Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 10
Posts 1 - 10

Girls and social media: 'You are expected to live up to an impossible standard'

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Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 23.8.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | gender, social media, threat, youth
Summary | According to a new poll, 1 out of 3 girls feels pressured to be "perfect" on social networks. Five teenage girls share their opinion on the subject. For instance, they constantly compare themselves to other people online and then feel like they have to project a perfect image of themselves online. Some people delete their pictures online because they don't feel confident anymore and think they are not following the "rules". Moreover, young girls online constantly look for other people's validation and "likes". Instagram seems to be the worst social network for those girls.
Image Description | Photograph of hands holding smartphones.
Image Tags | hand(s), smartphone

Wege aus der Peinlichkeit

(Exit ways out of embarrassment)

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Newspaper | die Weltwoche
Date | 28.9.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis, gender, misunderstanding, online dating, politeness, research/study, texting, youth
Summary | Emojis have entered our communication with no turning back but using them is a minefield of misunderstanding. It is especially risky in the initial stages of texting with a love interest: studies show that people tend to imitate the communication patterns of their interlocutor if they are in love with them. Because women are more communicative than men, they tend to be the ones who are imitated in such a scenario. But men, beware! Do not go overboard with your heart emojis, it's too girly. One should however also refrain from making overly abrupt changes to ones emoji habits as it can seem distanced and elitist if one stops to use emojis altogether.
Image Description | N/A

Girls gang up on boys in new cyberbullying craze called 'roasting', expert warns

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Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 25.7.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | (mental) health, cyberbullying, gender, social media, texting, threat, youth
Summary | "Roasting" is a new cyberbullying craze where girls pick on boys on WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook until they crack. Teenage girls and boys have already killed themselves because of cyberbullying.
Image Description | Photograph of three young girls using and staring at their smartphone
Image Tags | female(s), smartphone

Children are humiliating victims by using memes and chat rooms to 'roast' them in the latest cyberbullying craze

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Newspaper | Mail Online
Date | 25.7.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | childhood, cyberbullying, gender, texting, youth
Summary | Parents and teachers are worried about one type of cyberbullying; children pick on another with offensive abuse until the victim ‘cracks’. Girls seem to be twice as likely as boys to be perpetrators and victims of cyberbullying (boys seem to be more involved in physical bullying). It usually happens in group chats where people know each other. Cyberbullying is a competitive activity; the most offensive thing someone says, the better. One of the downsides of the digital era is cyberbullying and our children's protection.
Image Description | Photograph of a girl in front of her computer screen and photograph of a boy looking at a tablet screen.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s), tablet

Techie teens help bridge generational digital gap

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 16.5.2017
Language | English
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | digitized education, emojis, gender, texting, youth
Summary | A grandmother texted her grandson a series of emojis to ask him how the pets were and how the hockey game was. Most of the seniors are not as tech-savvy as she is. As a result, three high school teenage girls decided to create a new organization called GTG Tech in order to help older people get more familiar with new media. They hold free training lessons once a month. Most of the seniors seeking help are women. The girls and older people think that the intergenerational exchange is very rich.
Image Description | N/A

Kopfschuss: Glatte Eins!

(Shot to the head: A+!)

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Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 18.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | game, gender, school, threat, youth
Summary | A school in Norway is offering a course in E-sport, i.e. playing online team sports in shooter video games like Counter:Strike. The course is very popular among the male students (only one female student has taken the course) and has shown that students at risk of failing the year tend to do better in school overall when they are in a video game class. They get boosts of self-confidence because they can hold presentations about something they are passionate about. The school wants to reflect their students' reality in their curriculum and video games are a passion of many students and a future job for some of them. Shooter games are less stigmatized in Norway than in Germany.
Image Description | Image of male students playing video games.
Image Tags | game, male(s), school

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

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Newspaper | The Atlantic
Date | 0.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, cyberbullying, gender, smartphone, social media, threat, youth
Summary | A US study has conducted a large survey among teenagers and found out that smartphones are impacting their lives significantly. They sleep less, go out less, date less, are less likely to get (someone) pregnant, feel left out more, have more mental health issues, etc. Especially girls are more likely to feel left out because they spend more time on social media and because girls tend to bully each other by ostracization which is very easily achievable in cyberspace. Also, the teenage suicide rate has surpassed the teenage homicide rate for the first time in history.
Image Description | Two illustrations showing a woman falling with a tablet and a woman lying in bed at night looking at her smartphone. Charts showing the results from the US survey.
Image Tags | chart, female(s), smartphone, tablet

Double Standards: Why sexting sucks

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Newspaper | Times Live
Date | 23.6.2014
Language | English
Country | South Africa
Topic Tags | gender, law, research/study, sexting, youth
Summary | A study by Julia Lippman and Scott Campbell where they interviewed teenagers about their attitudes towards sexting showed that a strong double standard exists between judging girls' versus boys' sexting activities. If girls sext, the are perceived as attention-seeking 'sluts' and if the do not engage in sexting, they are judged for being frigid. Boys are however pardoned for sexting because "boys will be boys". Minors sexting is further problematic because it is persecuted under child pornography laws.
Image Description | Photograph of a woman taking a selfie in lingerie.
Image Tags | female(s), selfie, smartphone

Dem digitalen Lachen auf der Spur

(On the tracks of the digital laugh)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 19.8.2015
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | Facebook, gender, youth
Summary | The article reports about another article in the The New Yorker by Sarah Larson who did a quantitative study about how Americans convey laughter in their digital communication. They collected data from Facebook comment sections and analyzed them. Different ways to communicate laughter online co-occur with different demographics: younger people and women use more emojis to indicate laughter and men and older people do this more verbally by writing “haha” or similar verbal tokens
Image Description | N/A

Ante la violencia de género: 'Educad al niño para no castigar al hombre'

(Gender violence: 'Educate the child so as not to punish the man')

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Newspaper | El Mundo
Date | 26.11.2016
Language | Spanish
Country | Spain
Topic Tags | addiction, gender, threat, youth
Summary | A photo competition called "Don't touch my WhatsApp" (No me toques el WhatsApp) took place in Spain in order to fight against gender violence. A work called "Connected" won the second prize in the '14-17 year-old' category. According to the director, the photograph represents a different side of today's reality; whereas young people rely a lot on new technologies -which can harm relationships-, the work portrays the substitution of a digital relationship to a face-to-face one. The face-to-face relationship is sincere, direct, responsible, and caring.
Image Description | Photograph of two young people sitting on a bench and texting; YouTube video (second prize in the 'video' category); photograph of two young people talking face-to-face in the backgroung (foreground: two smartphones).
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone, text

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