How did texting go straight to sexting?

I’ll never forget the first time I encountered the word sexting and truly learned what this word meant from my 6^th grade best friend at the time. She had to explain to my other friends and myself that her cellphone had been taken away by her parents due to the fact that they had been checking her text messages and found that she was sexting her boyfriend. I quickly asked her what this term meant, as it was not a prevalent term used within my innocent life, and she explained that it was a term to describe when you send nudes to another individual. Although Angela’s parents thought that something was wrong with Angela for finding these pictures and wanted to send her to a private school, what Angela and her parents did not know is that in the nationally representative study of sexting that just was released, it was found that within the United States 19% of adolescents between the ages of 13-19 years old admit to having sent a nude or semi nude pictures to someone else.

When watching CBS news, a couple of weeks ago, an article immediately captured my attention as the article was labeled “Sexting is the new flirting, as teens turn to secretive apps.” As I chuckled and remembered my 6^th grade memory of Angela, I decided to read on and discover what this article truly had to say.  It was both shocking and alarming to watch these interviews of 6^th, 7^th and 8^th graders, as they touched upon how prevalent sexting has become in their worlds that they live in and how they search for new applications that allow them to hide these pictures from their parents. The news clip is attached below:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sexting-modern-day-america-photo-vault-apps/

This clip focuses on the overall idea that adolescents are more technological savvy then their parents and with no longer having the consequences or fear of their parents finding their pictures, these adolescents aren’t afraid to send scandalous pictures that they wouldn’t have sent before, this is a problem. This clip also shares the scary idea that these vaults that adolescents use to hide their pictures are not protected and could be leaked to the greater public. So although, I agree that sexting is a way for adolescents to grow up and consider themselves “independent actors” as Julia R. Lippman and Scott W. Campbell mention in their article “Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t…If you’re a girl: Relational and normative contexts of adolescents sexting in the United States” I do see this normative as a problem. As touched upon in the clip, adolescents are going through a stage in their lives when they don’t understand the harm that these sexting decisions can put them in and unlike Angela who was blessed to have her parents catch her mistake at an early stage, these adolescents will not have a parent to stop them. Instead, they will be stopped when their pictures are released through these applications and naked pictures are plastered all over the school walls and ruin their lives.

This is a large problem in society as Julia R. Lippman and Scott W. Campbell mention in their article that a wide group of adolescents strongly believe that sexting is not a big deal and everyone is participating in it. I think that CBS did a great job with showing parents of ways that they can help avoid these situations with their adolescents through receiving notifications on their phones of when their kids download apps and to pay attention to this terrible sexting epidemic.

                                        References

• Lippman, J. R. & Campbell. S. W. (2014) Damned if you do, damned if you don’t...if you’re a girl: Relational and normative contexts of adolescent sexting in the United States. Journal of Children and Media, 8:4, 371-386, doi: 10.1080/17482798.2014.923009 
  

Baseball and Selfies: America's Pastime and Future

On Tuesday, we were on the receiving end of a plethora of information about a subject that, as college students, is very well known among us.  Selfies, as a new word in the dictionary, is a social trend that has undoubtedly swept not only America but the world.  Many forms of media, including hit songs and comedy videos capture the essence of the selfie and why it has become such a polarizing facet of our culture.  Your student, whose name is escaping me, eloquently reviewed the motive behind selfies and why we do it.  This video perfectly sums up the overwhelming presence of the selfies, the demographic of who's taking them, and the sheer befuddlement and fascination adults have over millennials' obsession with them.

As you can see, there are literally 9 girls, each with their phone out, separately taking selfies of themselves and with others.  It is almost sickening to watch, as a former baseball player, that their "selfie game' is more important than the baseball game in front of them, which they paid to see might I add.  What I find so interesting is that not one girl feels any type of embarrassment or self-consciousness for blatantly taking selfies in front of a giant crowd.  As a person who dabbles in the selfie game, I make sure that no one in sight sees me taking a selfie.  However, the motives behind taking selfies between me and this group of girls are drastically different.

My motive behind taking selfies is usually due to reciprocation of a conversation that I am having with a friend.  When someone sends me a Snap (on SnapChat), I respond by sending a selfie with a facial reaction contingent on the caption I post alongside it.  Unlike me, these girls' motives are not due to a conversation.  Two of the reasons we learned in class were because a) you think you look good and b) you when to show people where you are.  These girls must have spent so long beautifying themselves before the game and then subsequently wanted to show as many people that they were at an Arizona Diamondbacks game.

The aspect of the video that I took notice to was the pure fascination of the broadcasters over what they were witnessing.  The fact that a live broadcast decided to document these girls for an astounding 2 minutes shows the significance of this trend in society.  The broadcasters found it astounding that these girls were so fixated on their phones and were taking so many pictures of themselves.  It became evident that these men believed that the girls' motives were out of narcissism and self-loving, another theory we learned about in class.  As long as there are cameras on the front of phones, the older generation is going to have to accept the selfie game and learn to understand the multiple levels of meaning and motives surrounding them.

(Lecture in Class)

The World of YouTube: "What Girls and Guys Do"

            Jenna Marbles, real name Jenna Mourey, is currently one of the most popular YouTube stars. She has over fifteen million subscribers, making her the seventh most subscribed to channel on YouTube as well as the most subscribed to woman.  As such, she serves as an interesting case study that could contribute to Roxanne’s work on the sexualization effects of the YouTube community. Her first video, “How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking” has been viewed over sixty-three million times- more than double that of any of her other videos.

While at first this video seems to be a makeup tutorial, in reality it’s somewhat of a commentary on the lengths many women go to when altering their appearance to be viewed as more attractive. The video is littered with quotes such as, “if you’re thinking about going for a more natural look, lets be serious you’re way too ugly to pull that off” and the powerful “The next step is, go out and get yourself a job that is super degrading. I picked dancing in my underwear, before I go to work I like to pump myself up by crying over my masters degree.” In this vein it seems possible that certain “YouTubers” may not enforce traditional gender roles and sexualize females but rather criticize a broader culture that already does so. However, this interpretation is of course subjective. If viewers do not pick up on Jenna’s sarcasm they may understand this video as reinforcing beauty ideals that tell women to just, “cake a bunch of makeup on your face.” This interpretation may be further enforced by her video series “What Girls and Guys Do.”

This video entitled “What Girls Think About During Sex” along with many others from the series enforces the heterosexual script that women are primarily valued for their physical experience- as evidenced by quotes such as “oh my god is that what my thighs look like, I need to go to the gym” (Kim, 2007). While these videos are made to make viewers laugh and perhaps again critique dominant gender norms, this message may not always be apparent. As these videos continue to rack up millions of viewers, dominant ideologies may be challenged or enforced. However, these effects have largely gone unexplored. While there is a wealth of research on the effects of these scripts in mediums such as television, more work must be done in online worlds such as YouTube.

Kim, J. L., Sorsoli, C. L., Collins, K., Zylbergold, B. a, Schooler, D., & Tolman, D. L. (2007). From sex to sexuality: Exposing the heterosexual script on primetime network television. Journal of Sex Research, 44(2), 145–157. http://doi.org/10.1080/00224490701263660 

Class Lecture