Fisk-Memo40

2. ABSTRACT

Over the past 5 years, the safety of children online has emerged as a pressing concern for parents, educators and policy makers, driving shifts in school curriculum, online service offerings and legislation – all to protect youth as they develop skills needed to navigate the “21st Century economy.” This project frames the development of “youth Internet safety” legislation and fostering of “21st Century Skills” as part of a process of dominant discourses making sense of youth Internet use. As such, I will focus on the following research questions:

1.How have contemporary categories of online deviance and youth safety been constructed? 2.How have policies based on these categories reconstituted youth cyberspace(s)? 3.What is the relationship between “youth Internet safety” and the development of “21st Century skills?”

Discussions about youth Internet safety policies and curricula are currently far from settled, providing a unique historical moment from which to undertake this research, and potentially guide youth Internet safety policies. Youth Internet safety issues remain of significant concern for school administrators and legislators, as evidenced by ongoing legislation and research. This study focuses specifically on youth Internet safety issues New York State, which has attempted to take a leadership role in the development of state legislation on youth Internet safety issues, in addition having significantly guided the development of federal youth Internet safety legislation through New York Senator Charles Schumer.

This study will draw data primarily from discourse analysis and multi-sited ethnography. Discourse analysis will be performed on state and federal Internet safety legislation effecting New York State, along with news media coverage of Internet safety issues between 2004 and 2008. The primary interview sites will be junior-high and high schools in New York State, where I will conduct a series of semi-structured interviews with students, teachers and school administrators. I will be targeting rural, suburban and urban schools across the state, with preliminary contact established with the Brighton, Fairport, Webster, Lake George and Fort Ann school districts, in addition to the Monroe and WWSHE BOCES. These interviews will be performed in two separate rounds, during the spring and fall of 2010, to allow for reformulation of interview questions following a period of analysis. Additionally, data gathered from the Rochester Regional Cyber Safety & Ethics Initiative (RRCSEI) survey (n=40,000) will be used as a baseline for policy analysis, allowing for the identification of gaps and discrepancies in extant youth Internet safety policies.

Finally, this study will be contribute to current literature in the fields of Science and Technology Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Criminology, further examining the social construction and conceptualization of deviance, hegemony and youth. Specifically, this study will move forward the literature on moral panics, drawing on Foucaultian concepts of discourse and power to recast moral panic theory, as suggested by recent moral panic publications.

Thought Note: Ultimately, an emphasis on developing “21st Century skills” is an emphasis on the reproduction of the 20th Century economy. Conceptualizing current youth practices online as deviant or criminal masks a shift in basic assumptions about community, property, sexuality, identity and privacy...