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Purpose – This study examines perpetrators and their fans media participation for the purpose of investigating whether new media produce school shootings anew.

Method – We first analyze the narrative structure of eight school shooters’ 75 self-produced videos (1999–2011), then conduct thematic and content analysis of this material. Then, based upon a three-year ethnographic investigation of a subculture on YouTube (2007–2010), from which a sample of 81 users, 142 videos, and screenshots of natural conversation was taken, we analyze the style and ritual practices, fan attachment, and online regulation of the subculture.

Findings – The mirroring of the school shooters’ videos and their fans’ media practices highlights a trait of contemporary society: a need for distinction and intrinsic individuality directly linked to a modern era in which autonomy and self-production have become well-praised norms, and media a support for individuation.

Social implications – We observe some of the pitfalls of contemporary social injunctions and how the media interplay into this dynamic. This research also emphasizes the role of regulation in an online subculture: opposition encountered tends to contribute to the individualization of positions rather than the reproduction of violence.

Value of paper – This study provides a starting-point for future research in visual communication and online fan-based subcultures related to contemporary forms of violence.

The paper presents final results of a comparative research on young Brazilian collegians in the 18–24-year-old age bracket. The objective was to understand the interactions and ways in which they transit within the physical and digital Web spaces and, within their transits, set up “circulatory territories,” deepen and enrich their secondary socialization setups and sociability, as well as their processes of individuation within the historic condition in which youth lives.

The study is supported by conceptual contributions offered by the sociology of youth, circulatory territory, socialization, sociability, and individuation. Research was carried out with students of two different universities: a public/state one and a public/municipal/foundational one situated in different urban centers of the southeastern region of the country. Procedures were qualitative and quantitative – closed questions forms, interviews, registries in field notebooks, etc.

The results of the investigation demonstrate: (a) that the representatives of the two student collectives studied circulate in physical and digital territories, setting up circulatory territories; (b) there are also different youth lifestyles, either due to social positions and the fact that they possess social capital, or because of differences and inequalities referring to gender, race/ethnicity (whites and non-whites), living situations.

In this manner, the study indicates the importance of questioning the homogenized image of connected youth since some collegians’ lives are limited due to their condition as young workers, while others live their youth condition as a social moratorium, being able to produce other manners of being and of living in the world.

Previous literature demonstrated low-to-moderate rates of agreement between children and mothers regarding child anxiety. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate factors related to differences between mother-child dyads who disagreed vs agreed in their reports of child anxiety symptoms.

In total, 87 children aged 9-12 years old and their mothers completed questionnaires regarding maternal perceptions of child behavior, maternal separation anxiety about the child’s individuation, and mother-child relationship characteristics.

The results showed that mothers in mother-child dyads who disagreed on child anxiety symptoms, compared to those in dyads who agreed on child anxiety symptoms, perceived their children as showing higher affect intensity and behavioral problems. They also expressed greater anxiety about the children’s individuation process, characterized in part by children’s increased autonomy and decline of reliance on them. Further, children in dyads who disagreed, compared to those in dyads who agreed, reported lower mother-child attachment security.

The results extend the literature by identifying specific factors related to the discrepancy between mothers’ and children’s reports of childhood anxiety in early adolescence. The results highlight the need to consider both mothers’ and children’s views when assessing childhood anxiety. Importantly, the results also indicate that specific factors investigated in this study, including maternal perception of children’s behavioral problems and their affect intensity, maternal anxiety about child individuation, and mother-child attachment security, could be used to inform clinical decisions regarding informant discrepancies.

This paper addresses the lack of conceptual and theoretical consensus around cyber-bullying and problems associated with over-reliance on mainstream criminological thinking to explain this phenomenon.

The paper offers a critical criminological perspective on cyber-bullying encouraging scholars to engage with fundamental complications associated with the relationship between late-modernity, neo-liberalism and cyber-bullying. It argues for an approach that contextualizes cyber-bullying within the realities and consequences of late-modernity and neo-liberalism.

The paper argues that a robust understanding of cyber-bullying entails contextualization of the problem in terms of the realities of consumption, individualism, youth identity formation and incivility in late modern society.

In addition to challenging extant theoretical approaches to cyber-bullying, the paper has important implications for intervention that surpass the limitations of law and order policies which tend to focus on criminalizing poorly understood bad behaviour or indicting internet technologies themselves.

This study’s purpose is to examine the relations between LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) youths’ Internet usage and their social capital. Previous research has shown that Internet use assists actors with similar background and interests in forming bonding social capital. Additionally, it has been found that Internet use can assist actors from dissimilar background in forming bridging social capital. This study aims at extending these findings to LGBT youth, who may especially benefit from having a supporting social network while coping with the challenges of forming their sexual orientation/gender identity. For this purpose, an Internet survey was launched, with 82 participants, who were users of forums in the Israeli Gay Youth organization website (IGY). The survey included three measures of Internet use (i.e., amount of time spent in Internet forums, content posting activity, and emotional investment in forums), and questionnaires estimating the degrees of bridging and bonding social capital. In general, we found a positive association between forum usage and social capital. Inasmuch as Internet forum use was more intensive, the reported social capital increased. Furthermore, our findings suggest that more passive forum usage may be sufficient for forming bridging social capital, whereas bonding social capital may necessitate more active usage. These findings suggest that Internet forums designated for LGBT adolescents are important resources that can help them to cope with the special challenges they face at this turning point for their identity, deem to decrease the risk of detrimental outcomes, such as depression or even suicide.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

Organizations have never addressed what it means to be global in its depth and entirety. It has been equated with being international, or having offices in different countries. It has been approached and appropriated through historical lenses of modernization, and of what sociologist Martin Albrow calls the “rational project”. It is felt that we have come to a situation that is nothing short of a crisis. Explores the depths of “global integrity” with a view to providing individuals, organizations and societies with the tools to engage in becoming global. In the process introduces our concept of the “four worlds,” and argues that each needs to be progressively transformed, from a local identity towards global integrity, if our current crisis is to be in any sense resolved. Such a resolution, moreover, requires, in each cultural case, tapping the core and bedrock as well as the subsoil and topsoil of each, as it were, with a view to evolving from a formative (local), as opposed to de‐formative, towards a normative, re‐formative and ultimately transformative (global) perspective.

This paper aims to investigate the extent of public participation of youth in strategic planning for local sustainable development, emphasising the establishment of a positive dialogue process between public administration and young people. Previous studies and international guidelines recognise youth as an essential group in the territorial sustainability process but also require a framework for processes and modalities for youth participation.

The analysis was carried out according to a multiple-case study approach conducted from the secondary sources (e.g. planning documents enabling sustainable development at the local level) developed by the 14 Italian metropolitan cities to assess the state-of-the-art and establish similarities and differences concerning the engagement levels found in the literature.

Although almost all the sample has undertaken a youth engagement process, this research demonstrates that only 6 out of 14 metropolitan cities - corresponding to 43% of the sample - have promoted highly engagement-intensive forms, underlining a total absence of a standardised and recursive approach in which the younger generation is consistently an integral part of sustainability strategies.

This research is innovative as it addresses practical and theoretical objectives simultaneously. The study underlines the adoption of engagement processes by metropolitan cities by considering the participatory methods implemented and providing a framework for enhancing forms of dialogue between young people and public authorities, contributing to the advancement of theoretical understanding and practical implementation.

Three distinct, and interrelated, events led to this article. All three actually happened to me. The first was when a young man whom I had known vaguely as a neighborhood kid approached the reference desk where I was working in August, 1974. He said, “Do you have a book on pregnancy? I'm getting married Saturday, and I want to make sure that she takes care of herself.”

This paper aims to describe an integration of the media naturalness theory, the continuum model of impression formation and the social identity model of deindividuation effects. The goal is to determine the compatibility of the central tenets and propositions of the two theories and reconcile their effects under a unified model that can be used to explain and predict changes in perceptions, attitudes and behaviors arising in computer-mediated interaction.

A review of the literature was used to determine whether the two theories were compatible. The reconciliation comes by way of a third theory, the motivated tactician theory, which focuses on the effects of cognitive effort on schema use, particularly on those schemas used in social categorization processes.

It was determined that the two models of focus could be combined via the tenets of the third. The combined model is expected to provide explanatory and predictive capabilities that exceed those of the individual theories and should prove to be relevant in the study of computed-supported collaboration, in the design of collaborative environments and in the analysis of individual and group behaviors in computer-mediated communication.

The current effort describes the main effects derived from the integration and offers four propositions that describe moderating factors that are derived from each of the three theories. The main effects must be tested and validated and, given support, must be extended to determine the validity of the moderating effects predicted by the propositions. Additionally, media naturalness theory is a relatively recent addition to theories of technology and so needs further empirical support for its propositions. As to the behavioral implications, the social identity model of deindividuation effects has yet to be tested with the specific intention of discovering how media characteristics affect self-concept.

The model can be used to inform information system designs that favor desirable behavioral outcomes or to prevent undesirable effects from occurring. For example, emphasis can place on media attributes and system features that individuate decision-makers within group decision support environments when consensus is a primary goal as a means to avoid group thinks and polarization. Conversely, attributes and features that are supportive of social categorization processes and deindividuation effects might be used to emphasize group membership, shared effort and to minimize social loafing or the frequency and intensity of inappropriate disparagement of ideas and contributions.

The combined model is principally useful in explaining and predicting human behavior in relation to computer-supported collaborative work such as distributed workgroups and online learning environments. For example, the explanatory elements of the combined theory can be used by managers as a diagnostic tool in problem situations within virtual teams. A specific instance would be to determine why a change to existing systems created a change in work habits. In a more proactive move, managers might use the predicted social categorization effects and subsequent depersonalization, to instill a group identity in an otherwise diverse workgroup.

The combined model is expected to provide explanatory and predictive capabilities that exceed those of the individual theories and should prove to be relevant in the study of computed-supported collaboration, in the design of collaborative environments and in the analysis of individual and group behaviors in computer-mediated communication.