Fisk-Memo2829

Things have changed for youth online in the decade that has passed since I was one of them, but in many ways, I imagine the online practices of those of my generation bear at least a family resemblance to those of today. In the mid-to-late 1990's, my most common online “hangout” was then-popular America Online, the kiddie pool of the Internet. There was a plethora of interesting trouble to get into on AOL in those days, if you knew where to look – private chat rooms devoted to pirated software and pornography, exploitable flaws in the AOL system, and public rooms full of teenagers (and those pretending to be teenagers) of every demographic. Merely entering a chat room was enough to produce a flurry of private “a/s/l” requests from online strangers. In an average week, I would “perpetrate” and “fall victim” to all manner of “cybercrime” and “computer abuse,” breaking into administrative sections of AOL, pretending to be a promiscuous teenage girl to solicit private information on my enemies, falling in love with online “strangers,” and being kicked off-line by floods of threatening private messages. While these experiences would now be described as “risky” online behavior, cyberbullying, or online predation – to me, it was all part of living the drama and adventure of that space. In 2007, I was having a conversation with a local news anchor in Rochester, NY who was approximately my age. She was there to interview my advisor about the research we were doing on youth Internet safety. Discussing how much risk youth face online, I asked her if she had used AOL growing up, which she had. We nostalgically exchanged stories about how creepy users were always trying to solicit “cybersex,” the friends and enemies we made but never met, and the various other interesting aspects of daily life online. Then, I explained that these types of behaviors were exactly what we were studying – youth being sexually solicited by online strangers, cyberbullying, online piracy and the like. She paused briefly with a surprised look on her face, and then stammered “I-I guess I had never thought about it that way,” as the dominant discourse of “youth Internet safety” reordered and reframed how she made meaning from what had once been simply everyday online life. In that instant, I watched her become a “victim.”