ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4 we contribute to knowledge about teens interpretations of parental and school-based mediation. Our focus groups reveal concerns related to privacy and mediation of online activities from parents and teachers. We delineate between “monitoring,” which is often accepted (sometimes begrudgingly) by teens as justified based on parental concerns for their safety online, and “surveillance,” which is perceived as more coercive and often performed without consent. While teens evidence active resistance to surveillance, especially in relation to parental surveillance, it is often tempered most directly in relation to school-based surveillance. Participant acquiescence to surveillance reflects a wider context of panoptic hegemony, referring not only to the omnipresence of surveillance technologies, but the wider expectation of their deterrent efficacy and embedding within society as “the way things are,” so as to stymie critical responses of the current system. We show how the internalization of this argument – in effect neutralizing the impetus for resistance – is facilitated through an attitude that youth have “nothing to hide” online, and “don’t do anything wrong.”
