Academic literature on the topic 'Daily telegraph (Sydney, N.S.W.)'

“Key issue” describes the main issue or perspective an article focuses on when reporting on a news topic. There might be different key issues for the same topic: When reporting on terrorism, articles can for example concentrate on the incident itself, the perpetrator behind it, victims and/or political reactions to terrorism. Field of application/theoretical foundation: Key issues share similarities with other variables such as news “frames”, “issue salience” or “issue ownership” that also try to identify different perspectives for the same or different news topics. Therefore, studies based on “Framing” (Entman, 1993) work with similar variables to analyze what issues journalists focus on and many studies cited here use the concept of framing to identify key issues, for example Li (2007) or Zhang & Hellmüller (2016). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Studies for example combine content analysis and interviews with journalists to shed more light on dynamics and structures of terrorism coverage, including key issues (Larsen, 2019). Example studies: Li (2007); Matthews (2016) Information on Li, 2007 Authors: Li (2007) Research question: How did television outlets frame 9/11 during the first 24 hours of coverage and how did this framing change over time? Object of analysis: News coverage by five TV outlets (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and FOX news) Time frame of analysis: 24 hours after attacks on September 9 2001 occurred Info about variables Variable name/definition: Coverage frame: “The coverage frame is defined as the aspects of a perceived reality identified through a story that makes these aspects more salient in the news coverage” (Li, 2007, p. 676). Level of analysis: News story (TV) Variables and values: Political coverage frame, economic coverage frame, criminal coverage frame, environment coverage frame, safety coverage frame, human interest coverage frame, religion coverage frame, disaster coverage frame, other coverage frame Reliability: Scott’s pi: .8 Information on Matthews, 2016 Authors: Matthews (2016) Research question: How did newspapers react in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings 2005? Object of analysis: News coverage by nine UK newspapers and their Sunday equivalents (The Star, The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent) Time frame of analysis: July 8 2005 to July 15 2005 Info about variables Variable name/definition: Story themes Level of analysis: News article Variables and values: Reconstruction and reaction, bombers’ identities, police investigation, victims/the missing, heroism and survivors, London’s reaction Table 1. Measurement of “Key Issue” in terrorism coverage. Author(s) Sample Manifestations Reliability Codebook An et al. (2018) Articles from terrorist websites 31 different key issues, ranging from terrorist attacks to their political consequences Average Holsti value for all pairwise comparisons: .66 Available Du & Li (2017) Online news articles 6 different key issues, including “description and updates of the incident itself”, “causes of the incident”, “consequences of the incident”, “conflicting viewpoint related to the incident”, “condemn the terrorist behavior and discuss the punishment/reprisal”, and “background/history knowledge of the incident areas” Scott’s pi for all variables in study: between .798 and 1 Available Haußecker & Jirschitzka, 2010; Jirschitzka et al., 2010 Broadcasting programs 11 different key issues, ranging from war against terror to communication of terrorists Average Holsti value for all pairwise comparisons with five coders and one main coder: .66 Available Larsen (2019) Broadcasting programs and online news articles 3 different key issues, including “threat of terrorism”, “countering and prevention”, and ”terrorism as phenomenon” Cohen’s kappa: .782 Available Li (2007) Broadcasting programs 9 different key issues, including “political”, “economic”, “criminal”, “environment”, “safety”, “human interest”, “religion”, “disaster”, and “other” coverage frame Scott’s pi: .8 Not available Li & Izard (2003) Broadcasting programs and news articles 10 different key issues, including “business”, “World Trade Center”, “Pentagon”, “safety (concerning future attacks)”, “government and U.S. president, “criminal activity and terrorism,” “personal story”, “American public”, “U.S. Arab community”, and “past events” Scott’s pi for all nominal variables in study: between .78 and .96 Not available Matthews (2016) Newspaper articles 6 different key issues, including “reconstruction and reaction”, “bombers’ identities”, “police investigation”, “victims/the missing”, “heroism and survivors”, and “London’s reaction” Not reported Not available Zhang & Hellmüller (2016) Online news articles 8 key issues, sorted in the overarching categories “geopolitics” (consisting of “failing state”, “political opportunism”, “strategic game”, “geopolitical alignment”) and “existential threat” (consisting of “ISIS prowess”, “human rights crisis”, “economic consequences”, and “ISIS propaganda”) Krippendorf’s alpha: .73 Available References An, Y., Mejía, N. A., Arizi, A., Villalobos, M. M, & Rothenberger, L. (2018). Perpetrators’ strategic communication: Framing and identity building on ethno-nationalist terrorists’ websites. Communications, 43(2), 133–171. doi:10.1515/commun-2017-0057 Du, Y. R., & Li, L. (2017). When press freedom meets national interest: How terrorist attacks are framed in the news in China and the US. Global Media and China, 2(3–4), 284–302. doi:10.1177/2059436418755761 Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x Haußecker, N., & Jirschitzka, J. (2010). Mediale Konstruktion I: Methodisches Vorgehen—Inhaltsanalyse der Terrorberichterstattung in deutschen Fernsehnachrichten [Media construction I: Methods – content analysis of terrorism coverage in German TV news]. In W. Frindte & N. Haußecker (Eds.), Inszenierter Terrorismus [Staged terrorism] (pp. 67–89). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Jirschitzka, J., Haußecker, N., & Frindte, W. (2010). Mediale Konstruktion II: Die Konstruktion des Terrorismus im deutschen Fernsehen – Ergebnisdarstellung und Interpretation. [Media construction II: the construction of terrorism in German TV - results and interpretation]. In W. Frindte & N. Haußecker (Eds.), Inszenierter Terrorismus [Staged terrorism] (pp. 81–119). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Larsen, A. G. (2019). Threatening criminals and marginalized individuals: Frames and news conventions in reporting of radicalization and violent extremism. Media, War & Conflict, 12(3), 299–316. doi:10.1177/1750635218769331 Li, X. (2007). Stages of a crisis and media frames and functions: U.S. television coverage of the 9/11 incident during the first 24 hours. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 51(4), 670–687. doi:10.1080/08838150701626578 Li, X., & Izard, R. (2003). 9/11 Attack coverage reveals similarities, differences. Newspaper Research Journal, 24(1), 204–219. oi:10.1177/073953290302400123 Matthews, J. (2016). Media performance in the aftermath of terror: Reporting templates, political ritual and the UK press coverage of the London Bombings, 2005. Journalism, 17(2), 173–189. doi:10.1177/1464884914554175 Zhang, X., & Hellmüller, L. (2016). Transnational media coverage of the ISIS threat: A global perspective? International Journal of Communication, 10, 766–785.

Probably the most (in)famous Australian teenager of recent times, now-17-year-old Kim Duthie—better known as the “St Kilda Schoolgirl”—first came to public attention when she posted naked pictures of two prominent St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) players on Facebook. She claimed to be seeking revenge on the players’ teammate for getting her pregnant. This turned out to be a lie. Duthie also claimed that 47-year-old football manager Ricky Nixon gave her drugs and had sex with her. She then said this was a lie, then that she lied about lying. That she lied at least twice is clear, and in doing so, she arguably reinforced the pervasive myth that women are prone to lie about rape and sexual abuse. Precisely what occurred, and why Duthie posted the naked photographs will probably never be known. However, it seems clear that Duthie felt herself wronged. Can she therefore be held entirely to blame for the way she went about seeking redress from a group of men with infinitely more power than she—socially, financially and (in terms of the priority given to elite football in Australian society) culturally? The many judgements passed on Duthie’s behaviour in the media highlight the crucial, seldom-discussed issue of how problematic behaviour on the part of women might reinforce patriarchal norms. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the context of a spate of alleged sexual assaults committed by elite Australian footballers over the past decade. Given that representations of alleged rape cases in the media and elsewhere so often position women as blameworthy for their own mistreatment and abuse, the question of whether or not women can and should be held accountable in certain situations is particularly fraught. By exploring media representations of one of these complex scenarios, we consider how the issue of “complicity” might be understood in a rape culture. In doing so, we employ Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential concept of the “grey zone,” which signifies a complex and ambiguous realm that challenges both judgement and representation. Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone,” Patriarchy and the Problem of Judgement In his essay titled “The Grey Zone” (published in 1986), Levi is chiefly concerned with Jewish prisoners in the Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos who obtained “privileged” positions in order to prolong their survival. Reflecting on the inherently complex power relations in such extreme settings, Levi positions the “grey zone” as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: a realm with “ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. [The ‘grey zone’] possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure, and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (27). According to Levi, an examination of the scenarios and experiences that gave rise to the “grey zone” requires a rejection of the black-and-white binary opposition(s) of “friend” and “enemy,” “good” and “evil.” While Levi unequivocally holds the perpetrators of the Holocaust responsible for their actions, he warns that one should suspend judgement of victims who were entrapped in situations of moral ambiguity and “compromise.” However, recent scholarship on the representation of “privileged” Jews in Levi’s writings and elsewhere has identified a “paradox of judgement”: namely, that even if moral judgements of victims in extreme situations should be suspended, such judgements are inherent in the act of representation, and are therefore inevitable (see Brown). While the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections must be kept in mind, the corruptive influences of power at the core of the “grey zone”—along with the associated problems of judgement and representation—are clearly far more prevalent in human nature and experience than the Holocaust alone. Levi’s “grey zone” has been appropriated by scholars in the fields of Holocaust studies (Petropoulos and Roth xv-xviii), philosophy (Todorov 262), law (Luban 161–76), history (Cole 248–49), theology (Roth 53–54), and popular culture (Cheyette 226–38). Significantly, Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, “Groping through Gray Zones” 3–26) has recently applied Levi’s concept to the field of feminist philosophy. Indeed, Levi’s questioning of whether or not one can—or should—pass judgement on the behaviour of Holocaust victims has considerable relevance to the divisive issue of how women’s involvement in/with patriarchy is represented in the media. Expanding or intentionally departing from Levi’s ideas, many recent interpretations of the “grey zone” often misunderstand the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections. For instance, while applying Levi’s concept to the effects of patriarchy and domestic violence on women, Lynne Arnault makes the problematic statement that “in order to establish the cruelty and seriousness of male violence against women as women, feminists must demonstrate that the experiences of victims of incest, rape, and battering are comparable to those of war veterans, prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration camp inmates” (183, n.9). It is important to stress here that it is not our intention to make direct parallels between the Holocaust and patriarchy, or between “privileged” Jews and women (potentially) implicated in a rape culture, but to explore the complexity of power relations in society, what behaviour eventuates from these, and—most crucial to our discussion here—how such behaviour is handled in the mass media. Aware of the problem of making controversial (and unnecessary) comparisons, Card (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 515) rightly stresses that her aim is “not to compare suffering or even degrees of evil but to note patterns in the moral complexity of choices and judgments of responsibility.” Card uses the notion of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” citing numerous examples of women identifying with their torturers after having been abused or held hostage over a prolonged period of time—most (in)famously, Patricia Hearst. While the medical establishment has responded to cases of women “suffering” from “Stockholm Syndrome” by absolving them from any moral responsibility, Card writes that “we may have a morally gray area in some cases, where there is real danger of becoming complicit in evildoing and where the captive’s responsibility is better described as problematic than as nonexistent” (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 511). Like Levi, Card emphasises that issues of individual agency and moral responsibility are far from clear-cut. At the same time, a full awareness of the oppressive environment—in the context that this paper is concerned with, a patriarchal social system—must be accounted for. Importantly, the examples Card uses differ significantly from the issue of whether or not some women can be considered “complicit” in a rape culture; nevertheless, similar obstacles to understanding problematic situations exist here, too. In the context of a rape culture, can women become, to use Card’s phrase, “instruments of oppression”? And if so, how is their controversial behaviour to be understood and represented? Crucially, Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” were primarily motivated by his concern that most historical and filmic representations “trivialised” the complexity of victim experiences by passing simplistic judgements. Likewise, the representation of sexual assault cases in the Australian mass media has often left much to be desired. Representing Sexual Assault: Australian Football and the Media A growing literature has critiqued the sexual culture of elite football in Australia—one in which women are reportedly treated with disdain, positioned as objects to be used and discarded. At least 20 distinct cases, involving more than 55 players and staff, have been reported in the media, with the majority of these incidents involving multiple players. Reports indicate that such group sexual encounters are commonplace for footballers, and the women who participate in sexual practices are commonly judged, even in the sports scholarship, as “groupies” and “sluts” who are therefore responsible for anything that happens to them, including rape (Waterhouse-Watson, “Playing Defence” 114–15; “(Un)reasonable Doubt”). When the issue of footballers and sexual assault was first debated in the Australian media in 2004, football insiders from both Australian rules and rugby league told the media of a culture of group sex and sexual behaviour that is degrading to women, even when consensual (Barry; Khadem and Nancarrow 4; Smith 1; Weidler 4). The sexual “culture” is marked by a discourse of abuse and objectification, in which women are cast as “meat” or a “bun.” Group sex is also increasingly referred to as “chop up,” which codes the practice itself as an act of violence. It has been argued elsewhere that footballers treating women as sexual objects is effectively condoned through the mass media (Waterhouse-Watson, “All Women Are Sluts” passim). The “Code of Silence” episode of ABC television program Four Corners, which reignited the debate in 2009, was even more explicit in portraying footballers’ sexual practices as abusive, presenting rape testimony from three women, including “Clare,” who remains traumatised following a “group sex” incident with rugby league players in 2002. Clare testifies that she went to a hotel room with prominent National Rugby League (NRL) players Matthew Johns and Brett Firman. She says that she had sex with Johns and Firman, although the experience was unpleasant and they treated her “like a piece of meat.” Subsequently, a dozen players and staff members from the team then entered the room, uninvited, some through the bathroom window, expecting sex with Clare. Neither Johns nor Firman has denied that this was the case. Clare went to the police five days later, saying that professional rugby players had raped her, although no charges were ever laid. The program further includes psychiatrists’ reports, and statements from the police officer in charge of the case, detailing the severe trauma that Clare suffered as a result of what the footballers called “sex.” If, as “Code of Silence” suggests, footballers’ practices of group sex are abusive, whether the woman consents or not, then it follows that such a “gang-bang culture” may in turn foster a rape culture, in which rape is more likely than in other contexts. And yet, many women insist that they enjoy group sex with footballers (Barry; Drill 86), complicating issues of consent and the degradation of women. Feminist rape scholarship documents the repetitive way in which complainants are deemed to have “invited” or “caused” the rape through their behaviour towards the accused or the way they were dressed: defence lawyers, judges (Larcombe 100; Lees 85; Young 442–65) and even talk show hosts, ostensibly aiming to expose the problem of rape (Alcoff and Gray 261–64), employ these tactics to undermine a victim’s credibility and excuse the accused perpetrator. Nevertheless, although no woman can be in any way held responsible for any man committing sexual assault, or other abuse, it must be acknowledged that women who become in some way implicated in a rape culture also assist in maintaining that culture, highlighting a “grey zone” of moral ambiguity. How, then, should these women, who in some cases even actively promote behaviour that is intrinsic to this culture, be perceived and represented? Charmyne Palavi, who appeared on “Code of Silence,” is a prime example of such a “grey zone” figure. While she stated that she was raped by a prominent footballer, Palavi also described her continuing practice of setting up footballers and women for casual sex through her Facebook page, and pursuing such encounters herself. This raises several problems of judgement and representation, and the issue of women’s sexual freedom. On the one hand, Palavi (and all other women) should be entitled to engage in any consensual (legal) sexual behaviour that they choose. But on the other, when footballers’ frequent casual sex is part of a culture of sexual abuse, there is a danger of them becoming complicit in, to use Card’s term, “evildoing.” Further, when telling her story on “Code of Silence,” Palavi hints that there is an element of increased risk in these situations. When describing her sexual encounters with footballers, which she states are “on her terms,” she begins, “It’s consensual for a start. I’m not drunk or on drugs and it’s in, [it] has an element of class to it. Do you know what I mean?” (emphasis added). If it is necessary to define sex “on her terms” as consensual, this implies that sometimes casual “sex” with footballers is not consensual, or that there is an increased likelihood of rape. She also claims to have heard about several incidents in which footballers she knows sexually abused and denigrated, if not actually raped, other women. Such an awareness of what may happen clearly does not make Palavi a perpetrator of abuse, but neither can her actions (such as “setting up” women with footballers using Facebook) be considered entirely separate. While one may argue, following Levi’s reflections, that judgement of a “grey zone” figure such as Palavi should be suspended, it is significant that Four Corners’s representation of Palavi makes implicit and simplistic moral judgements. The introduction to Palavi follows the story of “Caroline,” who states that first-grade rugby player Dane Tilse broke into her university dormitory room and sexually assaulted her while she slept. Caroline indicates that Tilse left when he “picked up that [she] was really stressed.” Following this story, the program’s reporter and narrator Sarah Ferguson introduces Palavi with, “If some young footballers mistakenly think all women want to have sex with them, Charmyne Palavi is one who doesn’t necessarily discourage the idea.” As has been argued elsewhere (Waterhouse-Watson, “Framing the Victim”), this implies that Palavi is partly responsible for players holding this mistaken view. By implication, she therefore encouraged Tilse to assume that Caroline would want to have sex with him. Footage is then shown of Palavi and her friends “applying the finishing touches”—bronzing their legs—before going to meet footballers at a local hotel. The lighting is dim and the hand-held camerawork rough. These techniques portray the women as artificial and “cheap,” techniques that are also employed in a remarkably similar fashion in the documentary Footy Chicks (Barry), which follows three women who seek out sex with footballers. In response to Ferguson’s question, “What’s the appeal of those boys though?” Palavi repeats several times that she likes footballers mainly because of their bodies. This, along with the program’s focus on the women as instigators of sex, positions Palavi as something of a predator (she was widely referred to as a “cougar” following the program). In judging her “promiscuity” as immoral, the program implies she is partly responsible for her own rape, as well as acts of what can be termed, at the very least, sexual abuse of other women. The problematic representation of Palavi raises the complex question of how her “grey zone” behaviour should be depicted without passing trivialising judgements. This issue is particularly fraught when Four Corners follows the representation of Palavi’s “nightlife” with her accounts of footballers’ acts of sexual assault and abuse, including testimony that a well-known player raped Palavi herself. While Ferguson does not explicitly question the veracity of Palavi’s claim of rape, her portrayal is nevertheless largely unsympathetic, and the way the segment is edited appears to imply that she is blameworthy. Ferguson recounts that Palavi “says she was able to put [being raped] out of her mind, and it certainly didn’t stop her pursuing other football players.” This might be interpreted a positive statement about Palavi’s ability to move on from a rape; however, the tone of Ferguson’s authoritative voiceover is disapproving, which instead implies negative judgement. As the program makes clear, Palavi continues to organise sexual encounters between women and players, despite her knowledge of the “dangers,” both to herself and other women. Palavi’s awareness of the prevalence of incidents of sexual assault or abuse makes her position a problematic one. Yet her controversial role within the sexual culture of elite Australian football is complicated even further by the fact that she herself is disempowered (and her own allegation of being raped delegitimised) by the simplistic ideas about “assault” and “consent” that dominate social discourse. Despite this ambiguity, Four Corners constructs Palavi as more of a perpetrator of abuse than a victim—not even a victim who is “morally compromised.” Although we argue that careful consideration must be given to the issue of whether moral judgements should be applied to “grey zone” figures like Palavi, the “solution” is far from simple. No language (or image) is neutral or value-free, and judgements are inevitable in any act of representation. In his essay on the “grey zone,” Levi raises the crucial point that the many (mis)understandings of figures of moral ambiguity and “compromise” partly arise from the fact that the testimony and perspectives of these figures themselves is often the last to be heard—if at all (50). Nevertheless, an article Palavi published in Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph (19) demonstrates that such testimony can also be problematic and only complicate matters further. Palavi’s account begins: If you believed Four Corners, I’m supposed to be the NRL’s biggest groupie, a wannabe WAG who dresses up, heads out to clubs and hunts down players to have sex with… what annoys me about these tags and the way I was portrayed on that show is the idea I prey on them like some of the starstruck women I’ve seen out there. (emphasis added) Palavi clearly rejects the way Four Corners constructed her as a predator; however, rather than rejecting this stereotype outright, she reinscribes it, projecting it onto other “starstruck” women. Throughout her article, Palavi reiterates (other) women’s allegedly predatory behaviour, continually portraying the footballers as passive and the women as active. For example, she claims that players “like being contacted by girls,” whereas “the girls use the information the players put on their [social media profiles] to track them down.” Palavi’s narrative confirms this construction of men as victims of women’s predatory actions, lamenting the sacking of Johns following “Code of Silence” as “disgusting.” In the context of alleged sexual assault, the “predatory woman” stereotype is used in place of the raped woman in order to imply that sexual assault did not occur; hence Palavi’s problematic discourse arguably reinforces sexist attitudes. But can Palavi be considered complicit in validating this damaging stereotype? Can she be blamed for working within patriarchal systems of representation, of which she has also been a victim? The preceding analysis shows judgement to be inherent in the act of representation. The paucity of language is particularly acute when dealing with such extreme situations. Indeed, the language used to explore this issue in the present article cannot escape terminology that is loaded with meaning(s), which quotation marks can perhaps only qualify so far. Conclusion This paper does not claim to provide definitive answers to such complex dilemmas, but rather to highlight problems in addressing the sensitive issues of ambiguity and “complicity” in women’s interactions with patriarchal systems, and how these are represented in the mass media. Like the controversial behaviour of teenager Kim Duthie described earlier, Palavi’s position throws the problems of judgement and representation into disarray. There is no simple solution to these problems, though we do propose that these “grey zone” figures be represented in a self-reflexive, nuanced manner by explicitly articulating questions of responsibility rather than making simplistic judgements that implicitly lessen perpetrators’ culpability. Levi’s concept of the “grey zone” helps elucidate the fraught issue of women’s potential complicity in a rape culture, a subject that challenges both understanding and representation. Despite participating in a culture that promotes the abuse, denigration, and humiliation of women, the roles of women like Palavi cannot in any way be conflated with the roles of the perpetrators of sexual assault. These and other “grey zones” need to be constantly rethought and renegotiated in order to develop a fuller understanding of human behaviour. References Alcoff, Linda Martin, and Laura Gray. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation.” Signs 18.2 (1993): 260–90. 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Introduction Eating is one of the most quintessential activities of human life. Because of this primacy, eating is, as food anthropologist Sidney Mintz has observed, “not merely a biological activity, but a vibrantly cultural activity as well” (48). This article posits that the current awareness of climate change in the Western world is animating such cultural activity as the Slow Food movement and is, as a result, stimulating what could be seen as an evolutionary change in popular foodways. Moreover, this paper suggests that, in line with modelling provided by the Slow Food example, an increased awareness of the connections of climate change to the social injustices of food production might better drive social change in such areas. This discussion begins by proposing that contemporary foodways—defined as “not only what is eaten by a particular group of people but also the variety of customs, beliefs and practices surrounding the production, preparation and presentation of food” (Davey 182)—are changing in the West in relation to current concerns about climate change. Such modification has a long history. Since long before the inception of modern Homo sapiens, natural climate change has been a crucial element driving hominidae evolution, both biologically and culturally in terms of social organisation and behaviours. Macroevolutionary theory suggests evolution can dramatically accelerate in response to rapid shifts in an organism’s environment, followed by slow to long periods of stasis once a new level of sustainability has been achieved (Gould and Eldredge). There is evidence that ancient climate change has also dramatically affected the rate and course of cultural evolution. Recent work suggests that the end of the last ice age drove the cultural innovation of animal and plant domestication in the Middle East (Zeder), not only due to warmer temperatures and increased rainfall, but also to a higher level of atmospheric carbon dioxide which made agriculture increasingly viable (McCorriston and Hole, cited in Zeder). Megadroughts during the Paleolithic might well have been stimulating factors behind the migration of hominid populations out of Africa and across Asia (Scholz et al). Thus, it is hardly surprising that modern anthropogenically induced global warming—in all its’ climate altering manifestations—may be driving a new wave of cultural change and even evolution in the West as we seek a sustainable homeostatic equilibrium with the environment of the future. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed some of the threats that modern industrial agriculture poses to environmental sustainability. This prompted a public debate from which the modern environmental movement arose and, with it, an expanding awareness and attendant anxiety about the safety and nutritional quality of contemporary foods, especially those that are grown with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and/or are highly processed. This environmental consciousness led to some modification in eating habits, manifest by some embracing wholefood and vegetarian dietary regimes (or elements of them). Most recently, a widespread awareness of climate change has forced rapid change in contemporary Western foodways, while in other climate related areas of socio-political and economic significance such as energy production and usage, there is little evidence of real acceleration of change. Ongoing research into the effects of this expanding environmental consciousness continues in various disciplinary contexts such as geography (Eshel and Martin) and health (McMichael et al). In food studies, Vileisis has proposed that the 1970s environmental movement’s challenge to the polluting practices of industrial agri-food production, concurrent with the women’s movement (asserting women’s right to know about everything, including food production), has led to both cooks and eaters becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the links between agricultural production and consumer and environmental health, as well as the various social justice issues involved. As a direct result of such awareness, alternatives to the industrialised, global food system are now emerging (Kloppenberg et al.). The Slow Food (R)evolution The tenets of the Slow Food movement, now some two decades old, are today synergetic with the growing consternation about climate change. In 1983, Carlo Petrini formed the Italian non-profit food and wine association Arcigola and, in 1986, founded Slow Food as a response to the opening of a McDonalds in Rome. From these humble beginnings, which were then unashamedly positing a return to the food systems of the past, Slow Food has grown into a global organisation that has much more future focused objectives animating its challenges to the socio-cultural and environmental costs of industrial food. Slow Food does have some elements that could be classed as reactionary and, therefore, the opposite of evolutionary. In response to the increasing homogenisation of culinary habits around the world, for instance, Slow Food’s Foundation for Biodiversity has established the Ark of Taste, which expands upon the idea of a seed bank to preserve not only varieties of food but also local and artisanal culinary traditions. In this, the Ark aims to save foods and food products “threatened by industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage” (SFFB). Slow Food International’s overarching goals and activities, however, extend far beyond the preservation of past foodways, extending to the sponsoring of events and activities that are attempting to create new cuisine narratives for contemporary consumers who have an appetite for such innovation. Such events as the Salone del Gusto (Salon of Taste) and Terra Madre (Mother Earth) held in Turin every two years, for example, while celebrating culinary traditions, also focus on contemporary artisanal foods and sustainable food production processes that incorporate the most current of agricultural knowledge and new technologies into this production. Attendees at these events are also driven by both an interest in tradition, and their own very current concerns with health, personal satisfaction and environmental sustainability, to change their consumer behavior through an expanded self-awareness of the consequences of their individual lifestyle choices. Such events have, in turn, inspired such events in other locations, moving Slow Food from local to global relevance, and affecting the intellectual evolution of foodway cultures far beyond its headquarters in Bra in Northern Italy. This includes in the developing world, where millions of farmers continue to follow many traditional agricultural practices by necessity. Slow Food Movement’s forward-looking values are codified in the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture 2006 publication, Manifesto on the Future of Food. This calls for changes to the World Trade Organisation’s rules that promote the globalisation of agri-food production as a direct response to the “climate change [which] threatens to undermine the entire natural basis of ecologically benign agriculture and food preparation, bringing the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes in the near future” (ICFFA 8). It does not call, however, for a complete return to past methods. To further such foodway awareness and evolution, Petrini founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences at Slow Food’s headquarters in 2004. The university offers programs that are analogous with the Slow Food’s overall aim of forging sustainable partnerships between the best of old and new practice: to, in the organisation’s own words, “maintain an organic relationship between gastronomy and agricultural science” (UNISG). In 2004, Slow Food had over sixty thousand members in forty-five countries (Paxson 15), with major events now held each year in many of these countries and membership continuing to grow apace. One of the frequently cited successes of the Slow Food movement is in relation to the tomato. Until recently, supermarkets stocked only a few mass-produced hybrids. These cultivars were bred for their disease resistance, ease of handling, tolerance to artificial ripening techniques, and display consistency, rather than any culinary values such as taste, aroma, texture or variety. In contrast, the vine ripened, ‘farmer’s market’ tomato has become the symbol of an “eco-gastronomically” sustainable, local and humanistic system of food production (Jordan) which melds the best of the past practice with the most up-to-date knowledge regarding such farming matters as water conservation. Although the term ‘heirloom’ is widely used in relation to these tomatoes, there is a distinctively contemporary edge to the way they are produced and consumed (Jordan), and they are, along with other organic and local produce, increasingly available in even the largest supermarket chains. Instead of a wholesale embrace of the past, it is the connection to, and the maintenance of that connection with, the processes of production and, hence, to the environment as a whole, which is the animating premise of the Slow Food movement. ‘Slow’ thus creates a gestalt in which individuals integrate their lifestyles with all levels of the food production cycle and, hence to the environment and, importantly, the inherently related social justice issues. ‘Slow’ approaches emphasise how the accelerated pace of contemporary life has weakened these connections, while offering a path to the restoration of a sense of connectivity to the full cycle of life and its relation to place, nature and climate. In this, the Slow path demands that every consumer takes responsibility for all components of his/her existence—a responsibility that includes becoming cognisant of the full story behind each of the products that are consumed in that life. The Slow movement is not, however, a regime of abstention or self-denial. Instead, the changes in lifestyle necessary to support responsible sustainability, and the sensual and aesthetic pleasure inherent in such a lifestyle, exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship (Pietrykowski 2004). This positive feedback loop enhances the potential for promoting real and long-term evolution in social and cultural behaviour. Indeed, the Slow zeitgeist now informs many areas of contemporary culture, with Slow Travel, Homes, Design, Management, Leadership and Education, and even Slow Email, Exercise, Shopping and Sex attracting adherents. Mainstreaming Concern with Ethical Food Production The role of the media in “forming our consciousness—what we think, how we think, and what we think about” (Cunningham and Turner 12)—is self-evident. It is, therefore, revealing in relation to the above outlined changes that even the most functional cookbooks and cookery magazines (those dedicated to practical information such as recipes and instructional technique) in Western countries such as the USA, UK and Australian are increasingly reflecting and promoting an awareness of ethical food production as part of this cultural change in food habits. While such texts have largely been considered as useful but socio-politically relatively banal publications, they are beginning to be recognised as a valid source of historical and cultural information (Nussel). Cookbooks and cookery magazines commonly include discussion of a surprising range of issues around food production and consumption including sustainable and ethical agricultural methods, biodiversity, genetic modification and food miles. In this context, they indicate how rapidly the recent evolution of foodways has been absorbed into mainstream practice. Much of such food related media content is, at the same time, closely identified with celebrity mass marketing and embodied in the television chef with his or her range of branded products including their syndicated articles and cookbooks. This commercial symbiosis makes each such cuisine-related article in a food or women’s magazine or cookbook, in essence, an advertorial for a celebrity chef and their named products. Yet, at the same time, a number of these mass media food celebrities are raising public discussion that is leading to consequent action around important issues linked to climate change, social justice and the environment. An example is Jamie Oliver’s efforts to influence public behaviour and government policy, a number of which have gained considerable traction. Oliver’s 2004 exposure of the poor quality of school lunches in Britain (see Jamie’s School Dinners), for instance, caused public outrage and pressured the British government to commit considerable extra funding to these programs. A recent study by Essex University has, moreover, found that the academic performance of 11-year-old pupils eating Oliver’s meals improved, while absenteeism fell by 15 per cent (Khan). Oliver’s exposé of the conditions of battery raised hens in 2007 and 2008 (see Fowl Dinners) resulted in increased sales of free-range poultry, decreased sales of factory-farmed chickens across the UK, and complaints that free-range chicken sales were limited by supply. Oliver encouraged viewers to lobby their local councils, and as a result, a number banned battery hen eggs from schools, care homes, town halls and workplace cafeterias (see, for example, LDP). The popular penetration of these ideas needs to be understood in a historical context where industrialised poultry farming has been an issue in Britain since at least 1848 when it was one of the contributing factors to the establishment of the RSPCA (Freeman). A century after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (published in 1906) exposed the realities of the slaughterhouse, and several decades since Peter Singer’s landmark Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983) posited the immorality of the mistreatment of animals in food production, it could be suggested that Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (released in 2006) added considerably to the recent concern regarding the ethics of industrial agriculture. Consciousness-raising bestselling books such as Jim Mason and Peter Singer’s The Ethics of What We Eat and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both published in 2006), do indeed ‘close the loop’ in this way in their discussions, by concluding that intensive food production methods used since the 1950s are not only inhumane and damage public health, but are also damaging an environment under pressure from climate change. In comparison, the use of forced labour and human trafficking in food production has attracted far less mainstream media, celebrity or public attention. It could be posited that this is, in part, because no direct relationship to the environment and climate change and, therefore, direct link to our own existence in the West, has been popularised. Kevin Bales, who has been described as a modern abolitionist, estimates that there are currently more than 27 million people living in conditions of slavery and exploitation against their wills—twice as many as during the 350-year long trans-Atlantic slave trade. Bales also chillingly reveals that, worldwide, the number of slaves is increasing, with contemporary individuals so inexpensive to purchase in relation to the value of their production that they are disposable once the slaveholder has used them. Alongside sex slavery, many other prevalent examples of contemporary slavery are concerned with food production (Weissbrodt et al; Miers). Bales and Soodalter, for example, describe how across Asia and Africa, adults and children are enslaved to catch and process fish and shellfish for both human consumption and cat food. Other campaigners have similarly exposed how the cocoa in chocolate is largely produced by child slave labour on the Ivory Coast (Chalke; Off), and how considerable amounts of exported sugar, cereals and other crops are slave-produced in certain countries. In 2003, some 32 per cent of US shoppers identified themselves as LOHAS “lifestyles of health and sustainability” consumers, who were, they said, willing to spend more for products that reflected not only ecological, but also social justice responsibility (McLaughlin). Research also confirms that “the pursuit of social objectives … can in fact furnish an organization with the competitive resources to develop effective marketing strategies”, with Doherty and Meehan showing how “social and ethical credibility” are now viable bases of differentiation and competitive positioning in mainstream consumer markets (311, 303). In line with this recognition, Fair Trade Certified goods are now available in British, European, US and, to a lesser extent, Australian supermarkets, and a number of global chains including Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, Starbucks and Virgin airlines utilise Fair Trade coffee and teas in all, or parts of, their operations. Fair Trade Certification indicates that farmers receive a higher than commodity price for their products, workers have the right to organise, men and women receive equal wages, and no child labour is utilised in the production process (McLaughlin). Yet, despite some Western consumers reporting such issues having an impact upon their purchasing decisions, social justice has not become a significant issue of concern for most. The popular cookery publications discussed above devote little space to Fair Trade product marketing, much of which is confined to supermarket-produced adverzines promoting the Fair Trade products they stock, and international celebrity chefs have yet to focus attention on this issue. In Australia, discussion of contemporary slavery in the press is sparse, having surfaced in 2000-2001, prompted by UNICEF campaigns against child labour, and in 2007 and 2008 with the visit of a series of high profile anti-slavery campaigners (including Bales) to the region. The public awareness of food produced by forced labour and the troubling issue of human enslavement in general is still far below the level that climate change and ecological issues have achieved thus far in driving foodway evolution. This may change, however, if a ‘Slow’-inflected connection can be made between Western lifestyles and the plight of peoples hidden from our daily existence, but contributing daily to them. Concluding Remarks At this time of accelerating techno-cultural evolution, due in part to the pressures of climate change, it is the creative potential that human conscious awareness brings to bear on these challenges that is most valuable. Today, as in the caves at Lascaux, humanity is evolving new images and narratives to provide rational solutions to emergent challenges. As an example of this, new foodways and ways of thinking about them are beginning to evolve in response to the perceived problems of climate change. The current conscious transformation of food habits by some in the West might be, therefore, in James Lovelock’s terms, a moment of “revolutionary punctuation” (178), whereby rapid cultural adaption is being induced by the growing public awareness of impending crisis. It remains to be seen whether other urgent human problems can be similarly and creatively embraced, and whether this trend can spread to offer global solutions to them. References An Inconvenient Truth. 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Eshel, Gidon, and Pamela A. Martin. “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming.” Earth Interactions 10, paper 9 (2006): 1–17. Fowl Dinners. Exec. Prod. Nick Curwin and Zoe Collins. Dragonfly Film and Television Productions and Fresh One Productions, 2008. Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food. London: Gollancz, 1989. Gould, S. J., and N. Eldredge. “Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age.” Nature 366 (1993): 223–27. (ICFFA) International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture. Manifesto on the Future of Food. Florence, Italy: Agenzia Regionale per lo Sviluppo e l’Innovazione nel Settore Agricolo Forestale and Regione Toscana, 2006. Jamie’s School Dinners. Dir. Guy Gilbert. Fresh One Productions, 2005. Jordan, Jennifer A. “The Heirloom Tomato as Cultural Object: Investigating Taste and Space.” Sociologia Ruralis 47.1 (2007): 20-41. Khan, Urmee. “Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners Improve Exam Results, Report Finds.” Telegraph 1 Feb. 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4423132/Jamie-Olivers-school-dinners-improve-exam-results-report-finds.html >. Kloppenberg, Jack, Jr, Sharon Lezberg, Kathryn de Master, G. W. Stevenson, and John Henrickson. ‘Tasting Food, Tasting Sustainability: Defining the Attributes of an Alternative Food System with Competent, Ordinary People.” Human Organisation 59.2 (Jul. 2000): 177–86. (LDP) Liverpool Daily Post. “Battery Farm Eggs Banned from Schools and Care Homes.” Liverpool Daily Post 12 Jan. 2008. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2008/01/12/battery-farm-eggs-banned-from-schools-and-care-homes-64375-20342259 >. Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. New York: Bantam, 1990 (first published 1988). Mason, Jim, and Peter Singer. The Ethics of What We Eat. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. McLaughlin, Katy. “Is Your Grocery List Politically Correct? Food World’s New Buzzword Is ‘Sustainable’ Products.” The Wall Street Journal 17 Feb. 2004. 29 Aug. 2009 < http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/1732.html >. McMichael, Anthony J, John W Powles, Colin D Butler, and Ricardo Uauy. “Food, Livestock Production, Energy, Climate Change, and Health.” The Lancet 370 (6 Oct. 2007): 1253–63. Miers, Suzanne. “Contemporary Slavery”. A Historical Guide to World Slavery. Ed. Seymour Drescher, and Stanley L. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mintz, Sidney W. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Nussel, Jill. “Heating Up the Sources: Using Community Cookbooks in Historical Inquiry.” History Compass 4/5 (2006): 956–61. Off, Carol. Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2008. Paxson, Heather. “Slow Food in a Fat Society: Satisfying Ethical Appetites.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 5.1 (2005): 14–18. Pietrykowski, Bruce. “You Are What You Eat: The Social Economy of the Slow Food Movement.” Review of Social Economy 62:3 (2004): 307–21. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Scholz, Christopher A., Thomas C. Johnson, Andrew S. Cohen, John W. King, John A. Peck, Jonathan T. Overpeck, Michael R. Talbot, Erik T. Brown, Leonard Kalindekafe, Philip Y. O. Amoako, Robert P. Lyons, Timothy M. Shanahan, Isla S. Castañeda, Clifford W. Heil, Steven L. Forman, Lanny R. McHargue, Kristina R. Beuning, Jeanette Gomez, and James Pierson. “East African Megadroughts between 135 and 75 Thousand Years Ago and Bearing on Early-modern Human Origins.” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America 104.42 (16 Oct. 2007): 16416–21. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Jabber & Company, 1906. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: HarperCollins, 1975. (SFFB) Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. “Ark of Taste.” 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.fondazioneslowfood.it/eng/arca/lista.lasso >. (UNISG) University of Gastronomic Sciences. “Who We Are.” 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.unisg.it/eng/chisiamo.php >. Vileisis, Ann. Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back. Washington: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2008. Weissbrodt, David, and Anti-Slavery International. Abolishing Slavery and its Contemporary Forms. New York and Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations, 2002. Zeder, Melinda A. “The Neolithic Macro-(R)evolution: Macroevolutionary Theory and the Study of Culture Change.” Journal of Archaeological Research 17 (2009): 1–63.

In an article in the Sunday Tasmanian shortly after the deaths of Melbourne teenagers Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in 2007, Tasmanian Catholic Schools Parents and Friends Federation president Bill Button claimed: “Parents are concerned because all of a sudden their child, if they have access to a computer, can turn into an Emo” (qtd. in Vowles 1).For a few months in 2007, the dangers of emo and computer use were significant themes in Australian newspaper coverage. Emo, an abbreviation of the terms “emocore” or “emotional hardcore”, is a melodic subgenre of punk rock music, characterised by “emotional” or personal themes. Its followers, who adopt a look that includes black stovepipe jeans, dyed black hair and side-parted long fringes, might merely have been one of the many “tribes” (Bennett 605) that characterise contemporary youth culture. However, over an approximately five-month period in 2007, the deaths of three teenagers in two separate incidents—the murder Carly Ryan in February and the suicides of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in April—were linked to the emo subculture and to the social networking site MySpace, both of which were presented as dangerous and worrying developments in contemporary youth culture.This paper explores the media discourse surrounding emo and social networking technologies via a textual analysis of key reports and commentary pieces published in major metropolitan and national newspapers around the times of the three deaths. Although only a small selection of the 140-odd articles published Australia-wide is discussed here, those selected are indicative of broader trends in the newspaper coverage, and offer a means of examining how these incidents were constructed and understood within mainstream media discourse.Moral panics in relation to youth music and subculture are not uncommon in the news and other media (Cohen; Goode and Ben-Yehuda; Redhead; Rose 124-145; Weinstein 245-263; Wright). Moral panics related to social networking technologies have also been subject to academic study (Hinduja and Patchin 126; Livingstone 395; Marwick). In these cases, moral panic is typically understood as a force of normalisation and social control. The media discourses surrounding the deaths of the three young women possessed many of the features of moral panic described in this literature, including a build-up of concern disproportionate to “real” risk of harm (see Goode and Ben-Yehuda 33-41). But while emo youth were sometimes constructed as a straightforward “folk devil” (Cohen 11) or “enemy” (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 31) in need of clear sanctions—or, alternatively, as victims of a clear folk devil or enemy—the “problem” of emo was also framed as a product of much broader problems of youth culture.Connections between emo, MySpace, the deaths of the three young women were only ever tenuously established in the news reports and commentaries. That the stories appeared to be ultimately concerned with a broader group of (non-subculturally affiliated) young people suggests that this coverage can be seen as symptomatic of what John Hartley describes—in the context of reporting on young people more generally—as a “profound uncertainty in the textual system of journalism about where the line that defines the boundary of the social should be drawn” (17). The result is a “cultural thinking-out-loud” (Hartley 17) in which broader cultural anxieties are expressed and explored, although they are not always clearly articulated. While there were some attempts in these reports and commentaries on the three “emo deaths” to both mobilise and express specific fears (such as the concern that computer access can turn a child “into an Emo”), the newspaper coverage also expressed broader anxieties about contemporary youth culture. These can be described as anxieties about disclosure.In the cases of Carly Ryan, Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier, these were disclosures that were seen as simultaneously excessive and inadequate. Specifically, the newspaper coverage focused on both the dangers of young people’s disclosures of traditionally private material, and the ways in which the apparent secrecy of these disclosures made them inaccessible to adult authorities who could otherwise have “done something” to prevent the tragedies from occurring.Although some of these concerns were connected to the specificities of emo subcultural expression—the “excessive” emotionality on display and the impenetrability of subcultural imagery respectively—they were on the whole linked to a broader problem in contemporary youth culture that was seen to apply to all young people, whether or not they were emo-identified. Specifically, the deaths of Carly Ryan, Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier provided opportunities for the expression of anxieties that the private lives of young people were becoming increasingly “unknowable” to adult authorities, and, hence, that youth culture itself was increasingly “unknowable”.The Case of Carly RyanIn February 2007, the body of 15-year-old Carly Ryan was found in Horseshoe Bay at Port Elliot, just south of Adelaide. Several weeks later, a 48-year-old man and his 17-year-old son were arrested for her murder. The murder trial began January 2009, with the case still continuing at the time of writing. In the early reports of her death, particularly in Adelaide’s Advertiser, Ryan’s MySpace page was the focus of much discussion, since the teenager was understood to have presented an image of herself on the site that left her vulnerable to predators, including to one of her alleged killers with whom she had been regularly communicating in the weeks leading up to her murder (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 4; Hunt 2; Wheatley 4).The main report in The Advertiser, described Ryan’s MySpace page as “bizarre” and as “paint[ing] a disturbing picture of a world of drugs and sex” (Littlely, Salter and Wheatley 4). Ryan was reported as listing her interests as “drugs, smoking, music and sex”, to have described herself as “bisexual”, and to have uploaded images of a “girl injecting herself, a woman with a crucifix rammed down her throat and a woman with her lips stitched together” (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 4).Attempts were made to link such “graphic” imagery to the emo subculture (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 1; see also O’Donohue 5). The imagery was seen as subcultural insofar as it was seen to reflect a “bizarre teenage ‘goth’ and ‘emo’ world” (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 1), a world constructed both as dangerous (in the sense that her apparent involvement in subcultural activities was presented as “disturbing” and something that put her at risk of harm) and impenetrable (in the sense that subcultural imagery was understood not simply as harmful but also as “bizarre”). This linking of Ryan’s death to the emo and goth subcultures was done despite the fact that it was never clearly substantiated that the teenager did indeed classify herself as either “emo” or “goth”, and despite the fact that such links were contested by Ryan’s friends and family (see: “Gothic Images” 15; Riches 15).The repeated linking, then, of Ryan’s death to her (largely unconfirmed) subcultural involvement can be seen as one way of containing the anxieties surrounding her apparently “graphic” and “inappropriate” online disclosures. That is, if such disclosures can be seen as the expressions of a minority subcultural membership, rather than a tendency characteristic of young people more generally, then the risks they pose may be limited only to subcultural youth. Such a view is expressed in comments like Bill Button’s about computer use and emo culture, cited above. Research, however, suggests that with or without subcultural affiliation, some young users of MySpace use the site to demonstrate familiarity with adult-oriented behaviours by “posting sexually charged comments or pictures to corroborate their self-conception of maturity”—irrespective of whether these reflect actual behaviours offline (Hinduja and Patchin 136, 138). As such, this material is inevitably a construction rather than a straightforward reflection of identity (Liu).On the whole, Ryan’s death was presented as simultaneously the product of a dangerous subcultural affiliation, and an extreme case of the dangers posed by unsupervised Internet use to all young people, not just to those emo-identified. For example, the Sunday Mail article “Cyber Threat: The New Place Our Kids Love to Play” warned of the risks of disclosing too much personal information online, suggesting that all young people should restrict access to private information only to people that they know (Novak 12).Such reports reflect a more widespread concern, identified by Marwick, that social networking sites lower cultural expectations around privacy and encourage young people to expose more of their lives online, hence making them vulnerable to potential harm (see also De Souza and Dick; Hinduja and Patchin). In the case of Carly Ryan, the concern that too much (and inappropriate) online disclosure poses dangers for young people is also subtended by anxieties that the teenager and her friends also did not disclose enough information—or, at least, did not disclose in a way that could be made comprehensible and accessible to adult authorities.As a result, the so-called “graphic” material on Ryan’s MySpace page (and on the pages of her friends) was described as both inappropriately public and inappropriately hidden from public view. For example, a report in The Advertiser spoke of a “web of secret internet message boards” that “could potentially hold vital clues to investigating detectives” but which “have been blocked by their creators to everyone but [Ryan’s] tight-knit group of friends” (Littlely, Salter, and Wheatley 1). This “web of secret internet message boards” was, in fact, MySpace pages set to “private”: that is, pages accessible to approved friends only.The privacy settings on profiles are thus presented as an obfuscatory mechanism, a refusal on the part of young people to disclose information that might be of assistance to the murder case. Yet these young people were conforming to the very advice about online safety provided in many of the news reports (such as the article by Novak) and echoed in material released by the Australian Government (such as the Cybersmart Guide for Families): that is, in order to protect their privacy online, they should restrict access to their social networking profiles only to friends that they know.This contradictory message—that too much disclosure online poses safety risks, while conservative approaches to online privacy are evidence of secrecy and obfuscation—expresses a rather tangled set of anxieties about contemporary youth culture. This is part of the “cultural thinking-out-loud” that Hartley characterises as a feature of news reporting on youth more generally. The attempt to make sense of an (apparently motiveless) murder of a young woman with reference to a set of contemporary youth cultural practices that are described as both dangerous and incomprehensible not only constructs technology, subculture and young people as problems to be “fixed”, but also highlights the limited ways through which mainstream news coverage comes to “know” and understand youth culture.Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier: The “MySpace Suicide Girls” News reporting on Carly Ryan’s death presented youth culture as a disturbing and dangerous underworld hidden from adult view and essential “unknowable” by adult authorities. In contrast, the reports and commentaries on the deaths of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier only a few months later sought to subsume events that may otherwise have been viewed as inexplicable into categories of the already-known. Gater and Gestier were presented not as victims of a disturbing and secret underground subculture, but a more fully knowable mainstream bullying culture. As a result, the dangers of disclosure were presented differently in this case.In April 2007, the bodies of 16-year-old friends Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier were found in bushland on the outskirts of Melbourne. The pair was understood to have hanged themselves as part of a suicide pact. Like the reporting on Carly Ryan’s death, anxieties were raised, particularly in the Melbourne papers, about “teenagers’ secret world” in which “introspective, lonely, misunderstood and depressed” young people sought solace in the communities of emo and MySpace (Dubecki 3).Also similar was that the dangers posed by emo formed part of the way this story was reported, particularly with respect to emo’s alleged connection to self-harming practices. The connections between the emo subculture and the girls’ suicides were often vague and non-specific: Gater and Gestier’s MySpace pages were described as “odes to subculture” (Dowsley 73) and their suicides “influenced by youth subcultures” (Dubecki and Oakes 1), but it was not clearly substantiated in the reports that either Gater or Gestier identified with the emo (or any) subculture (see: Dubecki 3).It was similarly the case that the stories connected the deaths of Gater and Gestier to personal disclosures on MySpace. In contrast to the reporting on Carly Ryan’s murder, however, there were fewer concerns about inappropriate and overly personal disclosures online, and more worries that the teenagers’ online disclosures had been missed by both the girls’ friends and by adult authorities. The apparent suicide warning messages left on the girls’ MySpace pages in the months leading up to the their deaths, including “it’s over for me, I can’t take it!” and “let Steph and me be free” (qtd. in Oakes 5), were seen as evidence of the inaccessibility of young people’s cries for help in an online environment. Headlines such as “Teen Cries for Help Lost in Cyberspace” (Nolan 4) suggest that the concern in this case was less about the “secrecy” of youth culture, and more about an inability of parents (and other adult authorities) to penetrate online youth culture in order to hear disclosures made.As a consequence, parents were encouraged to access these disclosures in other ways: Andrea Burns in an opinion column for the Sunday Herald Sun, for example, urged parents to open the lines of communication with their teenagers and not “leave the young to suffer in silence” (108). An article in the Sunday Age claimed developmental similarities between toddlers and teenagers necessitated increased parental involvement in the lives of teens (Susan Sawyer qtd. in Egan 12). Of course, as Livingstone notes, part of the pleasure of social networking sites for young people is the possibility of escape from the surveillance of parental authority (396). Young people’s status as a social category “to be watched” (Davis 251), then, becomes challenged by the obvious difficulties of regular parental access to teenagers’ online profiles. Perhaps acknowledging the inherent difficulties of fully “knowing” online youth culture, and in turn seeking to make the Gater/Gestier tragedy more explicable and comprehensible, many of the articles attempted to make sense of the apparently unknowable in terms of the familiar and already-known. In this case, the complexities of Gater and Gestier’s deaths were presented as a response to something far more comprehensible to adult authorities: school bullying.It is important to note that many of the articles did not follow government recommendations on the reporting of suicide as they often did not consider the teenagers’ deaths in the context of depression or other mental health risks (see: Blood et al. 9). Instead, some reports, such as the Neil McMahon’s story for The Sydney Morning Herald, claimed that the girls’ deaths could be linked to bullying—according to one friend Stephanie Gestier was “being bullied really badly” at school (1). Others simply assumed, but did not substantiate, a connection between the deaths of the two teenagers and the experience of bullying.For instance, in an opinion piece for The Australian, Gater and Gestier’s deaths are a segue for discussing teenage bullying more generally: “were Gater and Gestier bullied?” writer Jack Sargeant asks. “I do not know but I imagine they were” (10). Similarly, in an opinion piece for the Herald Sun entitled “Why Kids Today Feel so ‘Emo’”, Labor MP Lindsay Tanner begins by questioning the role of the emo subculture in the deaths of Gater and Gestier, but quickly shifts to a broader discussion of bullying. He writes: “Emos sound a lot like kids who typically get bullied and excluded by other kids [...] I’m not really in a position to know, but I can’t help wondering” (Tanner 21).Like Sargeant, Tanner does not make a conclusive link between emo, MySpace, suicide and bullying, and so instead shifts from a discussion of the specifics of the Gater/Gestier case to a discussion of the broader problems their suicides were seen to be symptomatic of. This was assisted by Tanner’s claims that emo is simply a characteristic of “kids today” rather than as a specific subcultural affiliation. Emo, he argued, “now seems to reflect quite a bit more than just particular music and fashion styles”: it is seen to represent a much wider problem in youth culture (Tanner 21).Emo thus functioned as a “way in” for critics who perhaps found it easier to (initially) talk about suicide as a risk for those on the cultural fringe, rather than the adolescent mainstream. As a result, the news coverage circled between the risks posed by subcultural involvement and the idea that any or all young people could be at risk of suicide. By conceiving explicit displays of emotionality online as the expression of bullied young people at risk of suicide, otherwise ambiguous disclosures and representations of emotion could be made knowable as young people’s cries for (parental and adult) help.ConclusionIn the newspaper reporting and commentary on the deaths of Carly Ryan, Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier, young people are thought to disclose both too much and not enough. The “cultural thinking-out-loud” (Hartley 17) that characterised this type of journalism presented young people’s disclosures as putting them at risk of harm by others, or as revealing that they are at risk of self harm or suicide. At the same time, however, these reports and commentaries also expressed anxieties that young people do not disclose in ways that can be rendered easily knowable, controllable or resolvable by adult authorities. Certainly, the newspaper coverage works to construct and legitimise ideals of parental surveillance of teenagers that speak to the broader discourses of Internet safety that have become prominent in recent years.What is perhaps more significant about this material, however, is that by constructing young people as a whole as “emotional people” (Vowles 1) in need of intervention, surveillance and supervision, and thereby subsuming the specific concerns about the emo subculture and social networking technologies into an expression of more generalised concerns about the “unknowability” of young people as a whole, the newspaper coverage is, in John Hartley’s words, “almost always about something else” (16). Emo and social networking, then, are not so much classic “folk devils”, but are “ways in” for expressing anxieties that are not always clearly and consistently articulated. In expressing anxieties about the “unknowability” of contemporary youth culture, then, the newspaper coverage ultimately also contributed to it. This highlights both the complexity in which moral panic discourse functions in media reporting, and the ways in which more complete understandings of emo, social networking technologies and youth culture became constrained by discourses that treated them as essentially interchangeable.ReferencesAdamson, Kate. “Emo Death Arrest.” Sunday Herald Sun 4 Mar. 2007: 12.Bennett, Andy. “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? 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Australian Communications and Media Authority, 2009. 24 Sep. 2009 ‹http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/Parents/Family safety resources/information for you to download.aspx›.Davis, Mark. Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997.De Souza, Zaineb, and Geoffrey N. Dick. “Disclosure of Information by Children in Social Networking: Not Just a Case of ‘You Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine.’” International Journal of Information Management 29 (2009): 255–61.Dowsley, Anthony. “Websites Hold Key to Teens’ Suicides.” The Daily Telegraph 28 March 2007: 73.Dubecki, Larissa. “Teenagers’ Secret World.” The Age 28 April 2007: 3.Dubecki, Larissa, and Dan Oakes. “Lost in Cyberspace: Fears That New Networks Are Breeding Grounds for Real-Life Tragedies.” The Age 24 April: 1.Egan, Carmel. “Being 16.” Sunday Age 29 Mar. 2007: 12.Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.“Gothic Images Appealed to Artistic Soul.” The Advertiser 24 Feb. 2007: 15.Hartley, John. “‘When Your Child Grows Up Too Fast’: Juvenation and the Boundaries of the Social in the News Media.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 12.1 (1998): 9–30.Hinduja, Sameer, and Justin W. Patchin. “Personal Information of Adolescents on the Internet: A Qualitative Content Analysis of MySpace.” Journal of Adolescence 31 (2008): 125-46. Hunt, Nigel. “Teen Murder Breakthrough.” Sunday Mail 4 Mar. 2007: 1-2.Littlely, Brian, Chris Salter, and Kim Wheatley. “Net Hunt for Murder Clues.” The Advertiser 23 Feb. 2007: 1, 4.Livingstone, Sonia. “Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers’ Use of Social Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Expression.” New Media & Society 10.3 (2008): 393-411.Liu, Hugo. “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008): 252-275.Marwick, Alice. “To Catch a Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic.” First Monday 13.6 (2008). 31 Aug. 2009 ‹http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2152/1966›.McMahon, Neil. “School Bullies on Girls’ Sad Road to Oblivion.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Mar. 2007: 1.Nolan, Kellee. “Teen Cries for Help Lost in Cyberspace.” The Courier Mail 24 Mar. 2007: 4.Novak, Lauren. “Cyber Threat: The New Place Our Kids Love to Play.” Sunday Mail 11 Mar. 2007: 12.Oakes, Dan. “Let Us Be Free: Web Clues to Teen Death Pact.” Sydney Morning Herald 23 Mar. 2007: 5.O’Donohue, Danielle. “Pain and Darkness in ‘Emo’ Dwellers’ World.” The Advertiser 23 Feb. 2007: 5.Redhead, Steve (ed). Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.Riches, Sam. “Farewell to My Love, My World, My Precious Baby Girl.” The Advertiser 10 March 2007: 15.Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.Sargeant, Jack. “It’s Hard to Be Emo and Be Respected.” The Australian 3 May 2007: 10.Tanner, Lindsay. “Why Kids Today Feel So ‘Emo’.” Herald Sun 12 June 2007: 21.Vowles, Gill. “Shock Figures on Emo Culture: Alarm at Teens’ Self-Harm.” Sunday Tasmanian 20 May 2007: 1.Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Boulder: Da Capo, 2000.Wheatley, Kim. “How Police Tracked Carly Suspects.” The Advertiser 5 Mar. 2007: 1, 4.Wright, Robert. “‘I’d Sell You Suicide’: Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson.” Popular Music 19.3 (2000): 365–385.

Introduction The public sphere includes a range of credible discourses asserting that a proportion of teenagers (“teens”) has an unhealthy dependence upon continuous connection with media devices, and especially smartphones. A review of media discourse (Jaunzems et al.) in Australia, and a critical review of public discourse in Australia and Belgium (Zaman et al.), reveal both positive and negative commentary around screentime. Despite the “emotionally laden, opposing views” expressed in the media, there appears to be a groundswell of concern around young people’s dependence upon digital devices (Zaman et al. 120). Concerns about ‘addiction’ to and dependency on digital media first emerged with the Internet and have been continually represented as technology evolves. One recent example is the 2020 multi-part Massey Lecture series which hooked audiences with the provocative title: “we need to reclaim our lives from our phones” (Deibert). In Sydney, a psychology-based “outpatient addiction treatment centre” offers specialised recovery programs for “Internet addiction”, noting that addicts include school-aged teens, as well as adults (Cabin). Such discourse reflects well-established social anxieties around the disruptive impacts of new technologies upon society (Marvin), while focussing such concern disproportionately upon the lives, priorities, and activities of young people (Tsaliki and Chronaki). While a growing peer-reviewed evidence base suggests some young people have problematic relationships with digital media (e.g. Odgers and Robb; Donald et al.; Gaspard; Tóth-Király et al.; Boer et al.), there are also opposing views (e.g. Vuorre et al.) Ben Light, for instance, highlights the notion of disconnection as a set of practices that include using some platforms and not others, unfriending, and selective anonymity (Light). We argue that this version of disconnection and what we refer to as ‘detox’ are two different practices. Detox, as we use it, is the regular removal of elements of lived experience (such as food consumption) that may be enjoyable but which potentially have negative consequences over time, before (potentially) reintroducing the element or pratice. The aims of a detox include ensuring greater control over the enjoyable experience while, at the same time, reducing exposure to possible harm. There is a lack of specific research that unequivocally asserts young people’s unhealthy dependence upon smartphones. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing public belief in the efficacy of “the detox” (Beyond Blue) or “unplugging” (Shlain). We argue that a teen’s commitment to regular smartphone abstinence is non-fungible with ‘as and when’ smartphone use. In other words, there is a significant, ineluctable and non-trivial difference between the practice of regularly disconnecting from a smartphone at a certain point of the day, or for a specified period in the week, compared with the same amount of time ‘off’ the device which is a haphazard, as and when, doing something else, type of practice. We posit that recurrent periods of smartphone abstinence, equating to a regular detox, might support more balanced, healthy and empowered smartphone use. Repeated abstinence in this case differs from the notion of the disconnected holiday, where a person might engage in irregular smartphone withdrawal during an annual holiday, for example (Traveltalk; Hoving; Stäheli and Stoltenberg). Such abstinence does have widespread historical and cultural resonance, however, as in the fasting practices of Islam (the month of Ramadan), the Christian season of Lent, and the holy Hindu month of Śravaṇa. Where prolonged periods of fasting are supplemented by weekly or holy-day fasts, they may be reprised with a regularity that brings the practice closer to the scheduled pattern of abstinence that we see as non-fungible with an unstructured as-and-when approach. An extreme example of the long fast and intermittent fast days is offered by the traditional practices of the Greek Orthodox church, whose teachings recommend fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as on religious holy days. With the inclusion of Lent, Greek Orthodox fasting practices can comprise 180 fast days per year: that’s about half of available days. As yet, there is no coherent evidence base supporting the benefits of regular intermittent disconnection. The Australian mental health Website Beyond Blue, which asserts the value of digital detox, cannot find a stronger authority to underpin a practice of withdrawal than “Research from Deloitte’s annual Mobile Consumer Survey report” which indicates that “44 per cent of people in Australia think their phone use is a problem and are trying to reduce how much time they spend on it” (Beyond Blue). Academic literature that addresses these areas by drawing on more than personal experience and anecdote is scarce to non-existent. Insofar as such studies exist over the past decade, from Maushart to Leonowicz-Bukała et al., they are irregular experiments which do not commit to repeated periods of disconnection. This article is a call to investigate the possibly non-fungible benefits of teens’ regularly practicing smartphone disconnection. It argues that there is actual evidence which is yet to be collected. New knowledge in this area may provide a compelling dataset that suggests verifiable benefits for the non-fungible practice of regular smartphone disconnection. We believe that there are teenagers, parents and communities willing to trial appropriate interventions over a significant period of time to establish ‘before’ and ‘after’ case studies. The evidence for these opinions is laid out in the sections that follow. Teens’ Experiences of Media, Smartphone, and Other Cultural Dis/connection In 2018, the Pew Research Center in the US surveyed teens about their experiences of social media, updating elements of an earlier study from 2014-15. They found that almost all (95%) the 743 teens in the study, aged between 13 and 17 when they were surveyed in March-April 2018, had or had access to a smartphone (Anderson and Jiang). A more recent report from 2021 notes that 88% of US teenagers, aged 13-18, have their own smartphone (Common Sense Media 22). What is more, this media use survey indicates that American teens have increased their screen entertainment time from 7 hours, 22 minutes per day in 2019 to 8 hours, 39 minutes per day in 2021 (Common Sense Media 3). Lee argues that, on average, mobile phone users in Australia touch their phones 2,617 times a day. In Sweden, a 2019 study of youth aged 15-24 noted a pervasive concern regarding the logical assumption “that offline time is influenced and adapted when people spend an increasing amount of time online” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 41). These authors critique the overarching theory of young people comprising a homogenous group of ‘digital natives’ by identifying different categories of light, medium, and heavy users of ICT. They say that the “variation in use is large, indicating that responses to ubiquitous ICT access are highly diverse rather than homogenously determined” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 48). The practice or otherwise of regular periods of smartphone disconnection is a further potential differentiator of teens’ digital experiences. Any investigation into these areas of difference should help indicate ways in which teens may or may not achieve comparatively more or less control over their smartphone use. Lee argues that in Australia “teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices have a 71% higher risk factor for suicide”. Twenge and Campbell (311) used “three large surveys of adolescents in two countries (n = 221,096)” to explore differences between ‘light users’ of digital media (<1 hour per day) and ‘heavy users’ (5+ hours per day). They use their data to argue that “heavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts” (Twenge and Campbell 311). Notably, Livingstone among others argues that emotive assertions such as these tend to ignore the nuance of significant bodies of research (Livingstone, about Twenge). Even so, it is plausible that teens’ online activities interpolate both positively and negatively upon their offline activities. The capacity to disconnect, however, to disengage from smartphone use at will, potentially allows a teen more opportunity for individual choice impacting both positive and negative experiences. As boyd argued in 2014: “it’s complicated”. The Pew findings from 2018 indicate that teens’ positive comments about social media use include: 81% “feel more connected to their friends”; 69% “think it helps [them] interact with a more diverse group of people”; and 68% “feel as if they have people who will support them through tough times.” (Anderson and Jiang) The most numerous negative comments address how of all teens: 45% “feel overwhelmed by all the drama there”; 43% “feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others”; and 37% “feel pressure to post content that will get a lot of likes and comments.” (Anderson and Jiang) It is notable that these three latter points relate to teens’ vulnerabilities around others’ opinions of themselves and the associated rollercoaster of emotions these opinions may cause. They resonate with Ciarrochi et al.’s argument that different kinds of Internet activity impact different issues of control, with more social forms of digital media associated with young females’ higher “compulsive internet use […] and worse mental health than males” (276). What is not known, because it has never been investigated, is whether any benefits flowing from regular smartphone disconnection might have a gendered dimension. If there is specific value in a capacity to disconnect regularly, separating that experience from haphazard episodes of connection and disconnection, regular disconnection may also enhance the quality of smartphone engagement. Potentially, the power to turn off their smartphone when the going got tough might allow young people to feel greater control over their media use while being less susceptible to the drama and compulsion of digital engagement. As one 17-year-old told the Pew researchers, possibly ruefully, “[teens] would rather go scrolling on their phones instead of doing their homework, and it’s so easy to do so. It’s just a huge distraction” (Anderson and Jiang). Few cultural contexts support teens’ regular and repeated disengagement from smartphones, but Icelandic society, Orthodox Judaism and the comparatively common practice of overnight disconnection from smartphone use may offer helpful indications of possible benefits. Cross-Cultural and Religious Interventions in Smartphone Use Concern around teens’ smartphone use, as described above, is typically applied to young people whose smartphone use constitutes an integral part of everyday life. The untangling of such interconnection would benefit from being both comparative and experimental. Our suggestions follow. Iceland has, in the past, adopted what Karlsson and Broddason term “a paternalistic cultural conservatism” (1). Legislators concerned about the social impacts of television deferred the introduction of Icelandic broadcasting for many years, beyond the time that most other European nations offered television services. Program offerings were expanded in a gradual way after the 1966 beginnings of Iceland’s public television broadcasting. As Karlsson and Broddason note, “initially the transmission hours were limited to only a few hours in the evening, three days a week and a television-free month in July. The number of transmission days was increased to six within a few years, still with a television-free month in July until 1983 and television-free Thursdays until 1987” (6). Interestingly, the nation is still open to social experimentation on a grand scale. In the 1990s, for example, in response to significant substance abuse by Icelandic teens, the country implemented an interventionist whole-of-Iceland public health program: the Icelandic Prevention Model (Kristjansson et al.). Social experimentation on a smaller scale remains part of the Icelandic cultural fabric. More recently, between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran a successful social experiment whereby 1% of the working population worked a shorter work week for full time pay. The test was deemed successful because “workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being” (Lau and Sigurdardottir). A number of self-governing Icelandic villages operate a particularly inclusive form of consultative local democracy enabling widespread buy-in for social experiments. Two or more such communities are likely to be interested in trialling an intervention study if there is a plausible reason to believe that the intervention may make a positive difference to teens’ (and others’) experiences of smartphone use. Those plausible reasons might be indicated by observational data from other people’s everyday practices. One comparatively common everyday practice which has yet to be systematically investigated from the perspective of evaluating the possible impacts of regular disconnection is that practiced by families who leave connected media outside the bedroom at night-time. These families are in the habit of putting their phones on to charge, usually in a shared space such as a kitchen or lounge room, and not referring to them again until a key point in the morning: when they are dressed, for example, or ready to leave the house. It is plausible to believe that such families might feel they have greater control over smartphone use than a family who didn’t adopt a regular practice of smartphone disconnection. According to social researchers in the Nordic nations, including co-authors Kjartan Ólafsson and Elisabeth Staksrud, it is likely that an Icelandic community will be keen to trial this experience of regular smartphone disconnection for a period of six months or more, if that trial went hand in hand with a rigorous evaluation of impact. Some religious communities offer a less common exemplar for teens’ regular disconnection from their smartphone. Young people in these communities may suspend their smartphone (and other media use) for just over a full day per week to focus on deepening their engagement with family and friends, and to support their spiritual development. Notable among such examples are teenagers who identify as members of the Orthodox Jewish faith. Their religious practices include withdrawing from technological engagement as part of the observance of Shabbat (the Sabbath): at least, that’s the theory. For the past ten years or so in Australia there has been a growing concern over some otherwise-Orthodox Jewish teens’ practice of the “half-Shabbat,” in which an estimated 17-50% of this cohort secretly use digital media for some time during their 25 hours of mandated abstinence. As one teacher from an Orthodox high school argues, “to not have access to the phone, it’s like choking off their air” (Telushikin). Interestingly, many Jewish teens who privately admit practicing half-Shabbat envision themselves as moving towards full observance in adulthood: they can see benefits in a wholehearted commitment to disengagement, even if it’s hard to disengage fully at this point in their lives. Hadlington et al.’s article “I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]” similarly evokes a broader community crisis around children’s dependence on digital media, noting that many children aged 8-12 have a tablet of their own before moving onto smartphone ownership in their teens (Common Sense Media 22). We appreciate that not every society has children and young people who are highly networked and integrated within digital dataflows. Nonetheless, while constant smartphone connectivity might appear to be a ‘first world problem’, preparing teens to be adults with optimal choice over their smartphone use includes identifying and promoting support for conscious disengagement from media as and when a young person wishes. Such a perspective aligns with promoting young people’s rights in digital contexts by interrogating the possible benefits of regularly disconnecting from digital media. Those putative benefits may be indicated by investigating perspectives around smartphone use held by Orthodox Jewish teenagers and comparing them with those held by teens who follow a liberal Jewish faith: liberal Jewish teens use smartphones in ways that resonate with broader community teens. A comparison of these two groups, suggests co-author Lynne Cohen, may indicate differences that can (in part) be attributed to Orthodox Jewish practices of digital disconnection, compared with liberal Jewish practices that don’t include disconnection. If smartphone disconnection has the potential to offer non-fungible benefits, it is incumbent upon researchers to investigate the possible advantages and drawbacks of such practices. That can be done through the comparative investigation of current practice as outlined above, and via an experimental intervention for approximately six months with a second Icelandic/Nordic community. The Potential Value of Investigating the (Non-)Fungibility of Digital Engagement and Digital Inactivity The overarching hypothesis addressed in this article is that a lived experience of regular smartphone disconnection may offer teenagers the opportunity to feel more in control of their personal technologies. Such a perspective aligns with many established media theories. These theories include the domestication of technology and its integration into daily life, helping to explain the struggle teens experience in detaching from digital media once they have become a fundamental element of their routine. Domestication theory asserts that technology moves from novelty to an integral aspect of everyday experience (Berker et al.). Displacement theory asserts that young people whose lives are replete with digital media may have substituted that media use for other activities enjoyed by the generations that grew up before them, while boyd offers an alternative suggestion that digital media add to, rather than displace, teens’ activities in daily contexts. Borrowing inputs from other disciplinary traditions, theories around mindfulness are increasingly robust and evidence-based, asserting that “attentiveness to what is present appears to yield corrective and curative benefits in its own right” (Brown et al. 1). Constant attention to digital media may be a distraction from mindful engagement with the lived environment. A detailed study of the non-fungible character of smartphone disconnection practices might offer an evidence base to support suggestions, such as those proffered by Beyond Blue, that a digital detox benefits mental health, resilience, and sociality. Such information might support initiatives by schools and other organisations central to the lives of teenagers to institute regular digital disconnection regimes, akin to Iceland’s experiments with television-free Thursdays. These innovations could build upon aligned social initiatives such as “no email Fridays” (Horng), which have been trialled in business contexts. Further, studies such as those outlined above could add authority to recommendations for parents, educators, and caregivers such as those recommendations contained in papers on the Common Sense Media site, for example, including Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health (Odgers and Robb) and Device-Free Dinners (Robb). Relevantly, the results from such observational and intervention studies would address the post-COVID era when parents and others will be considering how best to support a generation of children who went online earlier, and more often, than any generation before them. These results might also align with work towards early-stage adoption of the United Nations’ General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment (UNCRC). 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Hadlington, Lee, Hannah White, and Sarah Curtis. "‘I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]’: Children's Experiences of Using Tablet Technology within the Home." Computers in Human Behavior 94 (2019): 19-24. Horng, Eric. “No-E-Mail Fridays Transform Office.” ABC News [US], 4 Aug. 2007. <https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2939232&page=1>. Hoving, Kristel. “Digital Detox Tourism: Why Disconnect? : What Are the Motives of Dutch Tourists to Undertake a Digital Detox Holiday?” Undefined, 2017. <https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Digital-Detox-Tourism%3A-Why-disconnect-%3A-What-are-of-Hoving/17503393a5f184ae0a5f9a2ed73cd44a624a9de8>. Jaunzems, Kelly, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Kylie Stevenson. “Very Young Children Online: Media Discourse and Parental Practice.” Digitising Early Childhood. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/7550>. Karlsson, Ragnar, and Thorbjörn Broddason. Between the Market and the Public: Content Provision and Scheduling of Public and Private TV in Iceland. Kristjansson, Alfgeir L., Michael J. Mann, Jon Sigfusson, Ingibjorg E. Thorisdottir, John P. Allegrante, and Inga Dora Sigfusdottir. “Development and Guiding Principles of the Icelandic Model for Preventing Adolescent Substance Use.” Health Promotion Practice 21.1 (Jan. 2020): 62–69. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839919849032>. Lau, Virginia, and Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir. “The Shorter Work Week Really Worked in Iceland: Here’s How.” Time, 2021. <https://time.com/6106962/shorter-work-week-iceland/>. Lee, James. “16 Smartphone Statistics Australia Should Take Note Of (2021).” Smartphone Statistics Australia, 2022. <https://whatasleep.com.au/blog/smartphone-statistics-australia/>. Leonowicz-Bukała, Iwona, Anna Martens, and Barbara Przywara. "Digital Natives Disconnected. The Qualitative Research on Mediatized Life of Polish and International Students in Rzeszow and Warsaw, Poland." Przegląd Badań Edukacyjnych (Educational Studies Review) 35.2 (2021): 69-96. Light, Ben. Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Livingstone, Sonia. "iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood." Journal of Children and Media, 12.1 (2018): 118–123. <https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2017.1417091>. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New : Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford UP, 1990. Maushart, Susan. The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale. Penguin, 2011. Odgers, Candice L., and Michael Robb. “Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health: Coming of Age in an Increasingly Digital, Uncertain, and Unequal World.” Common Sense Media, 2020. <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/tweens-teens-tech-and-mental-health>. Robb, Michael. “Why Device-Free Dinners Are a Healthy Choice.” Common Sense Media, 4 Aug. 2016. <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/why-device-free-dinners-are-a-healthy-choice>. Shlain, Tiffany. “Tech’s Best Feature: The Off Switch.” Harvard Business Review, 1 Mar. 2013. <https://hbr.org/2013/03/techs-best-feature-the-off-swi>. Stäheli, Urs, and Luise Stoltenberg. “Digital Detox Tourism: Practices of Analogization.” New Media & Society (Jan. 2022). <https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211072808>. Telushikin, Shira. “Modern Orthodox Teens Can’t Put Down Their Phones on Shabbat.” Tablet Magazine, 12 Sep. 2014. <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/shabbat-phones>. Thulin, Eva, and Bertil Vilhelmson. “More at Home, More Alone? Youth, Digital Media and the Everyday Use of Time and Space.” Geoforum 100 (Mar. 2019): 41–50. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.02.010>. Tóth-Király, István, Alexandre J.S. Morin, Lauri Hietajärvi, and Katariina Salmela‐Aro. “Longitudinal Trajectories, Social and Individual Antecedents, and Outcomes of Problematic Internet Use among Late Adolescents.” Child Development 92.4 (2021): e653–73. <https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13525>. Traveltalk. “The Rise of Digital Detox Holidays and Tech-Free Tourism.” Traveltalk, 2018. <https://www.traveltalkmag.com.au/blog/articles/the-rise-of-digital-detox-holidays-and-tech-free-tourism>. Tsaliki, Liza, and Despina Chronaki. Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures. 1st ed. Springer International Publishing, 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46436-3>. Twenge, Jean M. iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us. Simon and Schuster, 2017. Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. “Media Use Is Linked to Lower Psychological Well-Being: Evidence from Three Datasets.” The Psychiatric Quarterly 90.2 (2019): 311-331. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-019-09630-7>. UNCRC. "General Comment No. 25 (2021) on Children's Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment." United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2 Mar. 2021. <https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation>. Vuorre, Matti, Amy Orben, and Andrew K. Przybylski. “There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased.” Clinical Psychological Science 9.5 (Sep. 2021): 823–35. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702621994549>. Zaman, Bieke, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, Kelly Jaunzems, and Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe. “Opposing Narratives about Children’s Digital Media Use: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online Public Advice Given to Parents in Australia and Belgium:” Media International Australia (May 2020). <https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X20916950>.

Introduction The public sphere includes a range of credible discourses asserting that a proportion of teenagers (“teens”) has an unhealthy dependence upon continuous connection with media devices, and especially smartphones. A review of media discourse (Jaunzems et al.) in Australia, and a critical review of public discourse in Australia and Belgium (Zaman et al.), reveal both positive and negative commentary around screentime. Despite the “emotionally laden, opposing views” expressed in the media, there appears to be a groundswell of concern around young people’s dependence upon digital devices (Zaman et al. 120). Concerns about ‘addiction’ to and dependency on digital media first emerged with the Internet and have been continually represented as technology evolves. One recent example is the 2020 multi-part Massey Lecture series which hooked audiences with the provocative title: “we need to reclaim our lives from our phones” (Deibert). In Sydney, a psychology-based “outpatient addiction treatment centre” offers specialised recovery programs for “Internet addiction”, noting that addicts include school-aged teens, as well as adults (Cabin). Such discourse reflects well-established social anxieties around the disruptive impacts of new technologies upon society (Marvin), while focussing such concern disproportionately upon the lives, priorities, and activities of young people (Tsaliki and Chronaki). While a growing peer-reviewed evidence base suggests some young people have problematic relationships with digital media (e.g. Odgers and Robb; Donald et al.; Gaspard; Tóth-Király et al.; Boer et al.), there are also opposing views (e.g. Vuorre et al.) Ben Light, for instance, highlights the notion of disconnection as a set of practices that include using some platforms and not others, unfriending, and selective anonymity (Light). We argue that this version of disconnection and what we refer to as ‘detox’ are two different practices. Detox, as we use it, is the regular removal of elements of lived experience (such as food consumption) that may be enjoyable but which potentially have negative consequences over time, before (potentially) reintroducing the element or pratice. The aims of a detox include ensuring greater control over the enjoyable experience while, at the same time, reducing exposure to possible harm. There is a lack of specific research that unequivocally asserts young people’s unhealthy dependence upon smartphones. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing public belief in the efficacy of “the detox” (Beyond Blue) or “unplugging” (Shlain). We argue that a teen’s commitment to regular smartphone abstinence is non-fungible with ‘as and when’ smartphone use. In other words, there is a significant, ineluctable and non-trivial difference between the practice of regularly disconnecting from a smartphone at a certain point of the day, or for a specified period in the week, compared with the same amount of time ‘off’ the device which is a haphazard, as and when, doing something else, type of practice. We posit that recurrent periods of smartphone abstinence, equating to a regular detox, might support more balanced, healthy and empowered smartphone use. Repeated abstinence in this case differs from the notion of the disconnected holiday, where a person might engage in irregular smartphone withdrawal during an annual holiday, for example (Traveltalk; Hoving; Stäheli and Stoltenberg). Such abstinence does have widespread historical and cultural resonance, however, as in the fasting practices of Islam (the month of Ramadan), the Christian season of Lent, and the holy Hindu month of Śravaṇa. Where prolonged periods of fasting are supplemented by weekly or holy-day fasts, they may be reprised with a regularity that brings the practice closer to the scheduled pattern of abstinence that we see as non-fungible with an unstructured as-and-when approach. An extreme example of the long fast and intermittent fast days is offered by the traditional practices of the Greek Orthodox church, whose teachings recommend fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as on religious holy days. With the inclusion of Lent, Greek Orthodox fasting practices can comprise 180 fast days per year: that’s about half of available days. As yet, there is no coherent evidence base supporting the benefits of regular intermittent disconnection. The Australian mental health Website Beyond Blue, which asserts the value of digital detox, cannot find a stronger authority to underpin a practice of withdrawal than “Research from Deloitte’s annual Mobile Consumer Survey report” which indicates that “44 per cent of people in Australia think their phone use is a problem and are trying to reduce how much time they spend on it” (Beyond Blue). Academic literature that addresses these areas by drawing on more than personal experience and anecdote is scarce to non-existent. Insofar as such studies exist over the past decade, from Maushart to Leonowicz-Bukała et al., they are irregular experiments which do not commit to repeated periods of disconnection. This article is a call to investigate the possibly non-fungible benefits of teens’ regularly practicing smartphone disconnection. It argues that there is actual evidence which is yet to be collected. New knowledge in this area may provide a compelling dataset that suggests verifiable benefits for the non-fungible practice of regular smartphone disconnection. We believe that there are teenagers, parents and communities willing to trial appropriate interventions over a significant period of time to establish ‘before’ and ‘after’ case studies. The evidence for these opinions is laid out in the sections that follow. Teens’ Experiences of Media, Smartphone, and Other Cultural Dis/connection In 2018, the Pew Research Center in the US surveyed teens about their experiences of social media, updating elements of an earlier study from 2014-15. They found that almost all (95%) the 743 teens in the study, aged between 13 and 17 when they were surveyed in March-April 2018, had or had access to a smartphone (Anderson and Jiang). A more recent report from 2021 notes that 88% of US teenagers, aged 13-18, have their own smartphone (Common Sense Media 22). What is more, this media use survey indicates that American teens have increased their screen entertainment time from 7 hours, 22 minutes per day in 2019 to 8 hours, 39 minutes per day in 2021 (Common Sense Media 3). Lee argues that, on average, mobile phone users in Australia touch their phones 2,617 times a day. In Sweden, a 2019 study of youth aged 15-24 noted a pervasive concern regarding the logical assumption “that offline time is influenced and adapted when people spend an increasing amount of time online” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 41). These authors critique the overarching theory of young people comprising a homogenous group of ‘digital natives’ by identifying different categories of light, medium, and heavy users of ICT. They say that the “variation in use is large, indicating that responses to ubiquitous ICT access are highly diverse rather than homogenously determined” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 48). The practice or otherwise of regular periods of smartphone disconnection is a further potential differentiator of teens’ digital experiences. Any investigation into these areas of difference should help indicate ways in which teens may or may not achieve comparatively more or less control over their smartphone use. Lee argues that in Australia “teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices have a 71% higher risk factor for suicide”. Twenge and Campbell (311) used “three large surveys of adolescents in two countries (n = 221,096)” to explore differences between ‘light users’ of digital media (<1 hour per day) and ‘heavy users’ (5+ hours per day). They use their data to argue that “heavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts” (Twenge and Campbell 311). Notably, Livingstone among others argues that emotive assertions such as these tend to ignore the nuance of significant bodies of research (Livingstone, about Twenge). Even so, it is plausible that teens’ online activities interpolate both positively and negatively upon their offline activities. The capacity to disconnect, however, to disengage from smartphone use at will, potentially allows a teen more opportunity for individual choice impacting both positive and negative experiences. As boyd argued in 2014: “it’s complicated”. The Pew findings from 2018 indicate that teens’ positive comments about social media use include: 81% “feel more connected to their friends”; 69% “think it helps [them] interact with a more diverse group of people”; and 68% “feel as if they have people who will support them through tough times.” (Anderson and Jiang) The most numerous negative comments address how of all teens: 45% “feel overwhelmed by all the drama there”; 43% “feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others”; and 37% “feel pressure to post content that will get a lot of likes and comments.” (Anderson and Jiang) It is notable that these three latter points relate to teens’ vulnerabilities around others’ opinions of themselves and the associated rollercoaster of emotions these opinions may cause. They resonate with Ciarrochi et al.’s argument that different kinds of Internet activity impact different issues of control, with more social forms of digital media associated with young females’ higher “compulsive internet use […] and worse mental health than males” (276). What is not known, because it has never been investigated, is whether any benefits flowing from regular smartphone disconnection might have a gendered dimension. If there is specific value in a capacity to disconnect regularly, separating that experience from haphazard episodes of connection and disconnection, regular disconnection may also enhance the quality of smartphone engagement. Potentially, the power to turn off their smartphone when the going got tough might allow young people to feel greater control over their media use while being less susceptible to the drama and compulsion of digital engagement. As one 17-year-old told the Pew researchers, possibly ruefully, “[teens] would rather go scrolling on their phones instead of doing their homework, and it’s so easy to do so. It’s just a huge distraction” (Anderson and Jiang). Few cultural contexts support teens’ regular and repeated disengagement from smartphones, but Icelandic society, Orthodox Judaism and the comparatively common practice of overnight disconnection from smartphone use may offer helpful indications of possible benefits. Cross-Cultural and Religious Interventions in Smartphone Use Concern around teens’ smartphone use, as described above, is typically applied to young people whose smartphone use constitutes an integral part of everyday life. The untangling of such interconnection would benefit from being both comparative and experimental. Our suggestions follow. Iceland has, in the past, adopted what Karlsson and Broddason term “a paternalistic cultural conservatism” (1). Legislators concerned about the social impacts of television deferred the introduction of Icelandic broadcasting for many years, beyond the time that most other European nations offered television services. Program offerings were expanded in a gradual way after the 1966 beginnings of Iceland’s public television broadcasting. As Karlsson and Broddason note, “initially the transmission hours were limited to only a few hours in the evening, three days a week and a television-free month in July. The number of transmission days was increased to six within a few years, still with a television-free month in July until 1983 and television-free Thursdays until 1987” (6). Interestingly, the nation is still open to social experimentation on a grand scale. In the 1990s, for example, in response to significant substance abuse by Icelandic teens, the country implemented an interventionist whole-of-Iceland public health program: the Icelandic Prevention Model (Kristjansson et al.). Social experimentation on a smaller scale remains part of the Icelandic cultural fabric. More recently, between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran a successful social experiment whereby 1% of the working population worked a shorter work week for full time pay. The test was deemed successful because “workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being” (Lau and Sigurdardottir). A number of self-governing Icelandic villages operate a particularly inclusive form of consultative local democracy enabling widespread buy-in for social experiments. Two or more such communities are likely to be interested in trialling an intervention study if there is a plausible reason to believe that the intervention may make a positive difference to teens’ (and others’) experiences of smartphone use. Those plausible reasons might be indicated by observational data from other people’s everyday practices. One comparatively common everyday practice which has yet to be systematically investigated from the perspective of evaluating the possible impacts of regular disconnection is that practiced by families who leave connected media outside the bedroom at night-time. These families are in the habit of putting their phones on to charge, usually in a shared space such as a kitchen or lounge room, and not referring to them again until a key point in the morning: when they are dressed, for example, or ready to leave the house. It is plausible to believe that such families might feel they have greater control over smartphone use than a family who didn’t adopt a regular practice of smartphone disconnection. According to social researchers in the Nordic nations, including co-authors Kjartan Ólafsson and Elisabeth Staksrud, it is likely that an Icelandic community will be keen to trial this experience of regular smartphone disconnection for a period of six months or more, if that trial went hand in hand with a rigorous evaluation of impact. Some religious communities offer a less common exemplar for teens’ regular disconnection from their smartphone. Young people in these communities may suspend their smartphone (and other media use) for just over a full day per week to focus on deepening their engagement with family and friends, and to support their spiritual development. Notable among such examples are teenagers who identify as members of the Orthodox Jewish faith. Their religious practices include withdrawing from technological engagement as part of the observance of Shabbat (the Sabbath): at least, that’s the theory. For the past ten years or so in Australia there has been a growing concern over some otherwise-Orthodox Jewish teens’ practice of the “half-Shabbat,” in which an estimated 17-50% of this cohort secretly use digital media for some time during their 25 hours of mandated abstinence. As one teacher from an Orthodox high school argues, “to not have access to the phone, it’s like choking off their air” (Telushikin). Interestingly, many Jewish teens who privately admit practicing half-Shabbat envision themselves as moving towards full observance in adulthood: they can see benefits in a wholehearted commitment to disengagement, even if it’s hard to disengage fully at this point in their lives. Hadlington et al.’s article “I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]” similarly evokes a broader community crisis around children’s dependence on digital media, noting that many children aged 8-12 have a tablet of their own before moving onto smartphone ownership in their teens (Common Sense Media 22). We appreciate that not every society has children and young people who are highly networked and integrated within digital dataflows. Nonetheless, while constant smartphone connectivity might appear to be a ‘first world problem’, preparing teens to be adults with optimal choice over their smartphone use includes identifying and promoting support for conscious disengagement from media as and when a young person wishes. Such a perspective aligns with promoting young people’s rights in digital contexts by interrogating the possible benefits of regularly disconnecting from digital media. Those putative benefits may be indicated by investigating perspectives around smartphone use held by Orthodox Jewish teenagers and comparing them with those held by teens who follow a liberal Jewish faith: liberal Jewish teens use smartphones in ways that resonate with broader community teens. A comparison of these two groups, suggests co-author Lynne Cohen, may indicate differences that can (in part) be attributed to Orthodox Jewish practices of digital disconnection, compared with liberal Jewish practices that don’t include disconnection. If smartphone disconnection has the potential to offer non-fungible benefits, it is incumbent upon researchers to investigate the possible advantages and drawbacks of such practices. That can be done through the comparative investigation of current practice as outlined above, and via an experimental intervention for approximately six months with a second Icelandic/Nordic community. The Potential Value of Investigating the (Non-)Fungibility of Digital Engagement and Digital Inactivity The overarching hypothesis addressed in this article is that a lived experience of regular smartphone disconnection may offer teenagers the opportunity to feel more in control of their personal technologies. Such a perspective aligns with many established media theories. These theories include the domestication of technology and its integration into daily life, helping to explain the struggle teens experience in detaching from digital media once they have become a fundamental element of their routine. Domestication theory asserts that technology moves from novelty to an integral aspect of everyday experience (Berker et al.). Displacement theory asserts that young people whose lives are replete with digital media may have substituted that media use for other activities enjoyed by the generations that grew up before them, while boyd offers an alternative suggestion that digital media add to, rather than displace, teens’ activities in daily contexts. Borrowing inputs from other disciplinary traditions, theories around mindfulness are increasingly robust and evidence-based, asserting that “attentiveness to what is present appears to yield corrective and curative benefits in its own right” (Brown et al. 1). Constant attention to digital media may be a distraction from mindful engagement with the lived environment. A detailed study of the non-fungible character of smartphone disconnection practices might offer an evidence base to support suggestions, such as those proffered by Beyond Blue, that a digital detox benefits mental health, resilience, and sociality. Such information might support initiatives by schools and other organisations central to the lives of teenagers to institute regular digital disconnection regimes, akin to Iceland’s experiments with television-free Thursdays. These innovations could build upon aligned social initiatives such as “no email Fridays” (Horng), which have been trialled in business contexts. Further, studies such as those outlined above could add authority to recommendations for parents, educators, and caregivers such as those recommendations contained in papers on the Common Sense Media site, for example, including Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health (Odgers and Robb) and Device-Free Dinners (Robb). Relevantly, the results from such observational and intervention studies would address the post-COVID era when parents and others will be considering how best to support a generation of children who went online earlier, and more often, than any generation before them. These results might also align with work towards early-stage adoption of the United Nations’ General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment (UNCRC). If so, an investigation into the fungibility or otherwise of digital abstention could contribute to the national and international debate about the rights of young people to make informed decisions around when to connect, and when to disconnect, from engagement via a smartphone. References Anderson, Monica, and Jingjing Jiang. "Teens’ Social Media Habits and Experiences." Pew Research Center 28 Nov. 2018. <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/28/teens-social-media-habits-and-experiences/>. Berker, Thomas, Maren Hartmann, and Yves Punie. Domestication of Media and Technology. McGraw-Hill Education, 2005. Beyond Blue. “The Benefits of a Digital Detox: Unplugging from Digital Technology Can Have Tremendous Benefits on Body and Mind.” Beyond Blue, n.d. <https://www.beyondblue.org.au/personal-best/pillar/wellbeing/the-benefits-of-a-digital-detox>. Boer, Maartje, Gonneke W.J.M. Stevens, Catrin Finkenauer, Margaretha E. de Looze, and Regina J.J.M. van den Eijnden. “Social Media Use Intensity, Social Media Use Problems, and Mental Health among Adolescents: Investigating Directionality and Mediating Processes.” Computers in Human Behavior 116 (Mar. 2021): 106645. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106645>. boyd, danah. It’s Complicated : The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press, 2014. <http://www.danah.org/books/ItsComplicated.pdf>. Brown, Kirk Warren, J. David Creswell, and Richard M. Ryan. “The Evolution of Mindfulness Science.” Handbook of Mindfulness : Theory, Research, and Practice, eds. Kirk Warren Brown et al. Guilford Press, 2016. Cabin, The. “Internet Addiction Treatment Center.” The Cabin, 2020. <https://www.thecabinsydney.com.au/internet-addiction-treatment/>. Ciarrochi, Joseph, Philip Parker, Baljinder Sahdra, Sarah Marshall, Chris Jackson, Andrew T. Gloster, and Patrick Heaven. “The Development of Compulsive Internet Use and Mental Health: A Four-Year Study of Adolescence.” Developmental Psychology 52.2 (2016): 272. Common Sense Media. "The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021". <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf>. Deibert, Ron. “Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society.” 2020 Massey Lectures. CBC Radio. 7 Feb. 2022 <https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/reset-reclaiming-the-internet-for-civil-society-1.5795345>. Donald, James N., Joseph Ciarrochi, and Baljinder K. Sahdra. "The Consequences of Compulsion: A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of Compulsive Internet Use and Emotion Regulation Difficulties." Emotion (2020). Gaspard, Luke. “Australian High School Students and Their Internet Use: Perceptions of Opportunities versus ‘Problematic Situations.’” Children Australia 45.1 (Mar. 2020): 54–63. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cha.2020.2>. Hadlington, Lee, Hannah White, and Sarah Curtis. "‘I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]’: Children's Experiences of Using Tablet Technology within the Home." Computers in Human Behavior 94 (2019): 19-24. Horng, Eric. “No-E-Mail Fridays Transform Office.” ABC News [US], 4 Aug. 2007. <https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2939232&page=1>. Hoving, Kristel. “Digital Detox Tourism: Why Disconnect? : What Are the Motives of Dutch Tourists to Undertake a Digital Detox Holiday?” Undefined, 2017. <https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Digital-Detox-Tourism%3A-Why-disconnect-%3A-What-are-of-Hoving/17503393a5f184ae0a5f9a2ed73cd44a624a9de8>. Jaunzems, Kelly, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Kylie Stevenson. “Very Young Children Online: Media Discourse and Parental Practice.” Digitising Early Childhood. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/7550>. Karlsson, Ragnar, and Thorbjörn Broddason. 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