya, “The Effects of Computer Games on Primary School Students’ Achievement and Motivation in Geography Learning,” Computers & Education 52 (2009): 68–77. 6 Jackie Marsh, “Young Children’s Play in Online Virtual Worlds,” Journal of Early Childhood Research 8, no. 1 (2010): 30. 7 Marsh, “Young Children’s Play,” 35–6. 8 Jeanette Hannaford, “Imaginative Interaction with Internet Games. For Children and Teachers,” Literacy 46, no. 1 (2012): 25–32. 9 Dellinger-Pate, “Webkinz as Consumerist Discourse,” 264. 10 Sara M. Grimes, “Playing by the Market Rules: Promotional Priorities and Commercialization in Children’s Virtual Worlds,” Journal of Consumer Culture 15, no. 1 (2015): 110–134. 11 Grimes, “Playing by the Market Rules,” 120. 12 Grimes, “Playing by the Market Rules,” 120. 13 Grimes, “Playing by the Market Rules,” 122. 14 Grimes, “Playing by the Market Rules,” 126. 15 Grimes, “Playing by the Market Rules,” 126. 16 Sara M. Grimes, “Configuring the Child Player,” Science, Technology & Human Values 40, no. 1 (2015): 126–148. 17 Grimes, “Configuring the Child Player,” 142. 18 David Cohen and Stephen A. MacKeith, The Development of Imagination (London: Routledge, 1991), 11–14. 19 Lev S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 537. 20 Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 16. 21 Mary M. Watkins, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues (Boston: Sigo Press, 1990), 75. 22 Christopher Lawrence Latham, High Tech Image Influences on the Development of Young Children’s Imaginative World Making, Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering Vol. 63(7-B) (2003): 91.

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23 Rene Dubos, Man Adapting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 7. 24 Barry Ulanov and Ann Ulanov, The Healing Imagination (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1991). 25 Ray Misson, “Imagination, the Individual and the Global Media,” in Cross-Roads of the New Millennium, Proceedings of the Technological Education and National Development (TEND) Conference 2nd, April 8–10, 2000, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. 26 David Henry Feldman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Howard Gardner, Changing the World: A Framework for the Study of Creativity (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1994). 27 Kieran Egan, Romantic Understanding (London: Routledge, 1990), 166. 28 Patti M. Valkenberg and Tom H. A. van der Voort, “Influence of TV on Daydreaming and Creative Imagination: A Review of Research,” Psychological Bulletin 116, no. 2 (1994): 316–339; see also: Jerome L. Singer, The Inner World of Daydreaming (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); and Jerome L. Singer, “Navigating the Stream of Consciousness: Research in Daydreaming and Related Inner Experience,” American Psychologist 30 (1975): 727–738. 29 Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 56. 30 Cohen, Development of Imagination; see also Robert Silvey and Stephen MacKeith, “The Paracosm: A Special Form of Fantasy,” in Organizing Early Experience: Imagination and Cognition in Childhood, ed. Delmont C. Morrison (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1988). 31 Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: Routledge, 2005), 125. 32 Lev S. Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood,” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42, no. 1 (2004): 11–12 (English translation 2004 M. E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text Voobrazhenie i tvorchestvo v detskom vozraste. Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1967). 33 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 72–3. 34 Cobb, Ecology of Imagination, 29. 35 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 2: The Inner and the Outer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949/1992), 37e. 36 Piaget, Jean, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, trans. C. Gattegno & F. M. Hodgson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 142. 37 Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation, 142. 38 Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, The House of Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 32. 39 Singer, The House of Make-Believe, 32. 40 Singer, The House of Make-Believe, 32. 41 Dave Grossman and Gloria Degaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence (New York: Crown Publishers, 1999), 58.

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42 Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination, 27. 43 Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation, 87. 44 Natalia Gajdamaschko, “Vygotsky on Imagination: Why an Understanding of the Imagination is an Important Issue for School Teachers,” Teaching Education 16, no. 1 (2005): 15–17. 45 Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation, 118. 46 Robert W. Mitchell, “Imaginative Animals, Pretending Children,” in Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children, ed. Robert W. Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 4. 47 Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 67. 48 Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 25. 49 Laurence R. Goldman, Child’s Play: Myth, Mimesis and Make-Believe (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Angeline Lillard, “Just Through the Looking Glass: Children’s Understanding of Pretense,” in Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children, ed. Robert W. Mitchell, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 102–114. 50 Singer, The House of Make-Believe, 22 51 Rebecca L. Shiner, Ann S. Masten, and Jennifer M. Roberts, “Childhood Personality Foreshadows Adult Personality and Life Outcomes Two Decades Later,” Journal of Personality 71, no. 6 (2003): 1145–1170. 52 Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, Make-Believe: Games and Activities for Imaginative Play. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Books/ Imagination Press, 2001; Sara Smilansky, The Effects of Sociodramatic Play on Disadvantaged Preschool Children (New York: Wiley, 1986). 53 James N. Aronson and Claire Golomb, “Preschoolers’ Understanding of Pretense and Presumption of Congruity Between Action and Representation,” Developmental Psychology 35, no. 6 (1999): 1414–1425; Claire Golomb and Regina Kuersten, “On the Transition from Pretense Play to Reality: What Are the Rules of the Game?” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 14 (1996): 203–227. 54 Sandra W. Russ and Ethan D. Schafer, “Affect in Fantasy Play, Emotion in Memories and Divergent Thinking,” Creativity Research Journal 18, no. 3 (2006): 347–354. 55 Adams, Jonathan, “The End of Make Believe,” Newsweek, August 24, 2003, https://www.newsweek.com/end-make-believe-135693. 56 Alix Spiegel, “Old Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills,” npr, February 21, 2008, www.npr.org/templates/story.php?storyId=19212514. He states, “A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked children ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving… In 2001, researches repeated this experiment…the results were very different. Today’s 5-year-olds were

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acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of 5-year-old 60 years ago.” 57 Singer, The House of Make Believe. 58 Craig S. Rosen, David C. Schwebel, and Jerome L. Singer, “Preschoolers’ Attributions of Mental States in Pretense,” Child Development 66 (1997): 1133–1142; David C. Schwebel, Craig S. Rosen, and Jerome L. Singer, “Preschoolers’ Pretend Play and Theory of Mind: The Role of Jointly-Conducted Pretense,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 17, no. 3 (1999): 333–348. 59 Sharon B. Wulff, “The Symbolic and Object Play of Children with Autism: A Review,” Journal of Autism and Development Disorders 15, no. 2 (1985): 139–148. 60 Paul L. Harris, The Work of the Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 6. 61 Harris, The Work of Imagination, 6. 62 Singer, The House of Make-Believe, 268–9. 63 Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity,” 29. 64 Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 348. 65 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 91. 66 Cobb, Ecology of Imagination, 15. 67 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 87. 68 Vygotsky, “Imagination and Creativity,” 88. 69 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1964), 24. 70 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (California: University of California Press, 1969), 92. 71 James R. Peterson, “Eyes Have They, But They See Not: A Conversation With Rudolf Arnheim About a Generation that Has Lost Touch with its Senses,” Psychology Today (June 1972): 55. 72 Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child Matures (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985), 63. 73 Latham, High Tech Image, iv. 74 Stephen Kline, “Limits To The Imagination: Marketing And Children’s Culture,” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Ian H. Angus and Sut Jhally (New York: Routledge, 1989), 311. 75 Kline, “Limits to the Imagination,” 311 [emphasis added]. 76 Valkenburg, “Influence of TV on Daydreaming,” 324–5. 77 Salomon, “Television is Easy”; Singer, “Children’s Imagination as Predicted by Family Patterns.” 78 The others are: Passivity hypothesis—TV is seen as an “easy” medium, requiring little mental effort. (See: Salomon, “Television Is Easy”); Displacement hypothesis: this hypothesis assumes that TV takes up time that could otherwise be spent on

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other activities; Rapid Pacing hypothesis: TV’s reductive effect is attributed to the rapid pace and continuous movement of TV programs, which allow the viewer little time to reflect on the program content; Arousal hypothesis: the arousing quality of action-oriented and violent programs fosters a physically active and impulsive behaviour orientation, which disturb the peace and quiet necessary for creative imagination (see: Singer, “Children’s Imagination as Predicted by Family Patterns”). 79 Jessica Beagles-Roos and I. Gat, “Specific Impact of Radio and Television on Children’s Story Comprehension,” Journal of Educational Psychology 75 (1984): 128–137; Patricia Greenfield and Jessica Beagles-Roos, “Radio vs. Television: Their Cognitive Impact on Children of Different Socioeconomic and Ethnic Groups,” Journal of Communication 38, no. 2 (1988): 71–92; C. W. Meline, “Does the Medium Matter?” Journal of Communication 26, no. 3 (1976): 81–89; and Edwin Webb, “Images of Television: Some Reflections,” Use of English 32, no. 1(1980): 10–17. 80 Greenfield, “Radio vs. Television: Their Cognitive Impact”; L. K. Meringhoff, “Influence of the Medium on Children’s Story Apprehension,” Journal of Educational Psychology 72, no. 2 (1980): 240–249; M. M. Vibbert and L. K. Meringoff, “Children’s Production and Application of Story Imagery: A Cross-Medium Investigation” (Tech. Rep. No. 23). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Project Zero, 1981. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 210 682). 81 Debra Ann Goldberg, “Television from a Jungian Perspective,” Psychological Perspectives 29, no. 2 (1994): 16. 82 Goldberg, “Television from a Jungian Perspective,” 11–2. 83 Goldberg, “Television from a Jungian Perspective,” 11–2. 84 Annie Lang, Kuljinder Dhillon, and Qingwen Dong, “The Effects of Emotional Arousal and Valence on Television Viewers’ Cognitive Capacity and Memory,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 39, no. 3 (1995) 313–327. 85 Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Snapping (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1978), 191. 86 Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Perennial, 1978), 216. 87 Joseph C. Pearce, Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Inheritance (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1992), 166. 88 Pearce, Evolution’s End, 167. 89 Jayne Gackenbach, “Video Game Play and Lucid Dreams: Implications for the Development of Consciousness,” Dreaming, 16 (2006): 96–110; Jayne Gackenbach, “Electronic Media and Lucid-Control Dreams: Morning After Reports,” Dreaming 19 (2009): 1–6; Jayne Gackenbach, Beena Kuruvilla, and Raelyne Dopko, “Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness,” Dreaming, 19, no. 4 (2009): 218–231; Jayne Gackenbach, Beena Kuruvilla, Raelyne Dopko, and Hau Le, “Dreams and Video Game Play,” in Computer Games: Learning Objectives, Cognitive Performance and Effects on Devel-

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opment, ed. Agustin Soria and Julian Maldonado, 127–136 (Hauppage, NY: Nova Science, 2010); and Jayne Gackenback, Ian Matty, Beene Kuruvilla, Ashley Nicole Samaha, Alexis Zederayko, Jordan Olischefski, and Heather Von Stackelberg, “Video Game Play: Waking and Dreaming Consciousness,” in Perchance to Dream: The Frontiers of Dream Psychology, ed. Stanley Krippner and Debbie Joffe Ellis, 257–271 (Hauppage, NY: Nova Science, 2012). 90 Gackenbach, “Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness.” 91 David Smahel, Lukas Blinka, and Ondrej Ledabyl, “MMORPG Playing of Youths and Adolescents: Addiction and its Factors,” Vancouver Association of Internet Researchers (2007). https://is.muni.cz/publication/726643?lang=en. 92 Sandra L. Calvert and Patti M. Valkenberg, “The Influence of Television, Video Games, and the Internet on Children’s Creativity,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Development of the Imagination, ed. Marjorie Taylor (London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 438. 93 Susan Edwards, “Lessons from a ‘Really Useful Engine’™: Using Thomas the Tank Engine™ to Examine the Relationship Between Play as a Leading Activity, Imagination and Reality in Children’s Contemporary Play Worlds,” Cambridge Journal of Education 41, no. 2 (2011): 199. 94 Edwards, “Lessons from a Really Useful Engine,” 206; see also: Karen Brooks, Consuming Innocence: Popular Culture and Our Children (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008); and Linn, Susan, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Our Children (New York: The New Press, 2004). 95 Calvert, “The Influence of Television, Video Games, and the Internet,” 448; see also: Maya Götz, Dafna Lemish, Amy Aldman, and Hyesung Moon, Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children: When Harry Potter Meets Pokémon in Disneyland (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005).

CHAPTER 4

Internet Regulation: Could and Should the Internet Be Regulated? Introduction: A Need for Internet Regulation? From the inception of the Internet, whether and how it should be regulated have been contested topics. Arguments range across the continuum: at one extreme are those who argue that the Internet is not a unique technology, and so ordinary regulations are sufficient to contain its harms; at the other extreme are those who argue that the Internet is so unique it should not be regulated at all. This debate is ongoing and rests on the tension between the claimed benefits of the Internet—that it provides a free market of ideas and a source of cheap information—and its alarming consequences: violence, pornography, organized criminal activity, surveillance, spam, and so on. We argue that the answer lies somewhere in between these extremes. There exists a real need for regulation of the Internet, but this regulation should be within the limits of freedom of speech, which we discuss in Chapter 5, and should take into account the lessons drawn from Chapters 6 and 7, where we discuss alternative approaches. Chalfant et al. wrote in 1980: The time when developments in science and technology were automatically welcomed as progressive and beneficial has passed. Public confidence in the scientific community has given way to skepticism, if not distrust. This attitude is due in part to the recent development of highly complex and sophisticated technologies which, from their inception, have been recognized as entailing substantial risks as well as benefits. The public now expects the government to evaluate independently the risks of new technologies before they are introduced and, moreover, demands input into the decision making processes that sanction their use.1 The public’s attitude towards regulating the Internet was different from that towards DNA-related scientific developments, although these controversies took place at about the same time. Yet while the harms posed by recombinant DNA research may have been overblown, the harms posed by the Internet have not been fully appreciated. Livingstone and Bober argue that, “in terms of media regulation, therefore, it may be that the stakes have never been higher, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398887_004

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as society seeks to strike a balance between the failure to minimize the dangers and the failure to maximize the opportunities.”2 Striking the balance between dangers and opportunities, as well as the tension between technology and regulation, is an age-old topic. Napoleon, for example, never responded to letters for at least a year; the logic of this principle was that if the problem still persisted after that time, then it would be important enough for the Emperor to give it his attention.3 Intentionally or not, many policy-makers are dealing with the advent of new communications technologies in much the same manner. Unlike in the time of Napoleon, however, the complexity and sensitivity of the issues at stake is hampering our ability not only to regulate, but even to choose beneficial policies in the first place. Given the Internet’s potential to enhance democracy and promote the exchange of ideas, not everyone agrees that it should be regulated at all.4 In many ways, information and knowledge perform best when they are accessible and free to everyone. On the other hand, the Internet possesses a great potential for crime, abuse, and social ills. Regulation, at least in some areas, is very much needed.5 We identify four main issues that require regulation.6 First is the protection of social and moral values.7 The protection of children from harmful media consumption, as discussed in Chapter 1, is the most prominent example and the one with which we are most concerned here.8 Second, national security and criminal activities must be regulated.9 Third, the Internet is regulated in the name of protecting the intellectual property of copyright holders from those wishing to copy, modify, or redistribute copyrighted materials, while still upholding accessibility and free speech.10 Fourth, regulation is needed to protect computer security and to address unwanted messages or contacts—such as spam, surveillance and privacy—as well as protection against computer viruses and malware.11 From the inception of the Internet, academics and jurists have considered whether it creates a new area of law.12 Justice Easterbrook has argued that treating Internet law as a new field of law would be no different from studying the “Law of the Horse” in the nineteenth century.13 Easterbrook’s position and the responses to it have divided the field into two camps. One camp, the “unexceptionalists,” argue that Internet law can and should be dealt with by using the existing legal system14; the other camp, the “exceptionalists,” argue that there is a need for a new system of laws to deal with the challenges posed by the Internet.15 According to Berman: While the unexceptionalists have relied too much on the application of ‘mythical well-settled principles,’ the exceptionalists have, at times,

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tended to the opposite extreme, assuming that the rise of cyberspace changed nearly all extant ideas about law and the role of the state. Indeed, many of these exceptionalists rejected the idea that Internet ‘communities’ could or should be governed by territorially based sovereigns at all. John Perry Barlow’s much-quoted Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,16 issued in 1996, illustrates this approach.17 Echoing Barlow’s declaration, Johnson and Post argue that there is no way to regulate the Internet in a legitimate and effective way by using a jurisdiction based on geographical boundaries. They further argue that the Internet should create its own legal jurisdiction, or multiple jurisdictions.18 Others point to the hazards presented in the online environment, and highlight the legitimate interests that state and non-state entities have in mitigating these harms.19 A second generation of Internet-regulation scholars have emerged amidst this debate—a generation that was less optimistic regarding online regulation, and more aware of individual empowerment.20 For these scholars, code itself is a means of regulating behaviour on the Internet. If one seeks to prevent trucks from entering a parking lot, for example, one can place a sign stating that this is forbidden and hire guards to make sure that drivers comply. Another option would be to build a barrier at the parking entrance that prevents trucks above a certain height from driving inside. In both cases, the guards and the barrier are used as regulatory tools. The second generation of Internet-regulation scholars argue that architectural regulation in the form of code would be more effective than a ‘guard’ because it would prevent transgressions from occurring at all by virtue of inhering in the technology itself.21 The third generation of regulatory thought about the Internet combined some of the perspectives of the previous two.22 Much like the exceptionalists, third-generation regulatory scholars believe that there is a fundamental difference between the Internet and other regulatory spheres; this difference creates new opportunities and alters existing conventions. Nonetheless, much like the second generation, the third generation is concerned about the effects of using code as a regulatory instrument. This perception focuses on maintaining a better balance between the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet. Lewis argues that a hands-off approach is no longer sufficient to allow the state to maintain control. The idea that a functioning rule of law would spontaneously emerge to preside over the internet has been disproved and, instead, “passive sovereignty is evolving into a more active assertion of the rights of national governments to exert their control.”23 Before we discuss code as a regulatory instrument to mitigate harm, it is important to review the infrastructure and control of the Internet.

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Internet Infrastructure Understanding the Internet’s technical architecture is necessary in order to understand an analysis of online legal issues. A technical definition of the Internet includes not only physical devices, but also discusses the Internet’s network transmission and the protocols that glue the networks together.24 These protocols allow networks and the computers connected to them to communicate with one another and, using a common address system, to find other computers similarly connected. This collection of protocols is known as TCP/IP, after the two most important protocols: TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol). While an underlying collection of networks makes up the Internet, various applications designed to work with Internet protocols provide facilities to Internet users. The most significant applications are the World Wide Web, electronic mail, file downloading using file transfer protocol (ftp), Usenet newsgroups, instant messaging, streaming audio and video, and voice telephony (Voice Over IP, or VoIP).25 The core infrastructure of the Internet consists largely of routers or switches, which are computers designed to receive and forward packets of data, hosts, which store programs and data, and pipes, which are telecommunications connections that link the hosts and routers. Network providers have both physical links to and contractual relations with other networks and their providers. The physical connection—which may be a bilateral link to the other networks or at a special-purpose multilateral traffic-exchange center, such as MAE-East (Metropolitan Area Exchange)26 in Washington DC or LINX (London Internet Exchange) in London—enables traffic to flow directly from one network to the next. The contractual arrangement, often known as a ‘peering agreement,’ governs the exchange of traffic among the networks.27 Undersea data cables, sometimes referred to as ‘submarine cables,’ which cross the ocean extending from the U.S. to other continents, are referred to as the ‘backbone’ of the Internet. These cables are crucial to carrying out the transmission of financial transactions, telecommunications, and information. As of today there are more than 420 submarine cables that run across the entire world, including less populated geographic regions such as the remote areas of the Pacific Islands and the Arctic Circle.28 The Internet is based on two main providers: content and access. Access providers are typically commercial organizations selling Internet access to home and commercial users. Commercial-access providers are commonly known as Internet service providers, or ISPs.29 Content providers furnish much of the content published on the Internet. Content comes in many forms, but

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generally divides into real-time and downloadable content. Real-time content can be viewed or heard as the user accesses it, either delivered in batches or by maintaining a continuous stream of data. Downloadable content takes the form of a file that can be copied from the Internet site to the user’s own computer.30 In contrast to most other media formats, Internet users play a central role as content providers. In the context of code regulation, ISPs employ filtering and blocking, whereas content providers mainly employ age-verification and similar screening techniques. As will be discussed below, we show that these measures are problematic from a freedom-of-speech point of view and do not address intangible harms.

Control of the Internet The proper functioning of any network depends on there being some centralized control.31 The global telephone system, for example, is controlled by the International Telecommunication Union, now part of the United Nations. The Internet is coordinated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private-sector non-profit organization set up in 1998 by the United States. Such control is necessary for standardization, and to ensure that the different elements of the network are able to communicate with one another. One of the myths of the Internet is that it is uncontrollable. Like all myths, this is partly true and partly wishful thinking. Compared with the telephone system, the Internet is relatively regulation-free. Nonetheless, there are four areas that require control and coordination to operate smoothly. The ‘domain name system’ of addresses is the general name of these areas of control. The domain name system performs a number of key functions. First, there is a need to determine who will operate the database of generic names ending with suffixes such as .com, .net, .info, and others. This includes the two-letter country-code suffixes (such as .ca for Canada). Second, codes up to 12-digits—referred to as Internet Protocol numbers—are required for the computers in the network to identify other computers. Third, there are root servers: when Internet users surf the Web or send email, root servers match domain names with corresponding Internet Protocol numbers in a matter of milliseconds. Root servers are located in NASA, a Dutch non-profit organization, several universities, the U.S. military, and private companies. Today, ten root servers are operated from the United States and one each from Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Tokyo. Fourth, the domain name system

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fulfills the need to establish technical standards to allow for the Internet’s interoperability. Many countries argue that the Internet should be operating under a multilateral treaty, considering ICANN to be an instrument of American online hegemony. Another iteration of this ongoing debate took place at a 2012 meeting in Dubai; the United Nations summit broke down after the U.S., Canada, and several other Western democracies refused to sign a treaty that would grant a UN agency more authority over how the Internet is managed.32 Further development on a different avenue occurred in 2015, when Russian ships were reported to be placed near undersea data cables in hard-to-reach areas of the ocean. While cutting those data cables may not cause serious or lasting damage to the world, such an act does symbolize Russia’s desire to influence the United States’ control over internet policy. The loss of these cables would affect ecommerce transactions of at least $10 trillion USD on a daily basis.33 On June 9, 2016, the Department of Commerce formally approved ICANN’s proposal to transition out of its long-standing contract and assume independent management of the critical ‘naming and numbering’ function of the Internet.34 ICANN—which is governed by a complex multi-stakeholder structure—will directly control what is essentially the address book of the Internet: the ability to generate and assign new top-level domain names; the means to ensure that when one types, say, www.asil.org that it goes to the right website; the power to designate who adjudicates disputes over website names, and so on.35 According to Raustiala, “by relinquishing its role as primus inter pares among states, the United States seemingly will lose an important source of power and control over the Internet. And yet even as its power is diminished, the achievement of its preferences,” i.e. the Internet’s high degree of openness, diversity, completeness, and fundamental resilience, “will be strengthened.”36 This debate ties in to the difference in regulatory approach between the U.S. (with Canada) and the European Union and its allies. The North American approach prefers more flexible forms of regulation—i.e. voluntary self-regulation—due largely to pressure from Internet giants as well as the constitutional constraints of freedom of speech. On the other hand, the European approach is more concerned with the potential deleterious implications of Internet use, particularly privacy interests and harms to children, and takes a stricter approach to regulation. The different approaches parallel the general debate over the question of whether and how the Internet should be regulated, and are illustrated by the regulation of data transfer from the EU, in which the European Union’s commissioner surrendered to U.S. demands for self-regulation37; eventually, 15 years later, they faced a refusal by the European Union high court.38

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On October 6, 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its most significant judgment to date dealing with EU data transfer regulation. In Maximilian Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner,39 the CJEU invalidated the decision of the European Commission, finding that the EU-U.S. Safe Harbour agreement provided “adequate protection” for data transfers under Article 25 of the Directive.40 On February 2, 2016, the EU and the U.S. agreed on the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield as a replacement for the Safe Harbour, and on July 12, 2016, the European Commission published a formal decision finding that the Shield provides a level of data protection that is “essentially equivalent” to that of EU law.41 The Schrems judgment demonstrates both the reality and the illusion of the regulation of international data transfers under EU data protection law.42 While the CJEU continues the reality of legal protection for data protection rights, it demonstrates at the same time how EU law maintains the “exalting illusion” of imagining that EU standards can protect data transfers on a global basis. The position of the U.S. and its allies was that the current model of internet governance is designed to keep the internet open and free. However, nations such as Russia and China aspired for a different model of control on the information in their respective borders. For example, the Kremlin distrusts the internet because it “circumvents government-controlled ‘traditional’ media.”43 The Chinese government operates The Great Firewall of China, formally known as the Golden Shield Project, which is operated by the Ministry of Public Security.44 Golden Shield allows the Chinese government to control and block any content that is deemed offensive and creates a culture of selfcensorship, one that mandates companies be responsible for their own public content.45 The question of how much control private businesses should have in network regulation has arisen recently in the context of network neutrality.46 Net neutrality means avoiding preferential treatment for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and maintaining the transparency of policy decisions. Net neutrality includes regulating interconnection points throughout the entire Internet, without allowing broadband service providers to deliberately slow internet speeds or block service in favour of other internet services and apps.47 Currently the U.S. Federal Communication Commission has wiped off the books the rules barring internet providers from blocking or slowing content, or giving special treatment to certain content.48 Most major internet providers have promised not to block, throttle, or discriminate against legal content, but net neutrality activists don’t want to take the companies at their word. They’re fighting to block the FCC’s decision in both Congress and the courts while also working to pass new state laws.

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‘Code’ of Conduct Reidenberg was one of the first scholars to point out that in the digital age, software and hardware tend to regulate themselves—or rather, Internet users and developers tend to regulate themselves through technology.49 Reidenberg coined the term ‘Lex Informatica’ to refer to this development, comparing the newly emerging technology-embedded ‘law’ with the bottom-up-developed ‘Lex Mercatoria’ of the Middle Ages.50 Initially, he viewed this as positive, since for many reasons traditional legislatures are not a good fit for regulating a technology like the Internet; he invited public authorities to embrace instead the emerging ‘Lex Informatica’ to fill the regulatory gap.51 Reidenberg later turned more pessimistic, gaining a better appreciation for the downside of self-regulatory norms built into technology that bypass democratic control.52 Lessig has made a major contribution to the discussion of regulatory instruments in the context of code regulation for the Internet. He argues that the Internet is a unique regulatory sphere that should be treated differently from other, non-virtual, regulatory spheres.53 In many aspects, code is used in Internet applications to use technology to create restrictions on unacceptable conduct. However, technological control creates a risk to our moral judgment in other, less restricted, domains; as Spinello argues, “code should not be a surrogate for conscience.”54 While techniques based on communication seek to bring about behavioural change by engaging human rationale, techniques based on code operate by eliminating the possibility of undesired behavior. Lessig argues that Internet regulation may be achieved through code, since “law as code is the start to the perfect technology of justice.”55 The main systematic attempt to offer a set of criteria for judging normative technology has been made by Asscher,56 in the Institute for Information Law’s ‘code as law’ project.57 Asscher puts forward a fairly rough and tentative set of criteria, presented in the form of questions, using ‘code’ to indicate ‘normative technology.’58 He asks: 1. Can code rules be understood? If so, are they transparent and accessible to the general public? 2. Can the rules be trusted? Are they reliable in the sense of predictability? 3. Is there an authority that makes the code rules? 4. Is there a choice?59 This set of questions reflects the values of transparency, reliability, accountability, and choice—all of which are procedural criteria. ‘Techno-regulation’ has been defined as norm-enforcing technology, technology that in and of itself secures compliance.60 Brownsword presents two criteria for regulatory intervention: effectiveness and legitimacy, where legitimacy comes from respect for human rights and human dignity.61 Brownsword’s

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key criterion for assessing compliance-proof normative technology is the existence of choice.62 In subsequent work, Brownsword has outlined as additional criteria for techno-regulation: the principles of good governance, transparency and accountability.63 Particularly interesting is the remark that, even if technoregulation is implemented in a fully transparent and accountable way, transparency is still lost because the rule built into the techno-object simply becomes, for later generations, part of the object’s features and is no longer recognized for what it once was: a normative rule that purposefully influences people’s behavior. Then, “it is only outsiders and historians who can trace the invisible hand of regulation.”64 Whether there are disadvantages to this suggested process is not clear. Zittrain argues that: Generative networks like the Internet can be partially controlled, and there is important work to be done to enumerate the ways in which governments try to censor the Net. But the key move to watch is a sea change in control over the endpoint: lock down the device, and network censorship and control can be extraordinarily reinforced.65 Kesan and Shah have highlighted three characteristics of code that regulators should pay attention to: transparency of rules, open standards (which can be seen as transparency of the rule-making process), and default settings.66 The latter are important, because users tend not to change default settings, partly because they have a legitimating effect, for the default becomes the norm. This means that default settings ought to be made optimal for users, in light of the values that are at stake.67 In cases of pornography and intellectual property, for example, even a single click of a mouse can force extreme sanctions on the user.68 Users of offline media usually distinguish illegal content by the fact that it is not offered for sale; if it is for sale, the user assumes the content is legal. The situation is different online. Although the user is accustomed to assume that if it is accessible then it is legal, this is not always the case. This situation places the user in a vulnerable position. One solution would be for Internet service providers to implement filtering and, in turn, to offer users immunity for most categories of illegal material. A negative consequence of filtering and blocking could be that both users and the law might judge content as acceptable that is not blocked or filtered. An example of this approach exists in laws that criminalize unauthorized access to computer systems only if the user has broken the technical security protecting that system.69

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Advocating technology regulation via code to prevent the harms discussed in Chapter 1 is problematic. The intangible nature of the harm leaves only one identifiable indicator to regulate: usage time. This indicator is problematic both for practical reasons and because of its potential to violate freedom of speech. In a technology-created leviathan that operates automatically, code regulation is not a precise instrument. Within code regulation, filtering, blocking, and age verification are the more common variations. These tools are employed automatically, and they are not up to the challenge of mitigating many of the intangible harms we have highlighted. Code regulation is based on identifiable characteristics, factors, and variables that the machine—the computer—can understand and comply with. Nonetheless, when the harm is intangible, these factors and variables are hard to define, let alone transform into language that the machine can understand and implement. Filtering and Blocking Internet filtering and blocking are technologies that prevent access to or restrict the distribution of information.70 Jurisdictions such as Saudi Arabia and China widely use filtering to prevent access to political or pornographic material, thus creating “borders in cyberspace.”71 One example is the censorship of the phrase “Tiananmen Square” in Google Chinese, following the demands of the Chinese government.72 Information recently leaked from Google indicates that the company is designing a search engine system for the country that will blacklist numerous search terms related to politics and human rights, and will track and store information on users’ names, phone numbers, and search history for use by the Chinese government.73 British Telecom, a UK telecommunications operator, has employed the Cleanfeed system which blocks requests for Internet websites suspected of displaying child pornography.74 The British government has asserted that all Internet service providers should adopt a similar system.75 A court in Belgium ordered the implementation of measures by an Internet service provider to prevent users from accessing file-sharing websites and from distributing certain music files.76 In Canada, the Internet service provider Telus blocked users from visiting a website that supported the strike of Telus’ employees, while also blocking many unrelated sites.77 Blocking and filtering systems share common features: they are automatic, self-enforcing, and often opaque. These features are common to code regulation in general.78 Boyle79 and Swire80 both asserted that the nature of the Internet will cause regulators to focus on indirect enforcement, targeting providers rather than users, ‘elephants’ rather than ‘mice.’ Users and website

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owners may not be aware of the filtering or that access to a particular site has been blocked.81 Moreover, websites considered unacceptable by governments may be routinely blocked with a message to users suggesting that the website is not available (“file not found”), or users may encounter technical problems (“connection timeout”).82 This obscures the fact that censorship is taking place. Villeneuve has described the use of error pages as “an attempt to deflect criticism, allowing the authorities to claim that they are not censoring Internet content.”83 In other cases, governments employ practices that mislead end users. For example, in Uzbekistan there is a practice of informing users that pornographic content is the reason for blocking websites that are actually blocked for political reasons.84 Villeneuve observs that governments, “unable to justify the reason for blocking political content…choose to obscure or deny the fact that such content is in fact targeted.”85 Lessig argues that, “even if the users are aware of the filtering, they may not know who is responsible for it: it may be any entity upstream of the user.”86 Commercial forces are also involved. Filtering-software companies protect their lists of blocking sites, considering these lists as trade secrets. As these lists are generally encrypted, filtering-software companies have filed claims or threatened to do so against those who would make the lists public.87 According to McIntyre and Scott,88 in some cases such as the Australian Interactive Gambling Act of 2001, specific legal authority exists for a public body to investigate particular content, make determinations, and issue notices requiring ISPs to block access to that content.89 From a regulatory perspective, a more troubling situation occurs when governments use their capacity, without legislation, to encourage Internet service providers to engage in content filtering. This is what the UK government has done as part of self-regulation. According to Bright, consultation and cooperation were used to push Internet service providers such as British Telecom to automatically block customer access to URLs alleged to host child pornography, while the Internet Watch Foundation maintained the list of blocked URLs.90 Later, Grossman argues, UK authorities have indicated their intention to ensure that all UK Internet service providers adopt either Cleanfeed or a similar system, with the threat of legislation should ISPs fail to do so “voluntarily.”91 Furthermore, there is a real concern that requiring Internet service providers to filter content might allow them to externalize the costs associated with monitoring and blocking, thus causing high levels of censorship.92 Even more troubling are the incentives that filtering creates for Internet service providers. Kreimer argues that regulators can recruit “proxy censors” by targeting

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Internet service providers whose “dominant incentive is to protect themselves from sanctions, rather than to protect the target from censorship.”93 Recently Zitterin et al. conducted an empirical study of Internet filtering in 45 countries and found evidence of filtering in 26 of them.94 They conclude that “over the last couple of years, a confluence of technological, behavioral, and market forces have ushered in a new reality in which the playing field has been fundamentally altered.”95 Encryption by social media platforms, for example, “has effectively downgraded the filtering apparatuses used by states that filter the Internet.”96 Therefore, state authorities can no longer selectively block individual accounts, web pages, and stories. As a result, a growing number of countries have resorted to periodically shutting down Internet connectivity altogether. In India alone, twenty incidents of Internet shutdowns were recorded in the first six months of 2017.97 Countries that shut down the Internet in all or parts of the country in 2016 include Bahrain, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, and Malaysia.98 As the harms to children that we have discussed are inherent to the use of the Internet—not just what we watch, but that we watch—filtering techniques have little effect. Monitoring can allow better supervision by parents. Of course, regulation at home presents other challenges, as we discuss in Chapter 6. Furthermore, blocking and filtering may violate both providers’ and users’ freedom of speech rights, as we discuss in more detail in Chapter 5. Age Verification and Identity Authentication The purpose of age-verification technologies is to prevent minors from engaging with harmful material, such as pornography and gambling, and to ensure that adults do not use websites intended for children. Methods to determine a user’s age include using trusted third parties for verification (schools, banks, or government agencies are often used for this purpose), user self-identification, and credit-card requirements, for example. Technologies designed to authenticate a user’s identity work in the same manner. The Internet Safety Technical Task Force reported that available technologies make it challenging for children to pretend to be adults or for adults to pretend to be children, but that usually more than one technology is used to perform both functions.99 Willard questioned the utility of such technologies.100 Problems with age-verification and identity-authentication technologies have been identified by the ISTTF (Internet Safety Technical Task Force) Technology Advisory Board.101 For example, duress can cause victims to provide their verification credentials received as part of the process, thus enabling unauthorized persons pretending to be someone else to enter restricted sites; children can use a fake birth date and make use of their parents’ credit card information for false identification. The ISTTF concluded, “age verification and

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identity authentication technologies are appealing in concept but challenged in terms of effectiveness.”102 Nash et al. argue103 that recent advances in identity authentication and assurance mean that public authorities bear a renewed interest in the possibility of improving protection for minors through use of technological measures to verify age.104 At the same time, online deceit is remarkably common, with 39% of online teenagers in the U.S. admitting to lying about their age in order to access age-restricted services.105 Using payment methods as a measure of identifying children is challenging since children use a wide range of payment methods to purchase goods online—including online credits, debit and credit cards, Paypal, and pre-paid cards.106 Although this survey reports that most payments are made by parents, it’s worth noting that many children do have bank cards, and that in the UK, up to one in ten of those with bank accounts even use online banking.107

Conclusion Internet regulation in some form is needed to address the harms to children from media consumption, but the intangible nature of these harms means that technological regulations are not able to do an adequate job of modulating them. One way that these technologies can be used to address these harms is to prevent children from the lengthy use of virtual worlds. This is a rather mechanical solution that might miss the subtle issues involved with intangible and virtual harms. First, children can find ways to overcome these regulatory instruments by logging in with different user names. Second, although usage time is correlated with Internet addiction, it does not necessarily correlate with harm to the development of imagination, or other intangible harms. Third, this solution may violate free speech rights by forcing virtual-world companies to limit their customers’ usage time, which is the central element of their business model. Finally, this solution faces all the concerns related to code regulation—a lack of transparency, moral values, and accountability—in which users are not informed of the challenges they face, but are forced to cease usage after a specific amount of time.

Notes 1 James C. Chalfant, Michael E. Hartmann, and Alan Blakeboro, “Recombinant DNA: A Case Study in Regulation of Scientific Research,” Ecology Law Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1979): 55.

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2 Sonia Livingstone and Magdalena Bober, “Regulating the Internet at Home: Contrasting the Perspectives of Children and Parents,” in Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media, ed. D. Buckingham and R. Willett (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006), 94. 3 Michael Kirby, “The Fundamental Problem of Regulating Technology,” Indian Journal of Law and Technology 5 (2009): 9. 4 Nicholas Dickerson, “What Makes the Internet So Special? and Why, Where, How, and by whom Should its Content be Regulated?” Houston Law Review 46, no. 1 (2009): 67–8. 5 John G. Palfrey Jr. and Robert Rogoyski, “The Move to the Middle: The Enduring Threat of ‘Harmful’ Speech to the End-to-End Principle,” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 21 (2006): 37–8 (discussing problems associated with “harmful” online speech). 6 Kevin O’Keefe, John Palfrey, and Wendy Seltzer, “Internet Filtering in the United States and Canada,” in Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, ed. Ronald Diebert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinsky, and Jonathan Zittrain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 226. 7 Palfrey, “The Move to the Middle,” 38–39, noting the original problems that gave rise to a need to regulate the Internet dealt primarily with “offensive images, such as pornography, or text, such as hate speech.” 8 O’Keefe, “Internet Filtering in the United States and Canada,” 227–30, identifying congressional attempts to protect minors from explicit content on the Internet. 9 O’Keefe, “Internet Filtering in the United States and Canada,” 232; see also: Palfrey, “The Move to the Middle,” 41–2, detailing how political activists can use the Internet and attract the attention of governments. See generally: Ulrich Sieber and Phillip W. Brunst, Cyberterrorism: The Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2007). 10 Palfrey, “The Move to the Middle,” 40; see also: Jack M. Balkin, “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society,” New York University Law Review 79, no. 1 (2004): 13–18, assessing the Internet’s value as a means of facilitating access to and innovation based upon copyrighted material. 11 O’Keefe, “Internet Filtering in the United States and Canada,” 232, discussing congressional attempts to remedy security concerns; Palfrey, “The Move to the Middle,” 40, stating, “the security threats to the network often borne by spam and other means of dissemination [...] increase the potential damage of these activities.” 12 Paul Schiff Berman, ed., Law and Society Approaches to Cyberspace (London: Ashgate, 2007), xiii–xiv. 13 Frank H. Easterbrook, “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Article 7 (1996), 207–216.

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14 Jack L. Goldsmith, “The Internet and the Abiding Significance of Territorial Sovereignty,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5 (1998): 485–86; Jack L. Goldsmith, “Against Cyberanarchy,” University of Chicago Law Review 65 (1998): 422–30; Allan R. Stein, “The Unexceptional Problem of Jurisdiction in Cyberspace,” The International Lawyer 35 (1998): 1167–1191. 15 Dan L. Burk, “Federalism in Cyberspace,” Connecticut Law Review 28 (1996): 1095–136; David G. Post, “Against ‘Against Cyberanarchy,’” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 17, no. 4 (2002): 1365–1387. 16 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 17 Berman, Law and Society Approaches, xv–xvii. 18 David R. Johnson and David G. Post, “Law and Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace,” Stanford Law Review 48, no. 5 (1996): 1367–1402. 19 Goldsmith, “Internet and Territorial Sovereignty,” 485–86; Goldsmith, “Against Cyberanarchy,” 422–30; Stein, “The Unexceptional Problem.” 20 Paul Boyle, Law and Society Approaches to Cyberspace (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), Chapter 7; Julie E. Cohen, “Intellectual Privacy and Censorship of the Internet,” Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal 8 (1998): 693–701; Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Joel R. Reidenberg, “Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Rules Through Technology,” Texas Law Review 76 (1998): 553–85. 21 Bert-Jaap Koops, “Criteria for Normative Technology,” in Regulating Technology: Legal Futures, Regulatory Frames and Technological Fixes, ed. Roger Brownsword and Karen Yeung (Oxford: Hart Publishing 1998), 158. 22 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); David R. Johnson, Susan P. Crawford, and John G. Palfrey Jr., “The Accountable Internet: Peer Production of Internet Governance,” Virginia Journal of Law and Technology 9 (2004): 1–33; Jonathan Zittrain, “The Generative Internet,” Harvard Law Review 119 (2006): 1975– 2040 (2006). 23 James A. Lewis, “Sovereignty and the Role of Government in Cyberspace,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 16, no 2 (2010): 63. 24 Graham J. H. Smith, Internet Law and Regulation, 4th ed. (Sweet & Maxwell: London, 2007), 1. 25 Graham, Internet Law and Regulation, 4. 26 By 2009, many of the ISPs at MAE-East had moved to Equinix Ashburn, a competing Internet Exchange (IX). Today, several on-line resources (peeringdb.org, internetexchangemap.com) suggest MAE-East is gone. In any event, large providers tend to connect directly to allow higher speeds and reduce costs. Many of the smaller providers are now simply customers of the tier 1 network operators; see

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Scott M. Gross, “MAE Services: White Paper,” MCI, 2005, https://web.archive.org/ web/20050518153448/, http://www.mae.net/docs/WP8632.a.MAE%20Services.pdf. 27 Graham, Internet Law and Regulation, 5. 28 Nick Routley, “MAPPED: The World’s Network of Undersea Cables,” Business Insider, August 26, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/map-the-worldsnetwork-of-undersea-cables-2017-8. 29 Graham, Internet Law and Regulation, 12. 30 Graham, Internet Law and Regulation, 6. 31 Kenneth Neil Cukier, “Who Will Control the Internet? Washington Battles the World,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 6 (2005): 7–8. 32 Declan McCullagh, “U.N. Summit Implodes as U.S., Others Spurn Internet Treaty,” Cnet, December 13, 2012, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57559034-38/u.n-summit-implodes-as-u.s-others-spurn-internet-treaty/. 33 David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “Russian Ships Near Data Cables are Too Close for U.S. Comfort,” New York Times, October 25, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/10/26/world/europe/russian-presence-nearundersea-cables-concernsus.html?_r=0. 34 Brian Fung, “The U.S. Just Took One Step Closer to Privatizing a Core Part of the Internet,” Washington Post, June 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ the-switch/wp/2016/06/09/the-u-s-just-took-one-step-closerto-privatizing-a-corepart-of-the-internet. 35 Kal Raustiala, “Governing the Internet,” The American Journal of International Law 110, no. 3 (2016): 491. 36 Raustiala, “Governing the Internet.” 37 Nachshon Goltz, “Is There Anybody Out There? Analyzing the Regulation of Children’s Privacy Online in the U.S. and the EU According to Eberlein et al.,” Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper No, 11/2015, TBGI Project Subseries No. 22 (2015). 38 Ian Traynor and Owen Bowcott, “Facebook Row: U.S. Data Storage Leaves Users Open to Surveillance, Court Rules,” The Guardian, October 6, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/06/us-digital-data-storage-systemsenable-state-interference-eu-court-rules. 39 Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner, Case C-362/14, ECL:EU:C:2015:6506 (Judgment of 6 October 2015, European Court of Justice). 40 Christopher Kuner, “Reality and Illusion in EU Data Transfer Regulation Post Schrems,” German Law Journal 18, no. 4 (2017): 881. 41 Commission Implementing Decision 2016/1250 of 12 July 2016 Pursuant to Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Adequacy of the Protection Provided by the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, 2016 O.J. (L 207) 1, para. 137 (EU); The Privacy Shield has also been published in the U.S. Federal Register: Privacy Shield Framework, 81 Fed. Reg. 51,042 (August 2, 2016).

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42 Kuner, “Reality and Illusion in EU,” 910. 43 Julian Nocetti, “Contest and Conquest: Russia and Global Internet Governance,” International Affairs 91, no. 1 (2015): 113. 44 Zhi-Jin Zhong, Tongchen Wang, Minting Huang, “Does the Great Fire Wall Cause Self-Censorship? The Effects of Perceived Internet Regulation and the Justification of Regulation,” Internet Research 27, no. 4 (2017): 974–990, finding that perceived internet censorship significantly decreases the willingness to talk about sensitive issues and the likelihood of signing petitions with true names. 45 Torfox, “The Great Firewall of China: Background,” Torfox: A Stanford Project, June 1, 2011, https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/csl81/projects/2010-11/ FreedomOflnformationChina/the-great-firewall-of chinabackground/index.html. 46 Tim Wu, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination,” Journal of Telecommunications & High Technology Law 2 (2003): 141–179. 47 Federal Communications Commission, “Open Internet: Consumer Guide,” Federal Communications Commission, June 14, 2016, https://transition.fcc.gov/cgb/ consumerfacts/openinternet.pdf. 48 Klint Finley, “The FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules are Dead but the Fight Isn’t,” Wired, June 11, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/the-fccs-net-neutrality-rules-are-deadbut-the-fight-isnt/. 49 Joel R. Reidenberg, “Rules of the Road for Global Electronic Highways: Merging the Trade and Technical Paradigms,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 6 (1993): 287–305. 50 ‘Lex Mercatoria’ was the body of commercial law used by merchants throughout Europe during the medieval period. It evolved as a system of custom and best practice, which was enforced through a system of merchant courts along the main trade routes. It long functioned as the international law of commerce See: Henry Campbell Black, Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th ed. (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co., 1990), 911. 51 Black, Black’s Law Dictionary, 911. 52 Joel R. Reidenberg, “The Rule of Intellectual Property Law in the Internet Economy,” Houston Law Review 44, no. 4 (2007): 1073–95. 53 Lawrence Lessig, “The New Chicago School,” The Journal of Legal Studies 27, no. S2 (1998): 660–691; Lessig, Code and Other Laws. 54 Richard A. Spinello, “Code and Moral Values in Cyberspace,” Ethics and Information Technology 3 (2001): 137–150. 55 Lessig, Code and Other Laws. 56 Koops, Criteria for Normative Technology, 164. 57 Egbert J. Dommering and Lodewijk F. Asscher, eds., Coding Regulation: Essays on the Normative Role of Information Technology (The Hague: TMC Asser Press, 2006), 12. 58 Lodewijk F. Asscher, “‘Code’ as Law: Using Fuller to Assess Code Rules,” in Coding Regulation: Essays on the Normative Role of Information Technology, ed. Egbert J. Dommering and Lodewijk F. Asscher (The Hague: TMC Asser Press, 2006), 85.

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59 Asscher, “Code as Law,” 85. 60 Roger Brownsword, “What the World Needs Now: Techno-Regulation, Human Rights and Human Dignity,” in Global Governance and the Quest for Justice, Vol. 4, ed. Roger Brownsword (Oxford: Hart Publishing 2004), 210. 61 Brownsword, “What the World Needs Now,” 210. 62 Brownsword, “What the World Needs Now,” 230–232. 63 Brownsword, “What the World Needs Now,” section III. 64 Brownsword, “What the World Needs Now,” section III(i). 65 Jonathan Zittrain, “Perfect Enforcement on Tomorrow’s Internet,” in Regulating Technologies: Legal Futures, Regulatory Frames and Technological Fixes, ed. Roger Brownsword and Karen Yeung (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008), 155. See also: Joseph C. Rodriguez, “A Comparative Study of Internet Content Regulations in the United States and Singapore: The Invincibility of Cyberporn,” Asian-Pacific Law and Policy Journal 1, no. 1 (2000): 9; Yee Fen Lim, Cyberspace Law: Commentaries and Materials, 2nd ed. (Victoria, Australia: Oxford University Press, 2007), 396, discussing the inefficiency of the Singaporean ISP license regime in preventing access to explicit porn websites; particularly interesting is the discussion of the Australian legislator approach through the Broadcasting Services Act, at 406. 66 Jay P. Kesan and Rajiv C. Shah, “Deconstructing Code,” Yale Journal of Law & Technology 6 (2003–4): 277–389. 67 Rajiv C. Shah and Jay P. Kesan, “Manipulating the Governance Characteristics of Code,” University of Illinois College of Law Public Law and Legal Theory Research Papers, Research Paper No. 03-18 (2003), 5–8. 68 Jonathan Zittrain, “Internet Points of Control,” Boston College Law Review 43, no. 1 (2003), 36. 69 Sylvia M. Kierkegaard, “Here Comes the ‘Cybernators’!” Computer Law & Security Report 22, no. 5 (2006): 381; Orin Kerr, “Cybercrime’s Scope: Interpreting ‘Access’ and ‘Authorization’ in Computer Misuse Statutes,” New York University Law Review 78 (2003): 1596, suggesting that this approach should apply to unauthorized access offences generally. 70 T. J. McIntyre and Colin Scott, “Internet Filtering: Rhetoric, Legitimacy, Accountability and Responsibility,” in Regulating Technology: Legal Futures, Regulatory Frames and Technological Fixes, ed. Roger Brownsword and Karen Yeung (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1998), 109. 71 Nart Villeneuve, “The Filtering Matrix: Integrated Mechanisms of Information Control and the Demarcation of Borders in Cyberspace,” First Monday 11, no. 1 (2006), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1307/1227. 72 Hiawatha Bray, “Google China Censorship Fuels Calls for U.S. Boycott,” The Boston Globe, January 28, 2006, http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/01/28/ google_china_censorship_fuels_calls_for_us_boycott/.

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73 Ryan Gallagher and Lee Fang, “Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans to Closely Track Search Users in China,” The Intercept, September 21, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plansto-closely-track-search-users-in-china/. 74 Bernhard Warner, “BY Group to Block Access to Child Porn Web Sites,” Reuters, June 7, 2004, https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/world/2004-06-07-btcleanfeed_x.htm. 75 Wendy M. Grossman, “The Great Firewall of Britain,” net.wars, November 24, 2006, https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2006/11/the_great_firewall_of_ britain.html, quoting Vernon Coaker, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Home Department to Parliament saying, “We believe that working with the industry offers us the best way forward, but we will keep that under review if it looks likely that the targets will not be met.” 76 V. Scarlet Sabam, “Decision of the Court of First Instance in Brussels of 29 June 2007,” OUT-LAW News, July 6, 2007, http://www.out-law.com//default.aspx?page=8239. 77 Tom Barrett, “To Censor Pro-Union Web Site, Telus Blocked 766 Others,” TheTyee.ca, August 4, 2005, http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/. 78 Lessig, Code and Other Laws. 79 James Boyle, “Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors,” 66 University of Cincinnati Law Review 66 (1997): 177. 80 Peter P. Swire, “Of Elephants, Mice, and Privacy: International Choice of Law and the Internet,” The International Lawyer 32, no. 4 (1998): 991–1025. 81 A point made by Lessig, Code and Other Laws, in which he refers to ‘truth in blocking’ as a desirable characteristic. 82 Ronald J. Deibert and Nart Villeneuve, “Firewalls and Power: An Overview of Global State Censorship of the Internet,” in Human Rights in the Digital Age, ed. Mathias Klang and Andrew Murray (Portland, OR: Glass House Press, 2005), 119. 83 Villeneuve, “The Filtering Matrix.” 84 Villeneuve, “The Filtering Matrix.” 85 Villeneuve, “The Filtering Matrix.” 86 Lessig, Code and Other Laws, 257. 87 Brian R. Fitzgerald, “Edelman v. N2H2—At the Crossroads of Copyright and Filtering Technology,” Brooklyn Law Review 69, no. 4 (2004): 1471–1513. 88 McIntyre, “Internet Filtering,” 121 89 Interactive Gambling Act (Cwlth) 2001, s 24, https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/ C2017C00291. 90 Philip Hunter, “BT’s Bold Pioneering Child Porn Block Wins Plaudits Amid Internet Censorship Concerns,” Computer Fraud and Security 9 (2004): 4–5. 91 Wendy M. Grossman, “The Great Firewall of Britain,” net.wars, November 24, 2006, https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2006/11/the_great_firewall_of_britain.html

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92 Seth F. Kreimer, “Censorship by Proxy: The First Amendment, Internet Intermediaries and the Problem of the Weakest Link,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 11 (2006): 27–101. 93 Kreimer, “Censorship by Proxy,” 28. 94 Clark, Justin, Robert Faris, Ryan Morrison-Westphal, Helmi Norman, Casey Tilton, and Johnathan Zittrain, The Shifting Landscape of Global Internet Censorship (Cambridge, MA: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research, 2017). 95 Clark, The Shifting Landscape,” 1. 96 Clark, The Shifting Landscape,” 1. 97 Human Rights Watch, “India: 20 Internet Shutdowns in 2017,” Human Rights Watch, June 15, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/15/india-20-internetshutdowns-2017. 98 Access Now, “Latest News on #KeepItOn,” Access Now, 2018, https://www.accessnow.org/keepiton-news/. 99 IDology Inc., “IDology Expands on Its Member Statement to Internet Safety Technical Task Force’s Final Report,” IDology.com (2009), https://www.idology.com/ blog/idology-expands-on-its-member-statement-to-internet-safety-technicaltask-forces-final-report/. 100 Nancy Willard, “Research that is ‘Outdated and Inadequate?’: An Analysis of the Pennsylvania Child Predator Unit Arrests in Response to Attorney General Criticism of the Berkman Task Force Report,” embracecivility.org (2009), http://www.embracecivility.org/wp-content/uploadsnew/2011/10/papredator.pdf. 101 IDology Inc., “IDology Expands its Member Statement.” 102 IDology Inc., “IDology Expands its Member Statement,” 10 of Appendix D. 103 Victoria Nash, Rachel O’Connell, Bendert Zevenbergen, Allison Mishkin, Effective Age Verification Techniques: Lessons to be Learnt from the Online Gambling Industry (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2013), https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/archive/downloads/ publications/Effective-Age-Verification-Techniques.pdf. 104 The European Commission’s DG CONNECT has conducted expert workshops on the topic of Age Verification in the Digital Age whilst there are a number of panEuropean eID projects which seek to rationalize the enacting of online identification across borders (e.g. https://www.eid-stork2.eu/). 105 Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Maeve Duggan, Aron Smith, and Meredith Beaton, Teens, Social Media and Privacy (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2013), http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/TeensSocial-Media-And-Privacy.aspx. 106 Suren Ramasubbu, “A Close Look at the Online Spending Behavior of Children,” Huffington Post, October 27, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/surenramasubbu/a-close-look-at-the-online-spending-behavior-of-children_b_6036106.html.

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107 BBA, “Age of the App: Children Spending Online Before Getting Money Lessons at School,” BBA News, September 13, 2013, https://www.bba.org.uk/news/pressreleases/age-of-the-app-children-spending-online-before-getting-money-lessonsat-school/#.W6WqlS8ZOfU.

CHAPTER 5

Freedom of Speech and Online Harm to Children Introduction We continue our discussion of the regulation of the harms of media exposure—both tangible and virtual—by describing the importance of freedom of speech and its interpretation before the courts. While a comprehensive discussion is beyond the scope of this book, this chapter will focus on the general approach taken in Canada and the U.S. The Canadian approach is illustrated by the Supreme Court’s decision in the leading case Irwin Toy v. Québec,1 in which the court ruled that a prohibition on marketing to children in Québec does not infringe the right to freedom of expression set in section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The U.S. approach will be illustrated through the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Entertainment,2 which quashed a California law protecting children from violent video games on the basis that this abridges the freedom of speech clause as set out in the First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. We discuss the approach taken by the court in each jurisdiction in light of the harms of media exposure to developing children. More specifically, we predict what might be the decision of each court in the case of a law designed to restrict children’s access to virtual world video games, and whether the court would take account of the intangible harms inherent in this medium.

Canadian Law: Irwin Toy v. Québec As with most constitutional statutes, the text of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms leaves much to interpretation.3 Section 2(b) protects “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”4 The language, on its face, is broad and without apparent definitional limitations. As a result, such acts as picketing outside a business,5 advertising to children,6 publishing details of a divorce proceeding,7 describing Jews to school children as “sadistic,” “power hungry,” or “child killers,”8 soliciting one’s services as a prostitute,9 denying the Holocaust in a pamphlet,10 financing election advertisements,11 creating child pornography,12 comparing a public figure to Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, or skinheads,13 and advertising on the side of a transit bus,14 are among those acts © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004398887_005

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that have been held to be protected means of expression under section 2(b) of the Charter. The state can, however, seek to limit expression under certain circumstances. Section 1 of the Charter permits “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”15 Similar to the language used in section 2(b), the constitutional dictate in section 1 is broad, leaving much to be filled-in by the courts. The result is that certain limits on advertising to children are constitutionally permissible,16 while advertisements on the sides of transit buses are not17; denying the Holocaust is permissible,18 but defaming Jewish people as “child killers” is not.19 These examples demonstrate that the Court has opted for a structure that defines expression very broadly, with almost every conceivable form of expression being prima facie protected under section 2(b).20 The result is that section 2(b) is “little more than a formal step,”21 leaving effectively all significant analysis to section 1. At the same time, the Court has imposed a single, high bar for justification under section 1. As a result, illegally parking a car to make a point,22 or distributing pornography depicting real children,22 are each considered forms of expression that—in theory—require a “pressing and substantial purpose” if they are to be constitutionally limited.23 Unsurprisingly, the Court has struggled mightily in the two decades since its early section 2(b) cases to find meaningful ways to assess limits under section 1. Its solutions to this dilemma include the adoption of a ‘contextual approach’ and ‘deference’ to the legislative branch. However, these solutions have often served to further muddy the jurisprudential waters of section 2(b). The overall result is a jurisprudence that, according to Cameron, is replete with “contradictions and double standards,”24 is “capricious,” and is “a captive of instincts which shift from judge to judge, case to case, and issue to issue.”25 In this view, the myth of a monolithic Oakes test to determine whether an infringement of freedom of expression may be justified under section 1 is belied by “case-by-case manipulation”26 where the Supreme Court has “transformed section 1 review into an ad hoc exercise that exalts flexibility at the expense of principle.”27 Others express frustration with a highly deferential section 1 analysis that is, according to Hogg, “unprincipled and unpredictable,”28 according to Macklem and John, “inherently indeterminate and, consequently, open to manipulation,”29 and according to Bredt and Dodek, “a highly subjective exercise with little predictability.”30 Dodek further argued that the Court’s struggle in crafting its jurisprudence “has resulted in a lack of transparency and a general state of confusion among lawyers, scholars and Charter litigants.”31

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Most troubling, however, is that the purported stringency of the Oakes test has been clearly contradicted by precedent. This confirms the “dominant narrative” of scholarship that the Court’s section 1 analysis has been weakened over the last two decades.32 In the context of freedom of expression, the adoption of the contextual approach and a more deferential posture in applying section 1 has eroded the foundations of expressive freedom, especially in core areas such as political speech. The Court’s decision in Irwin Toy is relevant to the harms of media consumption discussed here, and is illustrative of the manner in which the Supreme Court of Canada approaches the protection of freedom of expression. Sections 248 and 249 of Québec’s Consumer Protection Act prohibits commercial advertising directed at persons under thirteen years of age.33 Irwin Toy challenged this legislation, arguing that it was ultra vires of the province and that it infringed the Canadian and the Québec Charters. As in Ford,34 the Supreme Court treated the Canadian and Québec Charters as being largely synonymous in their guarantees of freedom of expression. The starting point for the majority decision, delivered by Justices Dickson, Lamer and Wilson, was to elaborate on the scope of the protection found in s. 2(b) of the Charter. This scope is very broad indeed. “Activity,” the majority stated, “is expressive if it attempts to convey meaning.”35 Therefore, any human activity that conveys or attempts to convey meaning falls within the scope of the guarantee.36 Even the mundane physical activity of parking a car, the majority stated, can fall within the s. 2(b) guarantee if it is performed to convey meaning. For example, in the case of parking space reserved to spouses of government employees, an unmarried person might protest against this method of allocating a limited resource, by parking in these spaces.37 Once the Supreme Court had unsurprisingly determined that commercial advertising aimed at children was prima facie a form of expression, the majority then turned to the issue of the purpose and effect of the impugned legislation. Following the position taken in R. v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd.,38 the majority concluded that legislation will infringe s. 2(b) of the Charter if its purpose “is to restrict the content of expression by singling out particular meanings that are not to be conveyed…”39 This is to be contrasted with time, place and manner restrictions that simply aim at controlling the “physical consequences of certain human activity, regardless of the meaning being conveyed[.]”40 This latter category of governmental regulation may still infringe s. 2(b) if it can be established that the effect of the regulation is to restrict the plaintiff’s free expression. If the plaintiff is to fall within this latter category, the onus is on the plaintiff to establish that his or her activity is consonant with one or more of the functions of the freedom of expression guarantee.

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Applying this test, the majority had no difficulty in finding that the legislation under attack violated s. 2(b). The whole purpose of the Québec legislation was to ban certain types of advertising. This was not simply a manner or form restriction: it was a total prohibition, at least in certain media, against advertising aimed at children under the age of thirteen. As such, the purpose of the legislation was to limit the free expression of advertisers. The majority then turned to the Oakes criteria to determine whether the impugned sections of the Consumer Protection Act were justified under s. 1 of the Charter. The evidence before the Court indicated a high degree of consensus among the experts that children are particularly vulnerable to “the techniques of seduction and manipulation abundant in advertising.”41 The scientific evidence differed on precisely what group was vulnerable. The impugned legislation protected a group that was somewhat broader than the group that some studies found particularly at risk (children six or younger). The Court, however, was not willing to pick and choose among the reports of social scientists. The government is, the majority stated, “afforded a margin of appreciation to form legitimate objectives based on somewhat inconclusive social science evidence.”42 Turning to the proportionality requirement of the Oakes test, the majority concluded that, unlike the legislation in Ford, the impugned legislation in Irwin Toy was rationally connected to its goal. The government’s goal was to prevent advertisers from exploiting the vulnerability of children; while a complete ban on advertising of children’s products would not have been rationally connected to this end, the majority concluded that a prohibition of advertisements directed at young children was. Did Québec’s advertising ban restrict the freedom of expression as little as possible? In answering this question the majority once again emphasized the purposive approach to Charter interpretation. When legislation is directed towards the “protection of vulnerable groups, [the courts]…must be mindful of the legislature’s representative function.”43 Thus, the majority stated, the courts will be more vigilant in enforcing the minimal impairment requirement when the government is “the singular antagonist”44 of the individual whose right has been infringed (for example, in the context of criminal prosecution) than they will when the government is balancing competing claims between different groups in society. This is especially so, the majority continued, when the Charter is being used as “an instrument of better situated individuals to roll back legislation which has as its object the improvement of the condition of less advantaged persons.”45 Given this somewhat relaxed standard, the Court was willing to conclude that the route chosen by Québec impaired freedom of expression as little as possible.

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Finally, the majority noted that there was no suggestion that “the…effects of the ban are so severe as to outweigh the government’s pressing and substantial objective.”46 Significantly, the majority concluded that the challenge to the legislation was done mainly out of concern that corporate revenues would be affected.47 This concern over profits was not seen as a factor that weighed heavily in the section 1 scales. This is especially so when counterpoised with the legislative objective of protecting a vulnerable social group. Of some interest is the short dissenting judgment by Justice McIntyre, with Justice Beetz concurring, emphasizing the fundamental importance of freedom of expression, and concluding that the legislation could not be justified in a free and democratic society.48 McIntyre J. opines that this freedom should only be suppressed for the most “urgent and compelling reasons and then only to the extent and for the time necessary to protect the community.”49 The dissenting judges also declined to accept the government’s view that any real harm existed, thus dismissing the social science research underpinning the legislation at hand. While children may be unduly influenced by advertising, and while this may be “a source of irritation to parents…no evidence had been led that suggested that children would be permanently harmed by being subjected to advertising.”50 Given this conclusion, Justice McIntyre rejected the notion that the legislation was truly directed towards an objective of pressing and substantial importance. He went on to note that “a total prohibition of advertising aimed at children below an arbitrarily fixed age makes no attempt at the achievement of proportionality.”51 In Irwin Toy, the Supreme Court constructed a special analytical framework for the resolution of freedom-of-expression cases under s 2(b) of the Charter.52 That analytical framework both identified the questions that courts are required to answer when called upon to determine whether governmental action challenged on the basis of s 2(b) violates the right to freedom of expression, and prescribed the principles that are to be applied when each of these questions is being answered. In setting out that framework, the Supreme Court provides us with its understanding of two of the building blocks of any coherent theory of freedom of expression as a constitutional right: (1) the meaning to be given to freedom of expression, and (2) the manner in which one determines whether governmental action infringes upon freedom of expression as defined in (1). Of these two building blocks, the first is clearly the more important, since it determines the range of interests that s 2(b) protects. However, the second is a necessary and far from unimportant component of any such theory, for without it one has no legal basis upon which to decide in a given case whether or not the impugned governmental action adversely affects one of the protected

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interests in a manner, or to a degree, that should engage the concern of the courts. The Irwin Toy framework was harshly criticized by a number of scholars and jurists in the years immediately following its adoption, and for a broad range of reasons.53 To date, this criticism has fallen on deaf ears; in fact, the Court appears to have ignored it entirely.54 The Court has used this framework consistently in resolving s. 2(b) cases since it was first articulated and, as several recent decisions attest, continues to invoke it today.55 Irwin Toy and Virtual Worlds From the outset, the purpose of the Charter was that “substantive rights be given a broad and literal interpretation.”56 According to Cameron, these rights should only be limited under section 1. Therefore, the distinction between a breach of the Charter and justification under s. 1 of the Charter, “must be maintained to preserve the Charter’s integrity.” Cameron further suggests that the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Irwin Toy will only perpetuate the confusion surrounding Charter interpretation. If a case were to challenge government restrictions on virtual reality and new media, and if the evidence brought before the court is convincing as to the damage to children’s cognitive development—including to their imagination—would the Court may reach a similar conclusion, upholding for example a theoretical law limiting the use of virtual worlds to children under the age of fourteen? There is a fundamental difference between the restriction imposed in Irwin Toy—advertising to children—and the proposed restriction of access by children to the product itself. Therefore, if a law banning the use of virtual worlds by children under fourteen years were to be challenged on the grounds that it breaches freedom of expression, the Supreme Court may not uphold this law as it did in Irwin Toy, as this would not be the least restrictive measure the government could take to prevent the harm in question. Such a scheme would not be a ban on merely advertising a toy, as in Irwin Toy, but a ban on the toy itself. Legislation of this kind would take us a long way from the justifications accepted by the Court in the Irwin Toy decision. Having said that, if the government should enact a more permissive regulatory regime in which a self-regulatory or a co-regulatory scheme is employed to prevent a harm to children such as an impairment of the imagination or intellectual development, then the Supreme Court of Canada—based on its approach as was articulated in Irwin Toy—may well approve such a scheme as this will protect children from an intangible harm on the one hand, and will comply with the tests for restriction as set out in Oakes on the other.

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U.S. First Amendment Jurisprudence: Brown v. Entertainment A scenario similar to this was recently addressed by the United States Supreme Court. In the case of Brown v. Entertainment, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California law prohibiting the sale of violent video-games to minors57 on the grounds that it offended the First Amendment.58 Brown is the first case regulating the sale of video games to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.59 The California statute at issue purported to prohibit the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors, and required their packaging to be labeled ‘18.’ ‘Violent video games’ consist of games in which the options available to the player include “killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being,” as long as these acts are presented in a way that a reasonable person would find “appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors.”60 Violation of the Act is punishable by a civil fine of up to $1,000.61 As the opinions of the Court were strongly divided, we will discuss each judge’s opinion in turn, beginning with the majority judgment and concluding with the dissent. Justice Scalia’s Majority Opinion Justice Scalia delivered the majority opinion on behalf of the Court, and in so doing he relied heavily on an earlier case—United States v. Stevens.62 In Stevens, the majority held that new categories of speech which are not protected by the First Amendment may not simply be added-in by a legislature that believes certain speech is too harmful to be tolerated. The Stevens case dealt with the depiction of animal cruelty and the Supreme Court decided not to add this to the list of speech which is not protected by the First Amendment.63 The decision in Stevens was to quash a federal law that was aimed to ‘dry up’ the market for ‘crush videos’—videos depicting the intentional torture and killing of helpless animals.64 Stevens himself was exonerated for his disgraceful role in selling dog fight videos online. The decision in Stephens has been heavily criticized, and is considered by many to be one of the more problematic free speech decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court. According to Justice Scalia, the decision in Ginsberg v. New York65 cannot be used as a shield from First Amendment scrutiny every time a legislature decides that speech is harmful to minors. The decision in Ginsberg applies only to speech that is obscene and therefore harmful to minors. Justice Scalia further concludes that an exception for the protection of speech when it comes to violent video game aimed at minors could only be created “if there were a long-standing tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence.”66 Since there is no such tradition, the statute is “a

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restriction on the content of protected speech,” and therefore offends the First Amendment.67 It is not enough to show that declaring violent video games harmful to minors is rational; the legislator must also show that the statute “is justified by a compelling government interest and is narrowly drawn to serve that interest.”68 According to Justice Scalia, neither prong of the strict scrutiny doctrine is met: (i) there is no evidence of a “compelling interest” on the part of the state because California “cannot show a direct causal link between violent video games and harm to minors”69 to the “degree of certitude that strict scrutiny requires”70; and (ii) if this causal link between violent speech and harm to minors was established, the statute is not narrowly tailored to achieve its asserted goal. It is “wildly underinclusive” because it covers only violent video games, and does not cover the wide range of other violent speech (e.g., fairy tales, movies and cartoons) to which children are exposed, and because the statute is content to “leave this dangerous, mind-altering material in the hands of children so long as one parent (or even an aunt or uncle) says it’s OK.”71 Moreover, the statutory coverage is also “vastly overinclusive”72: although the state asserted that the statute was designed to “aid parental authority,” the Court is reluctant to accept this notion asserting that parents don’t always care if their children will purchase a violent video game. Therefore, state limits on the purchase of violent video games will also affect children whose parents do not object to the purchase of violent video games; hence, this legislation is too broadly tailored, and therefore in breach of the First Amendment.73 Perhaps the most notable statement made by Justice Scalia is that future technologies will be subject to the same First Amendment protections.74 Specifically, he states that First Amendment rights “do not vary when a new and different medium for communication appears.”75 This seems to deny outright the possibility that certain forms of communication—whether it be video games, virtual worlds, virtual reality or other highly immersive media experiences—can ever be harmful to children, irrespective of their content. Justice Scalia addressed California’s argument that video games are distinguishable from other forms of media because they are interactive in that the player participates in the violence and determines its outcome.76 He found this distinction uncompelling for two reasons.77 First, he compared controlling the outcome of the game to the popular “choose-your-own-adventure stories” of old, and which have been around since 1969.78 Second, he viewed the participatory nature of video game play as “more a matter of degree than kind.”79 In this view, increased interactivity is not an indictment of video games, or a mechanism by which they effect their harms, but is rather a testament to their success in drawing the player into the experience.80

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This opinion expressed the Court’s doubts that punishing video game vendors for selling violent video games to children, even when their parents do not wish their children to use these video games, is a “proper governmental means of aiding parental authority.”81 However, this type of government regulation of children’s access to speech is exactly what the Court upheld in Ginsberg, as well as several other cases.82 In fact, the Court has upheld numerous broadcasting restrictions, affecting adults and children alike, all in the name of protecting children from speech of which their parents may disapprove.83 Justice Alito’s Majority Opinion Justice Alito, joining the majority opinion, would have held the statute unconstitutional but on the “narrower ground that the law’s definition of ‘violent video games’ is impermissibly vague.”84 The California statute does not meet the vital threshold requirement: it does not define ‘violent video games’ with the “‘narrow specificity’ that the Constitution demands.”85 However, Justice Alito rejects the majority’s assumption that the consumption of video games has the same effects as more traditional media like books and movies,86 stating that the experience of playing video games “may be very different from anything that we have seen before.” Justice Alito stated that he had played violent video games to learn about this topic, and that he found the experience very different from reading books or watching movies.87 Justice Alito’s concurring opinion expresses the concern that the majority decision will be interpreted as a blanket prohibition on any regulation of a minor’s access to violent video games—or to novel communications technologies in general.88 Justice Alito takes the more pragmatic approach that the law should progress with technology, and proceed with caution when considering the principles of the Constitution and the rapid evolution of technology. Especially prescient is Justice Alito statement that “We should take into account the possibility that developing technology may have important societal implications that will become apparent only with time.”89 Justice Alito further states that the legislator may be in a better position than the courts to assess the implications of new technologies. The majority opinion, according to Justice Alito, exhibits none of this caution.90 Clearly, Justice Alito is taking the position that the Internet is a unique regulatory sphere. In addition, we argue that he is the only voice within the majority that recognizes ‘the simulacra bias,’91 what Baudrillard states is “the signs of the real when there is no real.”92 As Baudrillard contends: It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say

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of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all of its vicissitudes.93 We believe that the Court may need to revisit this opinion as it grapples with the effects of ever more immersive communication technologies of the future. Justice Breyer’s Dissenting Opinion In his dissenting opinion, Justice Breyer argues that the majority decision creates a “serious anomaly in First Amendment law.”94 While the state can prohibit the sale of magazines with nude pictures to minors, according to Justice Breyer, the decision in Brown prohibits the state from preventing the sale of violent interactive media to minors. This could lead to an absurd situation in which nude pictures are prohibited, but interactive video games allowing the minor to torture, rape and kill a virtual naked women are permitted.95 Justice Breyer states that the applicable standards of review in determining the constitutionality of California’s video game regulations are the standards regarding vagueness, and the strict scrutiny test. The relevant category of speech for this type of review is not ‘depictions of violence,’ but rather ‘protection of children.’96 Under the vagueness analysis, Justice Breyer found the California statute provided sufficient notice of what is prohibited under the law, and therefore was not impermissibly vague.97 Additionally, he found California’s law to be no more vague than the New York statute at issue in Ginsberg.98 Accordingly, any confusing or contentious issues could be cured through the interpretations of state courts.99 By applying the same standard of strict scrutiny to California’s video game regulation, Justice Breyer reached the opposite conclusion to that of the majority.100 Justice Breyer determined that both California’s interests in addressing a social problem and in aiding parental authority are legitimate and are furthered by the California legislation.101 According to Justice Breyer, the California law achieved these aims since it only prevents a minor from buying a violent video game without a parent’s permission.102 Furthermore, since some video games are accepted teaching tools, properly regulating the distribution of video games deemed exceedingly violent will further California’s aim of protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors.103 Justice Breyer imparted that the present case is more about education than censorship.104 As such, the First Amendment does not prevent the government from assisting parents with their children’s education about matters of violence.105 As Breyer pointed out, the Court has previously stated that an immature and developing child may be less able than an adult to determine for

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him or herself what material is appropriate or not, and as such is vulnerable to “negative influences.”106 Justice Thomas’ Dissenting Opinion Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion takes the view that the majority improperly extended the protections of the First Amendment.107 Instead, Justice Thomas finds the present case encompasses a new category of speech: “speech to minor children bypassing their parents.”108 Justice Thomas reasoned that the law does not prevent a minor from buying a violent video game with his or her parents’ consent. But if the parent does not consent, then the video game companies’ freedom of speech provides a bypass to parental consent, and this was not the original purpose of the First Amendment.109 Brown and the Future of Media Regulation The decision in Brown was hailed by many commentators as a great victory for free speech and the First Amendment.110 Post argues that Brown, read along with Stevens, prevents the government from suppressing speech that it defines as ‘obscene’ (Stevens) or ‘obscene to minors’ (Brown).111 On the legal question at the heart of the case, Post asks, “will a legislature’s decision to prohibit the distribution of purportedly harmful but non-obscene speech receive the highest level of First Amendment scrutiny?”112 The Court appears to be split into a fragile 5–4 alignment. According to Black, if the California law would have been affirmed, it would have created a ‘chilling effect’ on the video game industry.113 Black further argues that the boy has cried wolf and the ‘wolf’ has taken the form of video game violence; however, “the Supreme Court has held that California’s cry is nothing more than a false alarm.”114 Nonetheless, Goltz has argued elsewhere that the Brown decision is a ‘simulacra.’ “Ironically,” he has written, “and perhaps unsurprisingly, Judge Posner’s observation that books are as interactive as video games,115 back in 2001, lies at the heart of the Supreme Court’s mistake and strikingly demonstrates the misunderstanding of new media and its severe implications.”116 Judge Posner is certainly familiar with the concept of simulacra: elsewhere, he writes that registered partnership and homosexual cohabitation are “in effect a form of contract that homosexuals can use to create a simulacrum of marriage.”117 Caught in his own simulacrum, Judge Posner repeated his embarrassing comments more recently in the Backpage case,118 a case in which Backpage.com was sued unsuccessfully for facilitating trafficking and sexual exploitation of minors by permitting solicitations to be posted on their website. As Baudrillard states:

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Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation.119 The harms ignored by the courts in these cases, especially the harms done to underage girls at the hands of pimps and traffickers, are all-too-real. Shiffrin goes even further when he argues that the U.S. Supreme Court is involved in First Amendment idolatry, and that this idolatry is obvious in the Court’s decision in Brown.120 Wright, too, characterizes the Court’s approach in Brown as “a highly demanding strict scrutiny test”121 that leads to a “rigorous application of strict scrutiny.”122 Furthermore, Pollard Sacks writes that Brown focuses “on whether causation was sufficiently proven to support a state’s compelling interest.”123 Comparing the credibility of the scientific amicus curiae briefs that were submitted to the Court, Pollard Sacks et al. argue that the Court should have upheld “the California law because the scientific evidence clearly supports the findings on which the legislature relied.”124 Using the analogy of Brown to analyse a potential court decision regarding the harms to children of virtual media, and the legitimacy of using regulation to tackle them, would likely lead the U.S. courts to reach a different conclusion than the Canadian court did in Irwin Toy. Even when it comes to a law that engages parents in the regulation of their children’s engagement with new media, as did the California law in the Brown case, the U.S. Supreme Court will likely strike it down on the basis that it offends the freedom of speech of the media corporations. Several recent cases involving media and freedom of speech have relied on the Brown decision.125 Therefore, in order to pass muster and satisfy First Amendment requirements, an indirect and softer approach to regulation should be taken. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, any governmental supervision may offend the freedom of speech of both the virtual worlds’ owners and operators as well as the child users. Even a ‘weak’ instrument such as co-regulation may be considered offensive in this respect. Self-regulation nonetheless may be treated differently: it is not set by law, and the government is not enforcing it by legal means but merely encouraging the industry to regulate itself. In both Brown and Stevens the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that it would not allow any regulation of content which does not fall into the few categories already identified in the past as exceptions to the protection of freedom of speech. Whether the Court’s analysis in Brown was right in law is a matter that exceeds the scope of the discussion here, but the majority decision seriously impedes any initiatives to regulate the harms of new

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media and virtual reality through legislative restrictions on their sale and distribution.

Conclusion Two important aspects of the intersection of freedom of speech and harms to children from media consumption are illustrated by the cases Irwin Toy and Brown: upholding free speech protections is a core element of any regulatory regime governing new media, as is recognizing the differences between the judicial approaches to such regulations taken by various jurisdictions. In light of the decisions in Irwin Toy and Brown, we believe that in future cases involving the regulation of new media, the Supreme Court of Canada will tend towards a more flexible approach when considering content regulation, especially as it relates to the interpretation of section 1 of the Charter.126 The U.S. Supreme Court, on the other hand, will likely continue to rule as it did in Brown. A much more accurate and nuanced understanding of the nature of new media and advanced communications technologies will be needed if future American courts are to adopt Justice Alito’s reasoning in Brown—until then, Justice Scalia’s rigid framework will reign, and with it the tendency to disallow any regulatory interference on the basis of media content. It should be mentioned that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown goes to the heart of ‘The Law of the Horse’ debate: do the Internet and new media require special regulation, as we discussed in Chapter 4. One may argue, depending on whether one favors the Internet’s exceptional status as a media, that the ‘special’ attitude towards Internet regulation should be applied to analyze the constitutional aspects of media regulation, in the manner of Justice Alito. Finally, and most important for our discussion of the harms of media consumption, the cases analyzed in this chapter, and their respective legal traditions, shed some light on the correlation between using softer regulatory instruments and gaining a stronger ability to pass constitutional muster where freedom of expression is concerned. Moreover, there is a need to take different approaches when it comes to designing regulatory regimes in Canada and the U.S. While the Canadian Supreme Court may approve of co-regulation as not offending freedom of expression in order to protect children’s imaginative development in virtual worlds, the U.S. Supreme Court may reject such a solution regardless of the evidence to support the existence of the harm. It is also important to distinguish the two cases on the basis that while Irwin Toy deals with the advertisement of the product, Brown deals with the actual access to the product. To draw an analogy to the harm to children’s imaginative

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development in virtual worlds, it would be permissible from a freedom of speech perspective to educate child users and their parents about the potential deleterious effects of virtual worlds, but it would be extremely challenging to actually restrict children’s access to these worlds. Nonetheless, while in Irwin Toy the potential harm lies in the advertisement itself and children’s poor ability to deal with marketing appeals, in Brown it is the product itself that causes the harm. The most important aspect of this comparison in the context of the regulation of the harms of media consumption in general and more specifically with respect to the damage done to the development of children’s cognition and imagination, is the constitutional concept of harm and how it is doctrinalized differently in Canadian and U.S. free speech jurisprudence. The bottom line is that Canada is prepared to assume a causal link and presume the presence of harm on far less evidence, while the U.S. is not. Canada is also more likely to allow generous regulation where a vulnerable group (in this case children) is the target of the expression.

Notes 1 Irwin Toy v. Québec (Attorney General), [1989] 1 S.C.R 927, para.41. 2 Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 131 S. Ct. 2729; 546 U.S. 786 (2011). 3 Chanakya Sethi, “Beyond Irwin Toy: A New Approach to Freedom of Expression Under the Charter,” Appeal 17 (2012): 21–45. 4 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 1, s. 2(b). 5 RWDSU v. Dolphin Delivery, [1986] 2 S.C.R 573, [1986] S.C.J No. 75 (QL), at para 20. 6 Irwin Toy, para. 41, stating, “Activity is expressive if it attempts to convey meaning.” The single exception to this general rule, for reasons that are less than clear, is violence. 7 Edmonton Journal v. Alberta (AG), [1989] 2 S.C.R 1326, [1989] S.C.J No. 124 (QL), para. 50. 8 R. v. Keegstra, [1990] 3 S.C.R 697, [1990] S.C.J No. 131 (QL), para. 83. 9 Reference re ss. 193 and 195.1(1)(c) of the Criminal Code, [1990] 1 S.C.R 1123. 10 R. v. Zundel, [1992] 2 S.C.R 731, [1992] S.C.J No. 70 (QL). 11 Libman v. Quebec (AG), [1997] 3 S.C.R 569, [1997] S.C.J No. 85 (QL); Harper v. Canada (AG), [2004] 1 S.C.R 827, [2004] S.C.J No. 28 (QL). 12 R. v. Sharpe, [2001] 1 S.C.R 45, [2001] S.C.J No. 3 (QL). 13 WIC Radio v. Simpson, [2008] 2 S.C.R 420, [2008] S.C.J No. 41 (QL). 14 Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority v. Canadian Federation of Students, [2009] 2 S.C.R 295, [2009] S.C.J No. 31 (QL).

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15 The Charter. 16 Irwin Toy. 17 Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority. 18 R. v. Zundel. 19 R. v. Keegstra. 20 Irwin Toy, para. 41, stating, “Activity is expressive if it attempts to convey meaning.” The single exception to this general rule, for reasons that are less than clear, is violence. See: RWDSU, para. 20; There was one aspect of the decision that was definitional in nature: It was “clear” to the Court that “a murderer or rapist cannot invoke freedom of expression in justification of the form of expression he has chosen,” para. 42. As authority, the majority cited the opinion of Justice McIntyre in Dolphin Delivery, which merely repeated the same assertion, resulting in a tautology. Justice McIntyre had said in Dolphin Delivery that, “freedom [of expression], of course, would not extend to protect threats of violence or acts of violence.” The majority in Irwin Toy confirmed this by adding, “freedom of expression ensures that we can convey our thoughts and feelings in non-violent ways without fear of censure.” Though one can easily infer why a purposive analysis of section 2(b) of The Charter would result in the exclusion of violence from the right’s ambit, neither statement offers a thorough explanation of the exclusion. 21 Richard Moon, “Justified Limits on Free Expression: The Collapse of the General Approach to Limits on Charter Rights,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 40 (2002): 339. 22 Irwin Toy, para. 41. As Peter Hogg has cheekily observed, “Fortunately, most drivers are unaware of their constitutional right to disregard parking restrictions of which they disapprove” (Peter W. Hogg, Constitutional Law of Canada, Student ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 2009), 987 note 55.) 23 R. v. Oakes, [1986] 1 S.C.R 103, [1986] S.C.J No. 7 (QL), 26 DLR (4th) 200, 138–9, stating, “It is necessary, at a minimum, that an objective relate to concerns which are pressing and substantial in a free and democratic society before it can be characterized as sufficiently important.” 24 Jamie Cameron, “Governance and Anarchy in the s. 2(b) Jurisprudence: A Comment on Vancouver Sun and Harper v. Canada,” National Journal of Constitutional Law 17 (2005): 103. 25 Cameron, “Governance and Anarchy,” 71. 26 Jamie Cameron, “Abstract Principle v. Contextual Conceptions of Harm: A Comment on R. v. Butler,” McGill Law Journal 37 (1992): 1147; see also: R. v. Oakes. 27 Jamie Cameron, “The Past, Present, and Future of Expressive Freedom under the Charter,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 35, no. 1 (1997): 5. 28 Hogg, Constitutional Law of Canada, 990. 29 Terry Macklem and John Terry, “Making the Justification Fit the Breach,” Supreme Court Law Review 11, no. 2 (2000): 593.

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30 Christopher D. Bredt and Adam Dodek, “The Increasing Irrelevance of Section 1 of the Charter,” Supreme Court Law Review 14, no. 2 (2001): 185. 31 Christopher D. Bredt, “The Right to Equality and Oakes: Time for a Change?” National Journal of Constitutional Law 27 (2009): 66. 32 Sujit Choudhry, “So What is the Real Legacy of Oakes? Two Decades of Proportionality Analysis under the Canadian Charter’s Section 1,” Supreme Court Law Review 34, no. 2 (2006): 515–521, stating “Our precedents, including for example those concerning hate speech, campaign financing, and defamation, belie the notion that free speech in Canada is more strongly protected as a result of the Oakes.” On hate speech, see also: R. v. Keegstra, with RAV v. St Paul (City), 505 U.S. 377 (1992), in which a unanimous court struck down a municipal ordinance and in doing so overturned the conviction of the teenaged accused for burning a cross on the lawn of an African-American family. 33 Consumer Protection Act, R.S.Q., c. P-4o.i. 34 Ford v. Québec (Attorney General), [1988] 2 S.C.R. 712, [1988] S.C.J No. 88 (QL). 35 Irwin Toy, 606. 36 Irwin Toy, 607. 37 Irwin Toy, 607. 38 R. v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd., [1985] 1 S.C.R. 295. 39 Irwin Toy, 610. 40 Irwin Toy, 610. 41 Irwin Toy, 620. 42 Irwin Toy, 623. 43 Irwin Toy, 625. 44 Irwin Toy, 626. 45 Irwin Toy, at 625, quoting from R. v. Edwards Books and Art Ltd., [1986] 2 S.C.R. 713, [1986] S.C.J No. 70 (QL), 779. 46 Irwin Toy, 630. 47 Irwin Toy, 630. 48 Irwin Toy, 636. 49 Irwin Toy, 637. 50 Irwin Toy, 636. 51 Irwin Toy, 636. 52 Robin Elliot, “Back To Basics: A Critical Look at the Irwin Toy Framework for Freedom of Expression,” Review of Constitutional Studies 15 (2010–2011): 205. 53 See e.g.: Jamie Cameron, “The Original Conception of Section 1 and Its Demise: A Comment on Irwin Toy Ltd. v. Attorney-General of Quebec,” McGill Law Journal 35 (1989): 253–277; D. Gibson, “Constitutional Law-Freedom of Commercial Expression Under the Charter-Legislative Jurisdiction Over Advertising-A Representative Ruling-Irwin Toy Ltd. v. Attorney-General of Quebec,” Canadian Bar Review 69 (1990):

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339; Terry Macklem, “Toying with Expression: Irwin Toy Ltd. v. Quebec (AttorneyGeneral),” Supreme Court Law Review, 1, no. 2 (1990): 547; L. Weinrib, “Does Money Talk? Commercial Expression in the Canadian Constitutional Context,” in Freedom of Expression and the Charter, ed. David Schneiderman (Toronto: Carswell, 1991), 341; D. Lepofsky, “The Supreme Court’s Approach to Freedom of Expression: Irwin Toy Ltd. v. Quebec (Attorney-General) and the Illusion of Section 2(b) Liberalism,” National Journal of Constitutional Law 3 (1993): 37; Richard Moon, “The Supreme Court of Canada on the Structure of Freedom of Expression Adjudication,” University of Toronto Law Journal 45 (1995): 419–470. It should be acknowledged that not everyone who has written about the approach taken to freedom of expression in Irwin Toy has been critical of it. For a sampling of some of the positive assessments, see: J. Ross, “The Protection of Freedom of Expression by the Supreme Court of Canada,” Supreme Court Law Review 19, no. 2 (2003): 81; S. Anand, “Beyond Keegstra: The Constitutionality of the Wilful Promotion of Hatred Revisited,” National Journal of Constitutional Law 9 (1998): 117; Michael J. Tilleard, “Commercial Expression Comes of Age: The Path to Constitutional Recognition Under the Charter of Rights,” Alberta Law Review 28, no. 3 (1990): 604–631. 54 Elliot, “Back to Basics.” 55 See the recent cases of: Ontario (Public Safety and Security) v. Criminal Lawyers’ Association, 2010 S.C.C 23, [2010] 1 S.C.R 815; Ernst v. Alberta Energy Regulator, [2017] 1 S.C.R. 3; Law Society of British Columbia v. Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32. 56 Jamie Cameron, “The Original Conception of Section 1,” 253. 57 See: CAL. CIV. CODE §§1746-1746.5 (West 2005). 58 Brown; see also: David G. Post, “Sex, Lies, and Videogames: Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association,” Cato Supreme Court Review 27 (2011): 38–39, discussing the question of why the Supreme Court granted leave to appeal in the first place. 59 Stephen Totilo, “All You Need to Know About This Week’s Violent Video Game Case in the U.S. Supreme Court,” Gizmodo, November 1, 2010, http://www.kotaku.com/ 5678354/all-you-need-to-know-about-this-weeks-violent-video-game-case-in-theus-supreme-court. 60 Brown, 2729. 61 Brown, 2732–33. 62 United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460, 130 S. Ct. 1577 (2010). 63 United States v. Stevens, 3 (Justice Scalia). 64 Joseph J. Anclein, “Crush Videos and the Case for Criminalizing Criminal Depictions,” 40 University of Memphis Law Review 40, no. 1 (2009): 1–54. 65 In Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968), 631–2, the owner of a Bellmore, Long Island, luncheonette had been convicted of selling “girlie magazines”—concededly not obscene—to a 16-year-old boy in violation of a New York statute that made it unlawful to sell “any picture…which depicts nudity…and which is harmful to minors…”

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66 Brown, 2736. 67 Brown, 2738, stating “the government[’s] power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content” (Brown, 2733 (quoting Ashcroft v. ACLU, 535 U.S. 564, 573 (2002)), is severely limited by the “strict scrutiny” such efforts will receive in the courts. The government’s burden of justification in such cases—to demonstrate that it has “a compelling interest” in achieving the goal it is pursuing, and that there are no “less speech-restrictive alternatives” available to accomplish that purpose as effectively—is not only substantial, it is well-nigh insurmountable; see United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc., 529 U.S. 803, 818 (2000), stating, “It is rare that a regulation restricting speech because of its content will ever be permissible.” 68 Brown, 2738. 69 Brown, 2738. 70 Brown, 2739 note 8. 71 Brown, 2740. 72 Brown, 2741. 73 Brown, 2741. 74 Brown, 2733. 75 Brown, 2733; see also: Laura Black, “Violence is Never the Answer, Or Is It? Constitutionality of California’s Violent Video Game Regulation,” Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law 5, no. 1 (2011): 122 note 351, stating, “It appears that the Court is trying to preempt future litigation that attempts to restrict emerging technologies because of its increased interactivity, such as the motion sensory technology of Xbox’s Kinect and PlayStation’s Move system.” 76 Brown, 2737–38. 77 Brown, 2738. 78 Brown, 2738. 79 Brown, 2738. 80 Brown, 2738, quoting Judge Posner, who commented on the interactivity of literature by stating, “the better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and suffering as the readers’ own” (quoting American Amusement Machine Association v. Kendrick, 224 F.3d 572, 577 (7th 2001)). 81 Brown, 2738. 82 Ginsberg, 390 U.S. at 639; see also, e.g., United States v. American Library Association Inc., 539 U.S. 194, 203 (2003); Ashcroft; Denver Area Educational Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727 (1996); Sable Communications of California, Inc. v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115 (1989). 83 See e.g.: FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978); Denver Area Educational Telecommunications; Information Providers Coalition v. FCC, 928 F.2d 866 (9th Cir. 1991).

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Brown, 2742. Brown, 2741. Brown, 2746 (Alito, J., concurring). Brown, 2748, 2749, 2751. Brown, 2747. Brown, 2742 [emphasis added]. Brown, 2742. Nachshon Goltz, “Simulacra’s Day in the U.S. Supreme Court: Brown Versus Entertainment Merchants Association and United States Versus Stevens,” Osgoode Hall Law School Research Report No. 36/2013, Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy, http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1308&context=clpe. 92 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 20. 93 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 169–188. The concept of simulacrum that Baudrillard uses differs significantly from the common use of the word “simulacrum,” which is defined as an image or likeness, a vague representation or a sham, Victoria Neufeldt, ed., Webster’s New World Dictionary of American English, 3rd college ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), 1251. 94 Brown, 2771 (Breyer, J., dissenting) 95 Brown, 2771. 96 Brown, 2762 (Breyer, J., dissenting). 97 Brown, 2763. 98 Brown, 2763–65. 99 Brown, 2765. 100 Brown, 2765–66. 101 Brown, 2766–67. 102 Brown, 2766. 103 Brown, 2767. 104 Brown, 2771. 105 Brown, 2771. 106 Brown, 2771, citing Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 569–70 (2005). 107 Brown, 2751 (Thomas, J., dissenting). 108 Brown, 2752. 109 Brown, 2761. 110 Catherine J. Ross, “The Supreme Court Was Right to Strike Down California’s Video Game Law,” Washington Post, June 27, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/the-supreme-court-was-right-to-strike-down-californias-video-gamelaw/2011/06/27/AG6jYDoH_story.html, stating, “The justices rejected a radical

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challenge to free speech—in the process protecting all of us, not just children”; David G. Savage, “Supreme Court Strikes Down California Video Game Law,” L.A. Times, June 28, 2011), http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-na0628-court-violent-video-20110628,0,5099090.story, noting that the decision “highlights a consistent theme of the high court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.: Freedom of speech is almost always a winner, even if the context is unusual”; Brent Jones, “Our View: Even Violent Video Games Are Protected,” USA Today, June 27, 2011, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2011-0627-Even-violent-video-games-are-protected_n.htm, describing “why the Supreme Court was right Monday in giving the makers of violent video games the same protection as the pamphleteers, printers and orators of the 18th century”; Tony Mauro, “Roberts Court Extends Line of Permissive First Amendment Ruling in Video Game Case,” The AmLaw Daily, June 28, 2011, http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/ amlawdaily/2011/06/scotusfirstamendmentvideo.html, stating that the Brown decision continues an “undeniable trend line” in favor of “classic First Amendment protection for even the most objectionable speech.” Post, “Sex, Lies, and Videogames,” 51. Post, “Sex, Lies, and Videogames,” 51. Black, “Violence is Never the Answer,” 130–2. Black, “Violence is Never the Answer,” 133. American Amusement Machine. Goltz, “Simulacra’s Day.” Richard Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 313. Jody Raphael, “Denial of Harm: Sex Trafficking, Backpage, and Free Speech Absolutism,” Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence 2, no. 1 (2017): Article 8; Mary Mazzio, I am Jane Doe, 50 Eggs (2017), https://www.iamjanedoefilm.com/. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glasner (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 20. Steven H. Shiffrin, What is Wrong with the First Amendment? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 71. R. George Wright, “Judicial Line-Drawing and the Broader Culture: The Case of Politics and Entertainment,” 49 San Diego Law Review 49 (2012): 344. Wright, “Judicial Line-Drawing,” 345. Deana Pollard Sacks, “Constitutionalized Negligence,” Washington University Law Review 89, no. 5 (2010): 1117. Deana Pollard Sacks, Brad J. Bushman, Craig A. Anderson, “Do Violent Video Games Harm Children? Comparing the Scientific Amicus Curiae ‘Experts’ in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association,” Northwestern University Law Review 106 (2011): 1–12.

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125 Hart v. Electronic Arts, Inc., 717 F. 3d 141 (2013), in which the court held, following Brown, that a video game manufacturer’s First Amendment right to free expression outweighed a football player’s right of publicity; Candy Lab Inc. v. Milwaukee County, 266 F. Supp. 3d 1139 (2017), in which the court granted the plaintiff a preliminary injunction barring a county from enforcing its ordinance requiring those offering games like the plaintiff’s location-based augmented reality game to obtain event permits to protect public property; the court rules that the ordinance violated the mobile application company’s First Amendment rights because the game had the minimum quantum of expression needed to constitute protected speech and because the ordinance lacked procedural safeguards to ensure the protection of First Amendment rights. 126 R. v. Oakes.

CHAPTER 6

Parental Regulation Introduction This discussion deals with the regulation of children’s Internet use by their parents. We address the harms of media consumption in general and the harms to children’s imaginational development in particular. This discussion details some of the research findings on parental regulation of Internet use at home, and how effective it can be in mediating media consumption and media harms. The research findings we present here should be evaluated carefully: cultural differences between countries, the age of the child, and how older research findings may apply to new and developing technologies—video games, virtual worlds, social media, and immersive virtual reality environments—all affect the relevance and interpretation of research findings. In general, the regulation of children’s Internet use at home reflects the governmental regulatory framework we have discussed previously. The nature of the relationships in the modern family—combined with the fact that regulatory instruments and technological and code regulation are already prevalent in all corners of the Internet—often means that parental regulation comes to resemble governmental regulation a good deal. There should be no surprise in finding that traditional and authoritarian forms of media regulation are not effective—whether performed by public regulators or by parents at home. It is the regulatory measures at the other end of the regulatory spectrum, so-called ‘soft regulation’ (or, in the private context, referred to as ‘assertive parenting’ or ‘authoritative parenting’) which involve understanding the terrain, discussing issues with children, and offering advice and guidance which seem to be the most effective in reducing the risk of the harms generated by Internet use. Although parents are best positioned to modulate their children’s Internet use, a number of obstacles make this task challenging: the knowledge gap, children’s privacy, ease of access to the Internet outside the parent’s home, and the parentchild relationship in general. To this end, we hope to guide parents and expose them to the research in this field, and to move towards a better understanding of how assertive parenting can effectively moderate children’s media habits. Although parents stand at the forefront of regulating children’s Internet use, they should not be left alone in this crucial battle. One point that we make in this book is that parents require and ought to have every assistance possible—from researchers, public authorities, schools and other relevant © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398887_006

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stakeholders—in order to grapple with the best ways to parent in the face of novel and rapid technological change. One may certainly ponder: Why, if the matter is so serious and the potential of harm so severe, are we leaving its governance to such a ‘soft’ measure as parental regulation? The answer is not a simple one. Even if we were to set aside the constraints of freedom of speech protections (which we do not endorse), the inefficiency and incapacity of traditional regulation will never be able to accomplish for each and every child what an informed and wellsupported parent can do for them. The question remains, then, can we do more? We argue that we can, but this will require changing social attitudes and regulatory paradigms on the grand scale, and we offer some suggestions here and in the next and final chapter on how to begin. This paradigm shift takes us back to the question posed in the outset of this paragraph to teach us that in the realm of virtual and intangible harm there is no ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ regulation, but rather a new and adaptive set of regulatory instruments—the regulatory spectrum of new technologies. This requires us to look internally, at home as discussed below in this chapter and to the past, as discussed in the next chapter, in order to move forward in an informed and successful way.

Parents, Children and Media in the Home According to Giddens1 and Beck,2 there is a shift in the modern family from the model of authority and hierarchy to a relationship of ‘friendship’ and democracy. Instead of using rules and rewards as a mean of control over children, parents build a relationship based on trust and negotiation. In this context, the regulation of children’s media habits is a way of ‘working’ the family relationship, rather than responding to an external threat. As Buckingham observed: Since it is the new media that mark the key transition for parents from the norms of their own childhood to those of their children’s childhood, these discussions center on new media and have a strongly nostalgic flavor.3 Many of the concerns parents have with respect to their children’s Internet use are those we have discussed previously, including isolation from others, being exposed to sexual and/or violent content, being displaced from more beneficial activities, and risks to their privacy.4 Nonetheless, most parents believe that the Internet can also assist their child do better at school and help them learn worthwhile things. Indeed, this is often why parents acquire access to the Internet in the first place.5

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Parents want to monitor their children’s Internet use, but this is often challenging. Ho and Zaccheus argue that parents are certainly encouraged to monitor and supervise their children’s Internet use.6 However, as Tripp notes, children often have much more knowledge about technology than their parents, and so effective parental monitoring is challenging.7 Livingstone et al. found that, “the relationship between parenting style and parental regulation of digital devices is qualified by parents’ own familiarity with digital media.”8 Moreover, with children using the Internet more through their mobile phones, parents find it harder to supervise their children’s Internet use.9 According to Shin, parents of children aged 7–12 were generally confident regarding their ability to manage their children’s Internet use; however, this confidence led parents to be less engaged in purposeful and communication-based mediation, and to fail to keep up with their knowledge of the Internet.10 Nor is there general agreement among researchers on how to best categorize media monitoring in the home. Paus-Hasebrink et al. have identified four main patterns of relationship between parents and children in the context of the Internet use: the ‘digital native vs. digital immigrant family—in which children have a better understanding of the Internet than their parents; the ‘unskilled family’—in which children and parents both lack basic Internet skills; the ‘triple C family’—who adopt a ‘confident, caring and communicative’ parenting style; and the ‘protective family’—in which parents employ active and restrictive mediation beyond the average.11 They found that the ‘triple C family’ is best able to regulate children’s Internet use, and this provides support for the supposition that assertive and authoritative (not to be confused with authoritarian) parental monitoring styles are more effective. Parental regulation is made even more challenging by the breadth of opportunities to access the Internet almost anytime and anyplace on an increasing variety of devices. According to a study conducted by the Keiser Family Foundation, 84% of the children in the United States use the Internet at home.12 Similar results were found among Australian children (67%),13 and children in the European Union (65%).14 Livingstone and Bober’s study of children in the UK found that regardless of the computer location—whether in a public or a private room—children are looking to use the internet in privacy, with 79% primarily using the Internet while alone.15 Livingstone and Bober conclude that: In terms of media regulation, therefore, it may be that the stakes have never been higher, as society seeks to strike a balance between the failure to minimize the dangers and the failure to maximize the opportunities.16

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Therefore, a number of challenges await parents in effectively regulating children’s media use, including knowledge of the Internet and new media, children’s ability to use the Internet in private and outside the home, protecting children’s privacy, and negotiating different parenting styles, family habits, and cultural values. Parental Goals for Internet Regulation In this section we review some of the research findings regarding the regulation of children’s Internet use by parents, the goals that parents have, and the ways in which we fall short of meeting these. We attempt to take a comparative perspective and account for cultural differences. This will serve as the ground for the following section in which we summarize and analyze findings from multiple countries. We first present the respective positions of children and parents, followed by a summary of the research findings on the use of technology as a tool of Internet regulation in the home. We will discuss parents’ practices regarding setting rules governing their children’s Internet and finally we detail the research regarding the effectiveness of different styles of parental Internet mediation. In one Canadian study conducted at the beginning of the millennium, most parents surveyed (94%) considered educating children about safe, responsible Internet use to be a top priority.17 Of these parents, 91% highlighted the importance of educating parents about strategies for managing the Internet. A majority (55%) of parents believe in taking responsibility for family Internet use, and 44% said that the content of the Internet should be controlled.18 Many of the parents supported a collaborative approach that would involve public libraries, schools, Internet service providers (ISPs), community institutions, the government, and police.19 A similar study conducted in the European Union found that most parents suggested the following to enhance their children’s safety online: “more/better teaching and guidance on the Internet use in schools” (88%), “more awareness raising campaigns on online risks” (87%), “more/better information and advice for parents on website children use” (87%), “stricter regulation for businesses that produce online content and services” (86%), “contact points where parents and children can receive individual advice about how to stay safe online” (84%), “improved availability/performance of monitoring software” (80%) and finally, “training sessions organized for parents by NGO’s, government, local authorities” (70%).20 Livingstone and Bober further found that only 41% of EU parents of 9–17 year-olds, were confident that their child has learned how to judge the reliability of online information.21

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Parents may lack information and awareness about their children’s Internet habits. A more recent study by Cassidy et al. found a gap between Canadian children’s and their parents’ perceptions of Internet use.22 While 6% of the parents indicate that their child spends 5 hours or more on the Internet per day, 11% of the children reported this length of time. It was further reported that 31% of parents do not supervise their child’s Internet use at all. Moreover, those 69% of parents who report supervising their child’s Internet use are using some of the methods similar to that found by Turow,23 and which were labeled as being “fleeting at best.” This included such minimal advice as “don’t give out your name,” “or don’t talk to strangers” that reflect offline advice parents traditionally give to children. Studies of parents in Spain and Argentina found a similar pattern. According to Garitaonandia and Garmendia: The main concern of Spanish parents was the amount of time children spent online, not the content of the pages their children were visiting or any online relationships they may be maintaining.24 Yet another Spanish study, surveying families with children aged 10 to 16, found that 27.6% of parents asked “always or almost always” what their children were doing online.25 Similarly, a study done in Argentina found a very low level of parental supervision, with parents vastly underestimating the risks of Internet access.26 Parents often lack information about Internet habits and the risks that children encounter online. According to Cassidy et al.: Although these parents were familiar with older types of technology (e-mail and cellular phones), they were less knowledgeable about newer forms of technology such as Facebook, blogs, and YouTube. The parents were even less familiar with these forms of technology than the participating educators, whose knowledge was also limited.27 It appears from this that many parents lack knowledge about the risks of novel communications technologies, and are not adapting their parenting practices to this new environment. Despite this lack of knowledge, parents are trying to actively mediate their children’s Internet use. Livingston et al. found that 87% of parents in Spain report actively mediating their child’s safety online.28 Even more parents (91%) report actively mediating their child’s Internet use. In addition, 93% of the parents reported restricting their child’s Internet use, but only 67% reported monitoring their child’s Internet use.29

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These findings align with the European Commission’s Eurobarometer 248 for Spain, in which 85% of Spanish parents reported talking to their children about the Internet (compared with 74% for all 27 EU member states); while 74% of Spanish parents reported that they always or frequently remained close to their children while they were online (compared with 61% for all 27 EU member states).30 Interestingly, 48% of parents reported imposing no restrictions on online access (compared to a much lower percentage of 25% for the Europe-wide average).31 Therefore, it appears that many parents are motivated and are taking steps to monitor their children’s Internet use; they are having difficulties, however, because they lack confidence, and they require more information, support, and community effort in order to be successful. Children’s Interests in Internet Regulation Children’s patterns, places, and modes of Internet use vary as they grow and develop.32 Before they reach the age of 12, children are more likely to access the Internet at home using a computer located in a communal area and have their access supervised. More specialized and diverse Internet practices are developed by adolescents, who use more places and devices to access the Internet, spend more time online, have less supervision, and engage in a greater variety of online activities. Younger children tend to visit fewer sites and return more often to familiar sites; they are more likely to use the Internet for doing homework, or to play online games, rather than communicate or seek out information.33 According to Livingstone and Bober, many children in the UK do not have the basic skills needed to evaluate online content. Among children aged 9 to 19, 38% said that they trust most of the information on the Internet, while 49% trust some of it; only 10% of the research participants said that they are skeptical about much information online and only one third of the participants said that they have been told how to judge the reliability of online information.34 Mascheroni studied the interaction of Italian children and parents in mediating smartphone use, and found that children are active recipients of parental mediation. Children negotiate, resist or ignore parental attempts to regulate their relationship with their smartphone: What parents perceive positively, as a way of engaging in their children’s everyday lives and guiding them towards safer Internet uses, is rather understood by children as a clear infringement of their privacy. For example, the practice of friending children on Facebook is acknowledged as a form of parental surveillance, to which children, especially young girls,

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resist by selecting privacy settings that exclude parents from their online conversations.35 It is easier for children, particularly older children, to hide their activities on the Internet than it is for parents to access the sites their children use, as this is what Internet technology is geared towards. According to children, parents are not very effective in accessing or filtering their online activities. Duerager and Livingstone report that EU children underestimate their parents’ use of monitoring and filtering.36 Of the children surveyed, 27% said that their parent’s involvement in Internet mediation was very active and 43% thought it was ‘a bit’ positive; 32% of the children said that their parents knew ‘a lot’ about their activities online, and 36% said their parents knew ‘quite a lot.’ Nonetheless, 11% said that their parent’s mediation limits their online activities ‘a lot’ and 33% said it limits their activities ‘a little’; 29% of the children said that they ignore their parents a little and 8% said they ignore a lot what their parents say about using the Internet. Finally, 5% would like their parents to take more interest in their online activity, and 10% would like a little more interest.37 Children, then, are seen to play an active as well as a positive role in the familial mediation of their Internet use. While children do sometimes perceive their parent’s mediation as invading their privacy, they also appreciate their parents’ time and concern, especially when it takes an educational rather than an arbitrary or authoritarian approach. Moreover, parental mediation plays an especially valuable role in helping children interpret and determine the reliability of content and advertising that they encounter online. Technological Mediation Parents appear to be moderately interested in technological means of regulating children’s online activities, such as monitoring, blocking, and filtering software. In Spain, 28% of parents report using parental controls or other means of blocking or filtering websites.38 In the U.S., 33% of parents report using some type of filtering or blocking software.39 Most American parents whose children use the Internet would be willing to pay for online protection measures, such as filtering software.40 According to Mitchell et al.,41 parents of younger children were more likely to use Internet filters. Half of parents in the European Union say that they install filtering software on the computer their child uses at home, and 37% of parents say that they use monitoring software; 27% said they used both filtering and monitoring software.42 According to Kirwil, 28% of EU parents use technical safety tools to moderate their children’s Internet use.43 Overall, parents preferred social mediation over technical restrictions and monitoring.

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Australian parents’ use of filtering software appears to be lower.44 Similar results were found in a report prepared for the Australian Broadcasting Authority (now the ACMA). This report found that more than third (35%) of parents reported using software filters to help mediate their children’s Internet use; almost one third of these parents (29%) use filtering software on a regular basis and 6% on an occasional basis.45 Fleming et al., in a more recent Australian study, found Internet filter usage levels considerably lower, at approximately 20%.46 Technological measures, such as blocking and filtering, are neither fine nor focused tools to regulate children’s Internet’s use. By their nature, these measures may work well in protecting children from sexual content but they work poorly when dealing with the harm to children’s imaginative development in virtual worlds, as well as the other intangible harms we have discussed: exposure to advertising, bullying, addictive behaviors, unreliable information, and the displacement of more beneficial activities (such as reading and exercise). While filtering technologies may be easy to use and give parents a sense of dealing with undesirable content, they are not a substitute for active monitoring, restricting, and engagement with children’s Internet use. This may be why more parents are not using them, and this lack of trust in technological forms of mediation appears to be well-founded. Setting Rules Parents tend to set rules for children’s Internet use, and they tend to impose more rules on younger children. One study of parental rule setting in the U.S. shows that parents of preadolescents, aged 10 to 12, tend to control and supervise their children’s online behavior more—such as by restricting online time and using filters—than do parents of teenagers, aged 12 to 17.47 Similarly, Rosen et al. found that parents of teenagers are more likely to adopt permissive and negligent styles more than parents of preadolescent children.48 The Kaiser Family Foundation has found that many 8 to 18 year-olds living in the U.S. report that their parents do not set any rules regarding the type of media content they can use or the amount of time they can spend with the media.49 Only 26% of the children reported being asked to follow media rules which their parents enforced most of the time. A further 39% of the children report having some rules, but say those rules aren’t always enforced.50 A European Commission survey found that in the EU, only 25% of the parents always or very frequently talked with their son or daughter about their online activities, while another 25% reported that they placed no rules or restrictions about their child’s use of the Internet.51 In the UK, parents prefer to use restrictive forms of guidance over evaluative or conversational forms: 42% of children say that they

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have to follow rules concerning how long they can use the Internet, and 35% of the children say they have to follow rules about when they can go online; parents provided similar answers.52 Parents may also be overestimating how much they are monitoring their children’s online activities. According to Wang et al. American parents report monitoring their teenaged children more (61%) than the teens themselves report (38%).53 Parents are more likely to control certain online activities, particularly those concerning safety and money. Topping the list are online shopping (84%), talking to strangers (83%) and spending a lot of time online (79%) as the primary activities that parents report restricting for their child.54 Duerager and Livingstone found that 89% of parents in the EU impose rules about whether their child can give out personal information online, 82% discuss their children’s online activities with them, and 58% stay nearby when the child is online.55 Parents also restrict children’s disclosure of personal information (85%), uploading (63%) and downloading materials (57%).56 Livingstone and Helsper found less parental involvement in the UK, with 53% of parents in the UK setting rules concerning the amount of time their children are allowed to spend online; parents also talk to their child about Internet use (64%), watch their child online (46%), stay nearby when their child is online (34%), check which sites their child has visited (30%), check their child’s e-mail accounts (17%), and sit with their child while online (16%).57 They conclude that in the UK, “parents have a preference for social over technical forms of mediation, preferring active co-use over technical restrictions, interaction restrictions, and monitoring practices.”58 In Spain, 70.4% of parents recognize the importance of setting rules for Internet use by children, whereas 67.4% of children do. However, parents’ emphasis is placed on controlling the time of day and amount of time spent online (64.1% and 59.6%, respectively), whereas the control of inappropriate content was much less frequently used (11.9%).59 According to Sureda et al., a majority of Spanish children aged 6 to 14 (53%) and fully 62% of teenagers aged 15 to 16 reported their parents placed no restrictions on their Internet use.60 When the parents do use rules, it is mainly regarding the amount of time spent online. Alvarez et al. found that many parents used Internet access as a form of reward or punishment for their children’s good or bad behavior, failing to recognize the importance of effective regulation of their children’s Internet use.61 Hiniker et al. found that American children aged 10 to 17 are more likely to follow rules that constrain technology activities (e.g., no Snapchat) than rules that constrain technology use in certain contexts (e.g., no phone at the dinner table).62 Therefore, parents do set and enforce rules in many cases, but these rules seems to be technical in nature. Rules mainly cover issues concerning the

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amount of time children are allowed to use the Internet, disclosing personal information, and shopping online, to name the most prevalent. However, these rules are not effective when considering the intangible harms of Internet use. In fact, rule-setting by parents is simply a less technically sophisticated reflection of the technological regulation imposed by governments we discussed previously. To use a regulatory phrase, rule-setting, like technological mediation, is akin to employing a ‘command and control’ regime at home, and it is often employed without a good understanding of how to modulate the harms of media consumption.

Parental Mediation Styles Aside from technological and rule-setting forms of control, parents tend to employ a variety of mediation styles to regulate children’s Internet use. These mediation styles tend to reflect the individual parent’s overall style of parenting, and some of these styles are more effective than others. The research on parental mediation was initially aimed at exploring how parents mediated children’s television viewing, but they also assess its consequences for media use in general, media literacy and, more specifically, media effects.63 Two main modes of parental mediation are positive mediation, which involves encouraging, facilitating, and requiring certain activities—giving a ‘green light’—and negative mediation, which involves discouraging, impeding, and prohibiting certain activities. Research shows that parents often combine positive and negative strategies of mediation, from the flexible strategy of parent-child co-viewing on one end of the spectrum, to more restrictive or controlling strategies on the other.64 Several broad categories of parental mediation have been defined in the literature. Valkenburg et al. suggest three styles: factual mediation, in which parents explain to their children how Internet content is created; evaluative mediation, in which parents assess the content while engaging with it together with the child and discussing the effects of the content; and restrictive mediation, which involves promoting parental rules governing the use of the Internet by the children.65 Livingstone and Helsper suggest four styles of parental mediation: social mediation, in which parents combine active mediation and co-use; interaction restrictions, in which parents restrict children’s online interactions; technical restrictions, in which parents control or limit online activities and time spent online; and active monitoring of children’s online practices.66 More recently, the EU Kids Online survey offered the distinction between active mediation in which the parent is present or nearby, discussing

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or sharing internet activities, versus safety guidance, in which the parent actively promotes safer and responsible uses of the Internet.67 This distinction led to the identification of five practices of parental mediation: active mediation of Internet use; active mediation of internet safety; restrictive mediation; monitoring; and technical mediation. Parents’ gender, education, and socio-economic background, as well as the characteristics and temperament of their children, all affect the adoption of parental mediation styles.68 A parent’s mediation style is also affected by their overall parenting style. Eastin et al. studied single and married mothers of teenagers in the Midwestern U.S. and found a correlation between parenting styles and Internet mediation strategies.69 Authoritative parents were more likely to use the evaluative strategies of watching and discussing Internet content with their children, while authoritarian and negligent parents were more likely to use restrictive techniques, such as blocking access.70 Research indicates that a parent’s mediation style has little effect on the extent to which their child engages in risky behavior online. Valcke et al. have found that increased parental control does not temper unsafe Internet use by adolescents.71 These results contradict those obtained by Padilla-Walker and Coyne, who found that parents do influence Internet regulation.72 This discrepancy is likely explained by that fact that, as we discussed in Chapter 1, risky online behavior is closely linked with economic and social-psychological deprivations in the child’s life in general. Liau et al. found that the supervision techniques employed by parents were generally unrelated to whether the children engaged in risky online behavior.73 However, when parents set limits, then children do spend less time using media.74 Lwin et al. distinguished between strategies of restrictive mediation and active mediation75 of U.S. parents overseeing the Internet use of their 10 to 12 year-old children.76 Findings indicate that the simple act of a parent talking to their child about not providing personal information online greatly reduces the likelihood that children will disclose personal information. In addition, it was found that setting rules for Internet use was not as effective as talking to children about the dangers of giving out such information. A restrictive mediation style may assist, however, in reducing the amount of time children spend using the Internet. In Belgium, the highest levels of Internet use among adolescents is observed when parents adopt a permissive mediation style; when parents adopt a restrictive style, Internet use among adolescents decreases.77 Active mediation appears to be more effective than a passive style. According to Duerager and Livingstone, the active mediation of Internet use—one in which parents talk with the child about the internet and stay nearby or sit with

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the child while they go online—reduces EU children’s exposure to online risks without reducing online opportunities.78 This mediation style also reduces reports by tweens, aged 9 to 12 years, of becoming upset when encountering online risks. On the other hand, technical mediation by parents—such as using a content filter—does not reduce online risk encounters among children.79 Parents’ mediation style may also depend on cultural factors. Studies of Internet use amongst fifth and sixth graders in Belgium show that most parents use a restrictive mediation style (59.4%).80 In contrast, Ihmeideh and Shawareb found that authoritative mediation was the most commonly used style among parents in Jordan. They interviewed Jordanian parents of children aged 7–8 years about their mediation styles. Authoritative mediation was the most commonly used, followed by the permissive and authoritarian parenting styles, with the neglectful parenting style being used the least.81 Mediation also differs in accordance with parents’ gender, educational level and age; mediation styles are linked to how much parents themselves use the Internet, their attitude to it and their experiences on the net.82 A study conducted in Australia concluded that “as children become teenagers direct supervision and rules become less effective and education and trust play greater roles.”83 Another study by Fleming et al. found that the use of more controlling styles, such as the authoritarian or authoritative styles, was not associated with awareness by parents of online risks to teenagers aged 13 to 16.84 Instead, the authoritative style was linked to lower levels of online risk behavior by children. These results support those found in other studies showing that assertive or authoritative mediation is the most effective in protecting against online risks. In their research into the effects of parental mediation on private information disclosure by Korean youth, Shin et al. found that parental mediation style had no significant impact on tweens’ disclosure of personal information online.85 This is contrary to previous findings in the parental mediation research on children’s television use86 and on teenagers’ perceptions of online safety.87 However, a significant relationship was found between parent-tween disagreement on restrictive mediation and tweens’ information disclosure. Buijzen et al. argue that parent-child agreement on parental mediation reflects the child’s accurate perception of parental mediation.88 Shin et al.’s findings seems to suggest that tweens’ inaccurate perception of what parents do to limit their access to commercial web sites can account for tweens’ information disclosure online.89 Lee and Chae surveyed 566 Korean children between the ages of 10 and 15 and found that risky behavior online was moderated by restrictive mediation by parents and by learning good Internet skills.90 Finally, Ihmeideh and Shawareb found that children whose parents adopt an authoritative parenting

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style, in which they define rules, discuss them with their children, and encourage their children to talk about their Internet use, have higher exposure to the Internet at home than those with parents who adopt other parenting styles.91 Nikken and Jansz92 surveyed 792 Dutch parents of children aged between 2 and 12 and found that parents use more mediation when they expect that the internet has a positive effect and particularly when they believe that it has a negative impact. Further, Livingstone et al.93 found a connection between parents’ digital skills and their mediation strategy. Enabling styles of mediation is found to be associated with increased online opportunities, but also risks; it tends to be employed when the parent or child is relatively digitally skilled. Restrictive styles of mediation are found to be associated with fewer online risks but at the cost of opportunities. These outcomes are often reflected in policy advice that regards media use as primarily problematic, and is further evidence that a personalized and fine-tuned strategy will work best to maximize online opportunities and minimize online risks.

Conclusion These findings show that parents are confused about how to best regulate their children’s Internet use. What is the best mediation approach? Who should regulate their children’s Internet use? What happens when children are outside the home? How do parents bridge the knowledge gap between the generations? How do parents keep up with changes in technology? These are only some of the questions posed. These challenges combined with the rapid evolution of the Internet (and communication technology in general), as well as cultural differences—such as traditional versus modern parental approaches—make this regulatory sphere greatly confusing and contested. The research shows that parents, as well as children, are actively seeking to educate themselves about using the Internet, including online risks and safety hazards, but they are also looking for more information, education, and community support. The assertive or authoritative mediation style seems to give the best results overall; however, parents often use more than one style, and restrictive mediation can also be effective—particularly in limiting Internet use and undesirable online behaviors. Certainly, the authoritarian and neglectful styles are not very effective, and this is in line with expectations about parenting styles generally. While few studies have looked at the kinds of virtual harms we discuss here—how to limit the damage caused by advertising, overuse, bullying, exposure to unreliable sources, and the displacement of beneficial activities, such as a lack of reading, exercise and imaginative play—we

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suggest that parents can play a positive role by talking to their children about media habits, media literacy, and information reliability, as well as by consistently encouraging outside activities. In the following chapter, we look at ancient culture for some more ideas about how to incorporate their wisdom into parental mediation strategies.

Notes 1 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 2 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). 3 David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 4 See: Ofcom, The Evidence Base: The Views of Children, Young People and Parents, Ofcom’s Submission to the Byron Review 72 (2007), http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/ binaries/research/telecoms-research/annex5.pdf. 5 David Buckingham, “The Electronic Generation? Children and New Media,” in The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, edited by Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage, 2002), 77–89; Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill, “Families and the Internet: An Observational Study of Children and Young People’s Internet Use,” BTexact Technologies (2001), http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_pdf/livingstone08.pdf. 6 D. Ho and M. Zaccheus, “Alarm Over Popular Facebook Group,” The Straits Times, October 23, 2012, B1-B2. 7 Lisa M. Tripp, “‘The Computer is Not for You to be Looking Around, it is for Schoolwork’: Challenges for Digital Inclusion as Latino Immigrant Families Negotiate Children’s Access to the Internet,” New Media & Society 13, no. 4 (2011): 552–567. 8 Sonia Livingstone, Giovanna Mascheroni, Michael Dreier, Stephane Chaudron, and Kaat Lagae, How Parents of Young Children Manage Digital Devices at Home: The Role of Income, Education and Parental Style (London: EU Kids Online Network, 2015), http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EUKidsIV/PDF/Parentalmediation.pdf. 9 Lynn Schofield Clark, “Parental Mediation Theory for the Digital Age,” Communication Theory 21 (2011): 323–343. 10 Wonsun Shin, “Parental Socialization of Children’s Internet Use: A Qualitative Approach,” New Media & Society 17, no. 5 (2015): 649–665. 11 Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink, Joke Bauwens, Andrea E. Durager, and Christina Ponte, “Exploring Types of Parent-Child Relationship and Internet Use Across Europe,” Journal of Children and Media 7, no. 1 (2013): 114–132.

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12 Victoria J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010), 3. 13 Julian J. Dooley, Donna Cross, Lydia Hearn, Robyn Trevaud, “Review of Existing Australian and International Cyber-Safety Research,” Child Health Promotion Research Centre, Edith Cowan University (2009), https://www.ecu.edu.au/__ data/assets/pdf_file/0007/32965/ECU_Review_of_existing_Australian_and_ international_cyber-safety_research.pdf. 14 European Commission Flash Eurobarometer, “Towards a Safer Use of the Internet for Children in the EU: A Parents’ Perspective,” Analytical Report (2008): 14, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_248_en.pdf. 15 Sonia Livingstone and Magdalena Bober, UK Children Go Online: Surveying the Experiences of Young People and their Parents (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2004), 101. 16 Livingstone, UK Children Go Online, 95. 17 Media Awareness Network, “Canada’s Children in a Wired World: The Parents’ View,” Final Report, March 1, 2003, 3, http://mediasmarts.ca/publicationreport/ canadas-children-wired-world-parents-view. 18 Media Awareness Network, “Canada’s Children in a Wired World,” 3. 19 Media Awareness Network, “Canada’s Children in a Wired World,” 3. 20 European Commission, “Towards a Safer Use of the Internet,” 55. 21 European Commission, “Towards a Safer Use of the Internet,” 104. 22 Wanda Cassidy, Karen Brown, and Margaret Jackson, “Making Kind Cool: Parents’ Suggestions for Preventing Cyber Bullying and Fostering Cyber Kindness,” Journal of Educational Computing Research 46, no. 4 (2012): 415–436. 23 Joseph Turow, “Family Boundaries, Commercialism, and the Internet: A Framework for Research,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 22, no. 1 (2001): 73–86. 24 C. Garitaonandia and M. Garmendia, “Cómo usan Internet los jóvenes: Hábitos, riesgos y control parental [How Youngster Use Internet: Habits, Risks and Parental Control],” (2007), cited in M. Álvarez, A. Torres, E. Rodríguez, S. Padilla & M.J. Rodrigo, “Attitudes and Parenting Dimensions in Parents’ Regulation of Internet Use by Primary and Secondary School Children,” Computers & Education 67 (2013): 69–78. 25 INTECO, Estudio sobre hábitos seguros en el uso de las TIC por niños y adolescentes y e-confianza de sus padres [Survey on Safety Habits in the Use of TICs by Children and Adolescents and e-trust of their Parents] (Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías de la Comunicación, 2009). 26 A. Melamud et al., “Internet Usage in Households with Children Between 4 and 18 Years Old. Parent’s Supervision: Results of a National Survey,” Archivos Argentinos de Pediatría 107, no. 1 (2009): 30–36. 27 Wanda Cassidy, Karen Brown, and Margaret Jackson, “‘Under the Radar’: Educators and Cyberbullying in Schools,” School Psychology International 33, no. 5 (2012): 520–532.

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28 Sonia Livingstone, Leslie Haddon, Anke Görzig & Kjartan Ólafsson, Risks and Safety on the Internet: The Perspective of European Children (London: EU Kids Online Network, 2011), http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EU%20 Kids%20II%20(2009–11)/National%20reports/UKReport.pdf. 29 Livingstone, Risks and Safety on the Internet. 30 European Commission, “Towards a Safer Use of the Internet.” 31 European Commission, “Towards a Safer Use of the Internet.” 32 Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), Media and Communications in Australian Families 2007: Report for the Media and Society Research Project (Melbourne: ACMA, 2007), http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/ lib101058/media_and_society_report_2007.pdf; Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), Use of Electronic Media and Communications: Early Childhood to Years, Findings from Growing Up in Australia (Melbourne: ACMA, 2009), http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310665/use_of_electronic_ media_and_comms-early_childhood_to_teenage_years.pdf; Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (3 to 4 and 7 to 8-year-olds), and Media and Communications in Australian Families (8 to 17-year-olds) (Melbourne: ACMA, 2007), http://www.growingupinaustralia.gov.au/pubs/newsletter/participants/studyupdate201002.pdf; Livingstone, Risks and Safety on the Internet. 33 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Children’s Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities Survey 2009 (Canberra: ABS, 2009), http://www.abs.gov.au/ ausstats/[email protected]/mf/4901.0; ACMA, Longitudinal Study; ACMA, Use of Electronic Media; Sydney Jones and Susannah Fox, Generations Online in 2009 (Washington: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2009), http://www.pewinternet.org/ 2009/01/28/generations-online-in-2009/; Sonia Livingstone, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations, Challenging Realities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_230790_en.pdf; Livingstone, UK Children Go Online; Livingstone, Risks and Safety on the Internet; Rideout, Generation M2. 34 Livingstone, UK Children Go Online. 35 Giovanna Mascheroni, “Parenting the Mobile Internet in Italian Households: Parents’ and Children’s Discourses,” Journal of Children and Media 8, no. 4 (2014: 440–456, at 451. 36 Andrea Duerager and Sonia Livingstone, How Can Parents Support Children’s Internet Safety? (London: EU Kids Online Network, 2012), http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42872/1/ How%20can%20parents%20support%20children’s%20internet%20safety(lsero).pdf. 37 Duerager, How Can Parents Support. 38 Livingstone, Risks and Safety on the Internet. 39 Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak, “Protecting Youth Online: Family Use of Filtering and Blocking Software,” Child Abuse & Neglect 29, no. 7 (2005): 753–765.

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40 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), The Protection of Children Online, Recommendation of the OECD Council Report on Risks Faced by Children Online and Policies to Protect Them (Paris: OECD, 2012), https://www.oecd.org/sti/ieconomy/childrenonline_with_cover.pdf. 41 Mitchell, “Protecting Youth Online.” 42 European Commission, “Towards a Safer Use of the Internet,” 48. 43 Lucyna Kirwil, “Parental Mediation of Children’s Internet Use in Different European Countries,” Journal of Children and Media 3, no. 4 (2009): 394–409; Livingstone, “Parental Mediation.” 44 Dooley, “Review of Existing Australian Research,” 175. 45 NetRatings Australia, Kidsonline@home: Internet Use in Australian Homes (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Authority and NetAlert Limited, 2005), http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/12156089. 46 Michele J. Fleming, Shane Greentree, Dayana Cocotti-Muller, Kristy A. Elias, and Sarah Morrison, “Safety in Cyberspace: Adolescents’ Safety and Exposure Online,” Youth and Society 38, no. 2 (2006): 135–154. 47 Mitchell, “Protecting Youth Online.” 48 Larry D. Rosen, Nancy A. Cheever & L. Mark Carrier, “The Association of Parenting Style and Child Age with Parental Limit Setting and Adolescent MySpace Behavior,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29, no. 6 (2008): 459–471. 49 Rideout, Generation M2. 50 Rideout, Generation M2, 35. 51 European Commission, Towards a Safer Use.” 52 Livingstone, “Regulating the Internet at Home,” 99. 53 Rong Wang, Suzanne M. Bianchi, and Sara B. Raley, “Teenagers’ Internet Use and Family Rules: A Research Note,” Journal of Marriage and Family 67, no. 5 (2005): 1249–1258. 54 European Commission, Towards a Safer Use,” 40. 55 Duerager, “How Can Parents Support Children.” 56 Duerager, “How Can Parents Support Children.” 57 Sonia Livingstone and Ellen J. Helsper, “Parental Mediation of Children’s Internet Use,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 52, no. 4 (2008): 581–599. 58 Livingstone, “Parental Mediation of Children’s Internet Use,” 596. 59 M. Álvarez, A. Torres, E. Rodríguez, S. Padilla, M.J. Rodrigo, “Attitudes and Parenting Dimensions in Parents’ Regulation of Internet Use by Primary and Secondary School Children,” Computers & Education 67 (2013): 69–78. 60 J. Sureda, R. Comas & M. Morey, “Menores y acceso a Internet en el hogar: las normas familiares [Minors and Internet access at home: family norms],” Comunicar 34 (2010): 135–143, cited in Álvarez, “Attitudes and Parenting Dimensions.” 61 Álvarez, “Attitudes and Parenting Dimensions.”

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62 Alexis Hiniker, Sarita Y. Schoenebeck, Julie A. Kientz, “Not at the Dinner Table: Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives on Family Technology Rules,” CSCW ‘16, February 27 to March 2, 2016, San Francisco, USA. 63 Erica Austin, “Exploring the Effects of Active Parental Mediation of Television Content,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 37, no. 2 (1993): 147–158; Erica Austin, Paul Bolls, Yuki Fujioka, and Jason Engelbertson, “How and Why Parents Take on the Tube,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 43, no. 2 (1999): 175– 192; Roger Desmond, Jerome L. Singer, Dorothy G. Singer, Rachel Calam, and Karen Colimore, “Family Mediation Patterns and Television Viewing: Young Children’s Use and Grasp of the Medium,” Human Communication Research 11, no. 4 (1985): 461–480; Aimee Dorr, Peter Kovaric, and Catherine Doubleday, “Parent-Child Coviewing of Television,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 33, no. 1 (1989): 35–51. 64 J. Van Der Bulck and B. Van Den Bergh, “Parental Guidance of Children’s Media Use and Conflict in the Family,” in Children and Media: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. B. Van Den Bergh & J. Van Der Bulck, 131–150 (Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant, 2000); Dorr, “Parent-Child Co-viewing”; Carolyn A. Lin and David J. Atkin, “Parental Mediation and Rulemaking for Adolescent Use of Television and VCRs,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 33, no. 1 (1989): 53–67. 65 Amy Nathanson, “Identifying and Explaining the Relationship Between Parental Mediation and Children’s Aggression,” Communication Research 26, no. 6 (1999): 124–143; Patti Valkenburg, Marina Krcmar, Allerd Peeters, and Nies Marseille, “Developing a Scale to Assess Three Styles of Television Mediation: Instructive Mediation, Restrictive Mediation, and Social Co-viewing,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 43, no. 1 (1999): 52–67. 66 Livingstone, “Parental Mediation.” 67 Livingstone, Risks and Safety on the Internet. 68 Matthew Eastin, Bradley Greenberg, and Linda Hofschire, “Parenting the Internet,” Journal of Communication 56 (2006): 486–504; Maialen Garmendia, Carmelo Garitaonandia, Gemma Martínez, and Miguel Ángel Casado, “The Effectiveness of Parental Mediation,” in Children, Risk and Safety on the Internet: Research and Policy Challenges in Comparative Perspective, ed. Sonia Livingstone, Leslie Haddon, and Anke Görzig, 231–244 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012); Livingstone, “Parental Mediation”; Margaret Nelson, Parenting out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 69 Eastin, “Parenting the Internet.” 70 Eastin, “Parenting the Internet.” 71 M. Valcke, B. De Wever, H. Van Keer, and T. Schellens, “Long-Term Study of Safe Internet use of Young Children,” Computers & Education 57, no. 1 (2011): 1292– 1305.

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72 Laura M. Padilla-Walker and Sarah M. Coyne, “‘Turn That Thing Off!’ Parent and Adolescent Predictors of Proactive Media Monitoring,” Journal of Adolescence 34, no. 4 (2011): 705–715. 73 Albert Kienfie Liau, Angeline Khoo, and Peng Hwa Ang, “Parental Awareness and Monitoring of Adolescent Internet Use,” Current Psychology 27, no. 4 (2008): 217–233. 74 Liau, “Parental Awareness and Monitoring,” 36. 75 This is similar to the distinction between reactive and proactive parenting in other socialization domains—See: Laura M. Padilla-Walker, Ashley M. Fraser, and James M. Harper, “Walking the Walk: The Moderating Role of Proactive Parenting on Adolescents’ Value-Congruent Behaviors,” Journal of Adolescence 35, no. 5 (2012): 1141–1152. 76 May Lwin, Andrea Stanaland, and Anthony Miyazaki, “Protecting Children’s Privacy Online: How Parental Mediation Strategies Affect Website Safeguard Effectiveness,” Journal of Retailing 84, no. 2 (2008): 205–217. 77 M. Valcke, S. Bonte, B. De Wever, and I. Rots, “Internet Parenting Styles and the Impact on Internet Use of Primary School Children,” Computers & Education 55, no. 2 (2010): 454–464. 78 Duerager and Sonia Livingstone, How Can Parents Support. 79 Duerager and Sonia Livingstone, How Can Parents Support. 80 Valcke, “Internet Parenting Styles.” 81 Fathi Mahmoud Ihmeideh and Aseel Akram Shawareb, “The Association Between Internet Parenting Styles and Children’s Use of the Internet at Home,” Journal of Research in Childhood Education 28, no. 4 (2014): 411–425. 82 Valcke, “Internet Parenting Styles.” 83 NetRatings Australia, Kidsonline@home, 68. 84 Fleming, “Safety in Cyberspace.” 85 Shin Wonsun, Huh Jisu, and Ronald J. Faber, “Tweens’ Online Privacy Risks and the Role of Parental Mediation,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 632–649. 86 Moniek Buijzen and Patti M. Valkenburg, “Parental Mediation of Undesired Advertising Effects,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 49, no. 2 (2005): 153–165. 87 Lwin, “Protecting Children’s Privacy”; Seounmi Youn, “Parental Influence and Teens’ Attitude Toward Online Privacy Protection,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 42, no. 3 (2008): 362–388. 88 Moniek Buijzen, Esther Rozendaal, Marjolein Moorman, and Martin Tanis, “Parent Versus Child: Reports of Parental Advertising Mediation: Exploring the Meaning of Agreement,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 52, no. 4 (2008): 509–525. 89 Wonsun, “Tweens’ Online Privacy.”

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90 Sook-Jung Lee and Young-Gil Chae, “Balancing Participation and Risks in Children’s Internet Use: The Role of Internet Literacy and Parental Mediation,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15, no. 5 (2012): 257–262. 91 Ihmeideh, “The Association Between Internet Parenting Styles.” 92 Peter Nikken and Jeroen Jansz, “Developing Scales to Measure Parental Mediation of Young Children’s Internet Use,” Learning, Media and Technology 39, no. 2 (2014): 250–266. 93 Sonia Livingstone, Kjartan Ólafsson, Ellen J. Helsper, Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva, Giuseppe A. Veltri, and Frans Folkvord, “Maximizing Opportunities and Minimizing Risks for Children Online: The Role of Digital Skills in Emerging Strategies of Parental Mediation,” Journal of Communication 67 (2017): 82–105. .

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The Cultural Regulation of Technology Introduction: Technology and Spirituality SelectSmart.com is a website that hosts questionnaires to help visitors make decisions on any number of life goals—from what foods or musical bands are most suited to your tastes, to quizzes that select your most compatible spiritual belief system. You can choose your religion alongside what camera, or future presidential candidate, might be a good fit for you. It seems inevitable that information technology should reduce human spiritual life to a personal preference that can be commodified and served up in much the same way as a breakfast cereal, or a new pair of shoes.1 Here, we take a cultural and a spiritual stance towards new technology through a discussion of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. We chose this story for the wisdom that it imparts on the themes we have discussed in this book. At base it is a story about relationships—towards God as well as one another—as well as communication and political organization. The Tower of Babel illustrates how a traditional, even ancient, cultural form can grapple successfully with new technologies and the pressures they place on our present-day values, morals, and social organization. To do so, we draw upon the ancient cultural form of Midrash, a traditional Jewish method of biblical interpretation, and itself a form of storytelling. As we have argued in the previous chapters, there are a number of limitations to modern methods of addressing technological harms: controlled studies cannot prove the harms that technology causes in time enough for us to summon the political will to mitigate them; command and control regulation is heavy-handed and ineffective; technological means of control—such as filtering, blocking, and code regulation—do not address the intangible and social harms caused by technology; self-help advice for parents and to-do lists simply give us an illusion of addressing harms without any real efficacy. The harms caused by new media and rapid technological change are problems that stem from values, cultural practices, and human relations, and this is why we turn to ancient forms of wisdom and storytelling to enliven these values and grapple anew with the pressures technology has placed on them. The Tower of Babel is one such story, and our retelling of it here is but the latest iteration of an aeons-long conversation.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398887_007

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The Tower and the Image And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there… And they said, “Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”2 According to Jewish sources, the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is a story of multiple sins: not only egoism and narcissism, but also the pursuit of materiality, the abandonment of human welfare, a rejection of the spiritual life, and a rebellion against God. These sins are echoed in the technological harms we have discussed here—the privileging of materiality over meaning, the rejection of human-centred values in pursuit of the trivial, the purposeful dereliction of well-being, and the surrender to technological imperatives. These virtual harms are wrapped up in the metaphor of the Tower as a representation of the images we have constructed, whereas the task of building of the Tower represents the communication media and networks that we have used in constructing the Internet, and the technological infrastructure which supports it. The three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—are all concerned in a fundamental way with media and images. As “people of the book,” each community defines itself through a relationship to the written word in the form of sacred texts.3 These include the Bible, the Quran, and for Judaism the Torah, the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and, as we will be discussing here, rabbinical Midrash—a form of scholarly commentary which interprets and explicates the fundamental sacred texts. Judaism teaches that human beings are created in the “image of God,” and accordingly sets up prohibitions on 1making certain images or representations on the grounds that to do so may trespass upon the work of God, replacing what is sacred with a worldly—and therefore vain and illusory—facsimile of the divine.4 Images of God are especially prohibited, including written and oral representations of the name of God, as such images are too readily contaminated by materiality and exposed to debasement. The second commandment is absolutely clear on this matter: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.5

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Postman wonders why God included instructions on how the people were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience and concludes that the biblical author “assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.”6 This is reflected in the Book of Isaiah, in which the great sins of the people are reckoned—war, violence, injustice, greed, but also pride in the images they have created: “Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made.”7 We become like those things which we nurture and elevate, and when these are reprehensible then our cultural values become denigrated accordingly. The technologies we use to create and disseminate images have mounted exponentially since these words were written. After the printing press, when images were still laborious and expensive to reproduce, came the mechanical reproduction of images exemplified, as Walter Benjamin has stated, by the more modern recording technologies of photography and cinema; then came electronic communication, which was the chief focus of Marshall McLuhan, in which images were broadcast in ‘real-time’ via communication media such as radio, television, and now the Internet.8 This phenomenon has only been exacerbated by the modern, mainly pictorial, forms of mass media. Mitchell and Hansen argue that modern mass media is quantitatively and qualitatively different from prior media forms. They state that the “invention of photography, cinema, television, and the internet has brought about a degree of image saturation in global culture that was unimaginable in earlier times.”9 Some scholars have termed this the “pictorial turn” in modern culture—a fundamental shift in which the ubiquity of images becomes the dominant cultural form.10 New forms of media pose challenges we cannot yet fathom: virtual reality threatens to supplant (a dull and meaningless) lived experience; ‘biomedia’ and bioinformatics, which reduce the human genome to mere data—a programmable, manipulable substrate11; the practice of implanting microchips and other forms of ‘bio-hacking’ threatens to turn the human body into just another connected ‘smart’ device.12 Bio-hacking, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence have reawakened some of the ancient phobias and taboos prohibiting the making of images, “because it seems quite literally to introduce the prospect of ‘playing god’ by taking over the role of making [and we would add ‘controlling’] creatures.”13 Having come through numerous cycles of technological revolution, adoption, and eventual obsolescence, what remains is our troubled relationship with the images we use these technologies to create.14 Our anxieties tend to flare up at such times, “when a new medium makes possible new kinds of images, often more lifelike and persuasive than ever before, and seemingly more volatile and virulent, as if images were dangerous microbes that could

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infect the minds of their consumers.”15 Some new media forms, such as the brain-computer interface, threaten to actually infiltrate our minds.16 Our time is one of not only great but also rapid revolution in communication technologies. We have as yet had little time to adapt, and this is a task that is made more difficult by the constraints imposed on our values, thinking, and social relations by those same innovations—technology’s commandments, by which the user is bound to all the rules of the system.

Technology’s Commandments And thou shall not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment.17 Jacques Ellul argues that human society has become dominated by ‘la technique’—a focus on the values of the scientific system which promotes progress, efficiency and dependence on technology.18 Technology can be regarded as having its own set of laws, intentions, values, and incentives which are imposed on those who use them. Users can transform their social practices, habits and relations almost effortlessly, and with little conscious reflection. This view has been termed ‘technological determinism’: the nature of the technology itself determines its uses, outcomes, and impacts.19 Ellul’s technological determinism has been incorporated in the work of a number of scholars, in which the key concern has become the tendency of media to impose a distinctive value set on society generally.20 According to one such scholar, Clifford Christians, technology has its own language, its own stresses and “inherent biases” that are hard for us to recognize, and change.21 For Christians, technological objects are “intertwined with their environments,” and loaded with the values of those that create and govern them.22 Very often, these standards are antithetical to religious beliefs.23 Quentin Schultze, too, raises concerns about the “techno-moral crisis” emerging from the diffusion of a modern information-based society.24 Information technology “fosters information-intensive, technologically oriented habits” where our cyber-innovations are “running far ahead of our moral sensibilities.”25 If we fail to address the moral dilemmas posed by technological change, Schultze argues that “we will lose our capacity to act responsibly. We will wrongly let instrumental practices unravel the moral fabric of our lives. The habits of our hearts will become high-tech instead of virtuous.”26 Whereas it is true that humans have always used technologies of one kind or another, Christians points out that we are now in a quantum shift

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in which the pace of technological change is greater than it has ever been. Nor is the problem merely one of the proliferation of particular technologies and their intrinsic qualities, but the technological order of society as a whole.27 In previous eras, the tools we used were held in check within a larger complex of social mores and practices. A slower pace of change gave us time to adapt, and incorporate the new technologies into a transformed social order. But today the pace and sophistication of technological developments are reorganizing society in ways that compel us to conform to technology’s needs and goals. There is little time to reflect and adapt before the cycle of advance and obsolescence hoists upon us a new set of exigencies and concerns. “Technique works like a guillotine,” Christians argues, “decapitating other social values,” much as in ancient times when they would “put out the eyes of nightingales in order to make them sing better.”28 The end result is that we ignore commitments and ethics in favour of technological prowess. Christians advocates resistance to la technique, to the spirit of the machine that drives the technology, without completely rejecting the technology itself.29 “We need a new paradigm,” he explains: …a transformation in our thinking. Through education we must revolutionize our beliefs about progress, expertise, and magnitude. Such values rooted in the machine must be replaced with values empowered by the sacredness of life. In contrast to global markets as the point of orientation, the universal sacredness of life is the axis of a humanistic perspective.30 Understanding technology’s commandments is a necessary first step to their overthrow. The Rejection of Humanity And they had been engaged in building for a very long time, so that they had already built the city, and the tower therein reached an enormous height. And by reason of its very great height it took a full year to carry the stones and the bricks upwards, to reach the builders high above. And thus it was done all the time, with some going up and others coming down, and so difficult was the ascension and descension that when a brick would happen to fall down and break all would lament and weep over such a great loss. But when a man would fall down and be killed, no one would take the least notice.31

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In Ellul’s terms, technological societies have sacralized the genius behind machines and the technological order they impose.32 We have allowed the technocracy to define not only the fields of engineering and business, but also politics, education, medicine, and religious practice. Human beings, states Christians, become “unable to establish a meaningful life outside the artificial ambiance of a technocratic culture.” and therefore see no choice but to “place their ultimate hope in it. Seeing no other source of security, we tend to become slaves to technical productivity. Moral purpose is sacrificed to technological excellence.”33 The technique of the machine is not applied superficially, only to methods of communicating or doing business, but also to the deeper layers of society and existence, touching the most profound aspects of our culture and our understanding of personhood.34 According to two Jewish interpretative sources, Rabbi Eliezer, writing in the 9th century C.E., and the Malbim (Rabbi Meyer Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser), writing in the late nineteenth-century, the tower-builders’ chief offence lay in their too-ready acceptance of materialism. The Malbim emphasizes the builder’s desire to construct extravagant buildings to glorify their own prowess,35 whereas Rabbi Eliezer emphasizes their repudiation of the value of human life. His commentary states: …and the Tower of Babylon had stairs from its East to its West. Those who were bringing up the bricks climbed from the East, and those who stepped down did so from the West. And if a person had fallen and died, they would not pay him any heed. But if one brick had fallen, then they would wail, and lament “how shall we get another for it?”36 In the words of Ellul, “technique has no place for the individual; the personal means nothing to it.”37 In many traditions, Nimrud, the king of Shinar, built the Tower of Babel to solidify his own power, with the aim of oppressing both individuality and the ability of individual subjects to rise against him. Rabbi Shimshon Refael Hirsh in his interpretation argues that the tower-builders sinned in how they oppressed the individual, and stifled the individual’s opportunities for development.38 This is echoed in Schultze’s argument that while “cybertechnologies may appear to function in a wholly revolutionary manner, they have quickly become another means of expanding industrial capitalism and consumerism around the world.”39 In this reading, the construction of the Tower, and the systems that are organized to build it, are but a means of subordinating the person to the will of the powerful. This is done through an

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all-encompassing system of tower-building that substitutes its own needs and values in place of human needs and human values—a system in which towerbuilding stands in the same place in this ancient drama as the technocracy does in our own time. According to the Midrash, God confounded the language of the towerbuilders in order to put an end to its building: And so they continued building the city and the tower, and they acted wickedly every day until many days and years had passed. And the Lord said to the seventy angels that stood first and nearest unto the throne, “Go, let us go down and confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.” And the Lord did unto them accordingly. At once they forgot one another’s speech, and they could no more speak or understand the same language. And when the builder would receive from the hands of the carrier the wrong bricks, or that which he was not ordered to bring, then the builder in his anger would fling it away, and cast it upon someone and kill him. And this disorder continued for many days, and a great number were killed in that way.40 According to Rabbi Hirsh, God has introduced a system of discommunication, in which each person is so wrapped up in their own selves, in their own subjectivity, that any kind of coordination or communication becomes impossible. The selfishness, self-centeredness, and lack of humanity of the towerbuilding is thus pushed to its logical extreme, and undermines the enterprise as a whole. In our reading, the Internet itself depends on such a system to function—a system that both glorifies and compels from us a continuous stream of narcissistic, subjective, and self-referential content, and one that risks much the same fate. Writes Houston, “our lives are easily described but rarely understood, busy going nowhere in particular. We live at the edges of other people’s lives, too busy to listen.”41 More communication, more social networks, have in so many ways divided us, with their encouragement of self-absorption, incivility, and triviality. We end up in cyberspace, shouting out to only our own selves, listening to no one, understanding nothing. The Rejection of the Divine And the Lord knew their wickedness, even that which was in their very thoughts. And when they shot arrows toward heaven, the arrows fell back upon them, full of blood. Seeing this, they rejoiced one and all, saying “We have killed all those that were in heaven.42

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Other readings of the Tower of Babel emphasize the tower-builders’ rejection of God. In climbing the Tower to worship the stars, they reject the Divine in favour of worldly idols. The Midrash tells us that the foundations for this rejection are hubris and arrogance—the thought that our creations can exceed those of God. The tower-builders revel in their organization and technical skills—forgetting that these are the blessings of God—and thinking that they can conquer the heavenly realm, overthrowing the ‘divine beings’ and ruling in their place.43 It is instructive to review the detailed commentary on the Tower of Babel found in the Zohar, a 6th century C.E. midrashic text containing rabbinical commentary on the Torah as well as mystical exegesis. The Zohar discusses the events preceding the building of the tower, and how they gave rise to this arrogance: In the days of Enosh, even the youth of that generation were looking at supreme wisdoms. And they would understand them. Said Rabbi Isa, “if this is so then it was stupidity, since they did not know that God will bring the waters of the flood upon them, and they will die from it.” Said Rabbi Ytzchak, “they knew. But foolishness held their heart.” As they knew the angel in charge of fire and the angel in charge of water. And they knew to stop these angels so that they would not be able to exact judgment upon them. And they did not know that God is the ruler of the earth. And from Him judgment will come into the world. But they understood that the world is ruled by these angels. And by them all the matters of the world behave. And for that they were not looking at God. And they were not observing His actions. And then the whole earth was corrupted.44 Human beings, according to Christians, have become unable to “establish a meaningful life outside the artificial ambiance of a technocratic culture”; we see no purpose or way of life outside of the technological system, and in this way, “moral purpose is sacrificed to technological excellence.”45 According to Christians: The mystique of machineness eats into our deepest being—our philosophy of life… The instrumentalist worldview is invading our spirit and influencing the way we teach and learn and manage our social institutions. A calculus of averages and probabilities is replacing ends and the common good; the technological order is reconstituting the moral order in terms of technique.46

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The technique of the machine transforms the deepest layers of our society and existence—not only our culture and norms, but our understanding of personhood, and our relationship to the sacred, subordinating all meaning and divinity to only itself.47 The Rejection of Value and Meaning But soon they came to know and understand the evil which had come over their brethren, and so they abandoned the cities and the tower, and they dispersed themselves all over the face of the whole earth. And so it came that the sons of man ceased to build the city and the tower. Therefore the name of the place is called Babel, because the Lord confounded there the language of all the earth.48 The confounding of languages and the scattering of the peoples of the earth speaks to the loss of connection, communication, a sense of the sacred and, ultimately, the loss of meaning and value we find in our everyday lives. Jacques Ellul tells us that ours is a progressively technical civilization. By this Ellul means that the ever-expending and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life. It compels a civilization committed to the quest for continuously improved means to bring about carelessly examined ends. Indeed, technique transforms ends into means. What was once prized in its own right now becomes worthwhile only if it helps achieve some other goal—money, fame, ‘likes,’ ‘shares,’ growth, advancement. Christians advocates wisely that we resist la technique—the spirit of the machine which drives technology—without completely rejecting the technology itself.49 He further argues that technological objects are “intertwined with their environments,” and loaded with the values of those that create and govern them, which are often antithetical to religious values.50 Christians frames technology as having and reproducing in us its own biases, “even in the hands of evangelicals there is no changing the inherent biases.”51 The present technological generation has committed the same folly as the tower-builders at Babel: they have taken what is central to a meaningful and spiritual life, and relegated it to the margins; in turn, they have taken the marginal—all that is time-wasting and trivial—and placed it at the centre of daily life. They have focused on building a monument to vanity, and have allowed true value to slip away. This loss of meaning is a consequence of the technological imperative. Neil Postman tells us that it is “the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest;

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that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business.”52 The postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard contends that this is a consequence of the simulacral nature of new technology. A simulacrum is generally an image, likeness, similarity, or semblance with the connotation that is superficial or inferior to the original. Although the term is a modern one, the philosophical concept goes back to ancient Greece, where the concept of image manipulation was treated by Plato. Baudrillard defines the simulacrum as an image that takes on a life of its own, but with no basis or connection to reality.53 He explains: It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all of its vicissitudes.54 The simulacrum is the final stage in the procession of an image: in the first stage, an image is a reflection of a reality; the second stage comes about as the reflection perverts or masks the reality; in the third stage, the image masks the absence of the reality; and in the fourth stage the image becomes real, taking on a life of its own, without any foundation in the underlying reality from which it was fashioned. Like Christians, Ellul does not advocate that we reject science and technique in their entirety. Ellul states that it is not “a question of minimizing the importance of scientific activity, but of recognizing that in fact scientific activity has been superseded by technical activity to such a degree that we can no longer conceive of science without its technical outcome…science has become an instrument of technique.”55 Just as the tower builders could have used their skills in engineering and organization to build a citadel that glorified God and served humanity, so it is that a human-centred science could lead to a technologically-advanced yet spiritually-enriched culture. We have surrendered to la technique, rather than mastered it. According to Schultze, this is a result of our misplaced priorities. We have pursued the “good life” only in terms of efficiency, efficacy, and success.56 He cautions that, “unless we cultivate virtuous character with as much energy and enthusiasm as we pursue cyber-technologies, our technological mindedness and habits will further unravel the moral fabric of society.”57 Christians argues that what we need now is “a transformation in our thinking. Through education we must revolutionize our beliefs about progress, expertise, and magnitude. Such values rooted in the machine must be replaced with values empowered by the sacredness of life. In contrast to global markets as the

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point of orientation, the universal sacredness of life is the axis of a humanistic perspective.”58 The Punishment Is Inherent in the System And there were three parts that were punished by the Lord according to that which they had said and done. Those who said, “We will go up into heaven and there enthrone our gods and worship them,” these the Lord turned into apes and into elephants. Those who said, “We will go up and kill all those who are in heaven with our spears and our arrows,” these the Lord caused to perish each and every one by the hand of his neighbour. And the third part who said, “We will go up into heaven and wage war against the Lord,” these the Lord dispersed through all the earth. And those who belonged to none of these parties were left to remain there. But soon they came to know and understand the evil which had come over their brethren, and so they abandoned the cities and the tower, and they dispersed themselves all over the face of the whole earth. And so it came that the sons of man ceased to build the city and the tower.59 The consequences of surrendering to a technological system are inherent in the system itself, just as in the Midrash the tower-builders suffered from a loss of their humanity, the violence of war, the pain of dispossession, and the rigors of apathy. The Tower itself suffers a similar punishment. As Rabbi Yochanan tells us, “And the tower itself was punished: a third burnt, a third swallowed, and a third remained.60 The Tower of Babel is described as a remarkable monument, a description which serves to emphasize its eventual destruction. As described by Rabbi Haia Bar Ada: This tower they built, a third was consumed in fire, a third sank into the earth, and a third remains standing, and if you say it is small [the existing third], then Rabbi Huna on behalf of Rabbi Eidi said: “if one climbed to the top of the summit, one would see the palm trees below no larger than grasshoppers.”61 Just as the system of tower-building destroyed the very communication necessary to maintain it, so too are the consequences of the Internet and new media inherent in their use. This echoes the point we made earlier in Chapter 2 that when it comes to new media, the user is bound to all the rules. The consequences for the tower-builders are the ones they have made for

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themselves: inhumanity, disunity and discommunication have divided them from one another and from God. As the Talmud states, their punishment is not to enjoy “the next world,” i.e. their rejection of God and the divine has put heaven forever out of reach.62 So it is with our own technological civilization and the lives we spend online, consuming junk info as if it were junk food, served up by the World Wide Web. Schultze, too, explicitly links the information we find there to junk food. He states that today, “we increasingly assume that doing things quickly and effectively is more important than doing them carefully, thoughtfully, and ethically. As a result, much of our daily communication slips into junk messaging—the informational equivalent of junk food.”63 He explains that our “manner of informational living deflates our moral character,” by weakening “the kinds of shared practices, such as neighbourliness and hospitality, that we need to maintain our moral bearings.”64 We have allowed technology to impose itself on us, uncritically and unreflectively. For Schultze, we have turned ourselves into “ethical chameleons,” as we “adapt our moral practices to the latest technologies rather than summoning our technologies to follow a long-term moral vision.”65 A rejection of meaning amounts to a striving after ever-greater vacuity in an information-rich but substance-poor media environment. As Theodore Roszak eloquently puts it, information itself has “taken on the quality of that impalpable, invisible, but plaudit-winning silk from which the emperor’s ethereal gown was supposedly spun.”66 In David Gross’s words, modern life “becomes increasingly vacuous, as entire populations become unable to discern what is valuable from what is valueless.”67 In this way, the technological imperative forms a religion unto itself. David Noble describes technology’s rejection of meaning as the “religion of technology,” in which the “expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by millenarian yearning for new beginnings.”68 Technological development proceeds at a breakneck pace, served up by “corporate, government, and media pitchmen”—the tower-builders of the present day—and whose doctrines and constructions serve only themselves. Nor can science and technology by themselves ameliorate the harms they cause; the studies that would prove harm, or the controlled experiments that would show us what remedies are effective would be obsolete long before they could even be completed. As Noble states, “pleas for some rationality, for reflection about pace and purpose, for sober assessment of costs and benefits—for evidence even of economic value, much less larger social gains—are dismissed as irrational. From

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within the faith, any and all criticism appears irrelevant, and irreverent.”69 Like technology itself, the religion of technology, and the demands it places upon us, have been thousands of years in the making.70 With each iteration, the demands that the new technology places on us become more insistent, even as they become more commonplace—both harder to fathom as well as to resist.

Notes 1 Quentin J. Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 31. 2 King James Bible (1611) (Cambridge, Eng.: Proquest, 1996), Genesis, 11: 1–4. 3 Heidi A. Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (London: Routledge, 2010) 14. 4 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Image,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (University of Chicago Press, 2010): 36. 5 King James Bible, Exodus 20: 4–5. 6 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Pengion Books, 1986), 9. 7 King James Bible, Isaiah 2:8. 8 Benjamin Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 9 Mitchell, “Image,” 37. 10 Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters,” in The Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis, 8–26 (London: Routledge, 2010); Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). 11 Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 12 Stephan Nicola, “Biohackers are Implanting Everything from Magnets to Sex Toys,” Bloomberg, October 18, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ 2018-10-19/biohackers-are-implanting-everything-from-magnets-to-sex-toys. 13 Walter, “The Work of Art,” 19. 14 Mitchell, “Image,” 38. 15 Mitchell, “Image,” 38. 16 Charles Grau, Romuald Ginhoux, Alejandro Riera, Thanh Lam Nguyen, Hubert Chauvat, Michel Berg, Julià Amengual, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Giulio Ruffini, “Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technology,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 8 (2014): e105225, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0105225. 17 King James Bible, Exodus 23:2.

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18 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books: New York, 1967). 19 Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media, 46. 20 Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 1977); Gregor T. Goethals, The TV Ritual: Worship at the Video Altar (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1981); William F. Fore, Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values and Culture (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1987). 21 Clifford G. Christians, “Redemptive Media as the Evangelical’s Cultural Task,” in American Evangelicals and the Mass Media, ed. Quentin J. Schultze (Grand Rapids, MI: Academic Books-Zondervan, 1990), 340. 22 Stephen V. Monsma, Clifford G. Christians, Eugene R. Dykema, Arie Leegwater, Egbert Schuurman, and Lambert Van Poolen, Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986). 23 Monsma, Responsible Technology, 31. 24 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart; Clifford G. Christians, “Technology and Triadic Theories of Mediation,” in Rethinking, Media, Religion and Culture, ed. Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby, 65–82 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997). 25 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 18–19. 26 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 13. 27 Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980). 28 Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Knopf, 2015), 75. 29 Clifford G. Christians, “Religious Perspectives on Communication Technology,” Journal of Media and Religion 1, no. 1 (2002): 37–47. 30 Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 44. 31 Sefer HaYasher (Midrash), trans. Edward B. M. Browne, 1876 (Sefaria.org, 2017), “Book of Genesis, Noach,” https://www.sefaria.org/Sefer_HaYashar_(midrash)?lang=bi. 32 Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). 33 Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 41. 34 Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 41. 35 Mikranet, Migdal Bavel: Ibud Shel Gilunot Nechama Leorahat Anose [trans. Nachshon Goltz] https://mikranet.cet.ac.il/mikradidact/pages/item.asp?item=20278. 36 Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer (Sefaria.org, 2017), “Chapter 24” [trans. Nachshon Goltz], https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_DeRabbi_Eliezer.2?lang=bi. 37 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books: New York, 1967), 286. 38 Dror Morgenstein, Migdal Bavel, Bein Achidut Leachdut [trans. Nachshon Goltz], https://asif.co.il/download/kitvey-et/kol/kol-29/kol-29-7/1-3.pdf. 39 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 16.

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40 Sefer HaYasher, Book of Genesis, Noach. 41 James M. Houston, The Heart’s Desire: Satisfying the Hunger of the Soul (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1996), 100. 42 Sefer HaYasher, Book of Genesis, Noach. 43 Elchanan Samet, Achet Veonsho Besipor Al Aeir Bevel Wumigdala, Daat [trans. Nachshon Goltz], http://www.daat.ac.il/lesson3/maamar2.asp?id=283. 44 Zohar (Sefaria.org, 2017), Genesis: 45–46 [trans. Nachshon Goltz], https://www.sefaria.org/Zohar.1.1a?lang=bi. 45 Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 40. 46 Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 42. 47 Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 41. 48 Sefer HaYasher, Book of Genesis, Noach. 49 Clifford G. Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 47. 50 Monsma, Responsible Technology, 31. 51 Christians, “Redemptive Media,” 340. 52 Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 94. 53 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Lon Angeles, CA: Simiotext(e), 1983), 11. 54 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. The concept of simulacrum that Baudrillard uses differs significantly from the common use of the word “simulacrum,” which is defined as an image or likeness, a vague representation or a sham: see: Neufeldt, Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1251. 55 Ellul, The Technological Society, 9. 56 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 17. 57 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 17. 58 Christians, “Religious Perspectives,” 44. 59 Sefer HaYasher, Book of Genesis, Noach. 60 Talmud Babvli: Sanhedrin 109:1 [trans. Nachshon Goltz], https://he.wikisource.org/ wiki/%D7%A1%D7%A0%D7%94%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9F_%D7%A 7%D7%98_%D7%90. 61 Bereishit Rabbah, 38:8 [trans. Nachshon Goltz], https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_ Rabbah.38.13. 62 Talmud Babvli: Sanhedrin 109:1 [trans. Nachshon Goltz], https://he.wikisource.org/ wiki/%D7%A1%D7%A0%D7%94%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9F_%D7%A 7%D7%98_%D7%90. 63 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 18. 64 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 18. 65 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 29. 66 Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 30, citing Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xiii.

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67 David Gross, The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 4. 68 David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997), 207. 69 Noble, The Religion of Technology, 207. 70 Noble, The Religion of Technology, 207.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Coming down from the Tower And the place was to the east of the land of Shinar. And the earth opened up her mouth and swallowed up one third of the tower, and then fire came down from heaven and consumed another third thereof, and one third remains there unto this day, hanging in the air of heaven, and its length is the distance of three day’s journey. And so it came to be that so many of the sons of man died in the work of that building that they could not even be numbered.1 The media technologies of the past—for all the revolutions they have created in the human condition—have come about at a slower pace, and with much more time for adaptation and response. Such time is absent given the pace of innovation today, even as the pressures that new media place on us are increasing by orders of magnitude. So it was that Reinhart Maurer could lament that the “technological pursuit of salvation has become a threat to our survival.”2 It is at just such a point that Heidegger perceived the dangers of social oppression are the greatest, for the “will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.”3 Christians suggests that the religious community should respond to innovation by performing the role of prophetic witness, one who reveals the threat technology poses to human freedom and autonomy. The prophetic community does not simply rail against technology, but “the prophetic aim must always be to offer explanation and teaching sufficiently to prevent hopeless self-flagellation and immobilization that comes from being uninformed, and to produce a responsible conscience.”4 As Postman contends, “only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.”5 This leaves us about where we began, when we offered a brief history of the development of new media technologies, their unfathomability, and their increasing hold on us. Certainly, the written word opened up new worlds for humanity while closing off others, just as the invention of the printing press radically changed the trajectory of nearly every human culture since. Under the umbrella of these new technologies, the tenants of modern civilization have been both enlightened and entertained, gained some pointless work, lost some remunerative work, and been exposed to new ideas—ideas that have © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398887_008

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been by turns vacuous, dangerous, degrading, and epiphanous. But what we have lost and gained is nothing for the technocracy’s overseers, who have so far managed to manipulate the technological system for their own benefit without much in the way of popular hindrance. Let’s change this.

Notes 1 Sefer HaYasher (Midrash), “Book of Genesis, Noach,” trans. Edward B. M. Browne, 1876 (Sefaria.org, 2017), https://www.sefaria.org/Sefer_HaYashar_(midrash)?lang=bi. 2 Reinhart Maurer, “The Origins of Modern Technology in Millenarianism,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Paul T. Durbin and Friedrich Rapp (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 265. 3 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 5. 4 Stephen V. Monsma, Clifford G. Christians, Eugene R. Dykema, Arie Leegwater, Egbert Schuurman, and Lambert Van Poolen, Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 218. 5 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 166.

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Index Addiction xiii, xv, xvii, 16, 17, 26, 32, 39, 45–47, 69, 82 Advertising ix, xiii, 3, 10–13, 23, 24, 41, 49, 91–96, 106, 118, 119, 124, 130 Aggression xiii, 1, 4–9, 17, 21, 22, 129 Alcohol 1, 3, 11, 12, 19 Animal xi, 33, 48, 50, 51, 53, 66, 97 Artificial Intelligence x, xiii, 34, 63, 134, 146 Blocking xiv, 33, 74, 76, 78–81, 88, 118, 119, 122, 127, 132 Books ix–xii, xv–xvii, 9, 18, 21, 30, 31, 33, 42, 43, 53, 62, 66, 75, 76, 91, 99, 101, 112, 132–134 Bullying xiii, xv, 6, 13, 14, 19, 119, 124 Charter of Rights and Freedoms 91, 104 Code xiv, 31, 51, 54, 61, 72, 74, 77–79, 82, 84, 86–88, 104, 107, 112, 132 Cognitive ix, xi, xiii, 1, 17, 33, 44, 45, 51, 57, 58, 63, 68, 96 Comic books x, 9, 31 Communication x, xii, xiii, xv, 1, 2, 5, 20, 22, 29, 30, 34, 35, 42, 43, 49, 71, 76, 77, 91, 98–100, 103, 114, 116, 124, 132–135, 138, 140, 142, 143, Constitution xiv, 75, 91, 92, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107 Creative xi–xiii, xiv, 32, 40, 48, 51–53, 55–58, 60–63 Cyberbullying 1, 13, 24, 126 Data xvi, 5, 10, 11, 14, 20, 41, 49, 62, 73–76, 134 Democracy 71, 113 Desensitization 6, 8 Digital xii, xvi, 1–3, 14, 19, 20, 31, 33, 53, 55, 59, 60, 62–64, 77, 114, 124 Displacement 62, 63, 119, 124 Dreams 52, 61, 62 Drugs 1, 12, 13, 19

Food ix, xiii, 1–3, 11, 12, 16, 132, 143 Freedom of speech 70, 74, 75, 79, 81, 91–104, 113 Gaming 1, 16, 17, 40 Government xiv, 20, 70, 72, 76, 78–81, 93–102, 108, 112, 115, 121, 143 Harm intangible x, xiii, xv, 60, 74, 79, 82, 91, 96, 113, 119, 121, 132 virtual x, xiii, xv, xvi, 50, 55, 60, 82, 91, 113, 124, 133 Image xiv, 6, 49–53, 59–61, 63, 97, 133, 141 Imagination x–xiii, 9, 17, 32, 40, 48–63, 82, 96, 104, 112 Interactive xii, xiii, 6, 41, 49, 62, 98, 100, 101 Internet xi–xiv, 1, 2, 10, 13, 14, 16–20, 31–38, 70–82, 112–124, 133–134, 138, 142 Internet service provider 73, 76, 78–81, 115 Legislation 80, 93–96, 98, 100 Machine 12, 35, 58, 79, 100, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141 Make-believe 49, 56, 57 Media ix, xii, 2–20, 29–42, 60, 91, 93, 96, 101–103, 134, 135, 148 Media Diet xii, 2–20, 48 Mediation 11, 15, 117–125 Net neutrality 76 Network 73, 74, 76, 78, 133, 138

Engagement ix, xiii, xvi, 29–42, 48, 102, 119

Parents xii, xiv–xvi, 40, 98–102, 112–125, 132 Parenting style 8, 114, 115, 122–124 Print media 9, 31 Privacy 10, 20, 71, 75, 76, 112–115, 117, 118 Psychological perceptual dimensions 31

Filtering xiv, 19, 74, 78–81, 118, 119, 133 First Amendment 91, 97, 98, 100–102

Regulation ix, x, xiv–xvi, 2, 70–72, 74–81, 91, 93, 99–104, 112–125, 132–144

index Sleep 6, 16, 33, 39 Simulacra 99, 101, 109, 141 Symbolic play 54, 56, 57 Technopoly 30, 35, 41 Technique 5, 7, 35, 41, 55, 74, 77, 81, 94, 122, 135–137, 139–141 Television xi, xii, 6, 7, 31–33, 35, 38, 42, 53, 59, 60–62, 68, 121, 123, 129, 134, 148 Time ix, xii, xv, 1, 4, 7, 11, 15, 16, 30–34, 38–40, 58, 59, 70, 71, 116, 118, 120, 122, 135 Tobacco 12 Toys 9, 10, 53, 62, 96

183 Video game ix–xii, 5, 6, 8, 9, 16, 17, 32, 38, 39, 48, 51, 61, 62, 91, 97–101, 112 Violence xvi, 4–11, 70, 97, 98, 100–102, 134, 142 Virtual reality xi, 10, 31, 38, 63, 96, 98, 103, 112, 134 Virtual world ix, xiii, xv, xvi, 6, 32, 34, 39, 40, 48–62, 82, 91, 96, 98, 102–104, 112, 119 Visual 31, 38, 39, 57, 59–61, 63, 140 Visualization 32, 60–62