The Intoxicating Camera

It's coming to your campus.

I'm Shmacked, founded by Arya Toufanian and Jeffrey Ray, two twenty-something aspiring filmmakers, turns college campuses into music videos, although perhaps not in the way administrators or parents might hope. In between jump cuts to students crowd surfing and shaky cam shots of students grinding on the dance floor, the videos might showcase a few noticeable campus buildings or cheering crowds at sports games. Academics and classrooms, of course, are noticeably absent. (Though the founders claim they'd like to show them too.) 

They insist they're merely there to document the college scene and to help prospective students learn about colleges by showcasing the social life. According to Toufanian, “Kids don’t want to read anymore...Seeing a video is a much more fun way to learn about a school.”

Of course their motto is "I'm Shmacked: It's a movement," which makes it sound less like a documentary project and more like...well, a movement.

The problem is the filmmakers host the parties they claim to document. Indeed, the very name I'm Shmacked suggests their focus. It's not something you say after a hard test. It's something you say after a few shots of hard liquor. At the bottom of their videos, the company claims that "no alcohol or illegal substance is used during filming, just props." Perhaps the camera itself acts as a kind of intoxicant.

Indeed, students eagerly perform for the camera. The camera is not an objective lens onto campus life, but an invitation to perform. Much as alcohol can be used as a kind of permission slip to misbehave, so can the camera and the thrill of being on screen. Perhaps students are compelled by some strange sense of school spirit that measures a university's success in cups of beer. One of the parties, held at University of Delaware, devolved into what police described as a near riot.

Co-founder Arya Toufanian admitted as much in an interview, saying, “I have cameras and a budget now, and a bunch of college kids who will do anything to be on camera.".

Indeed, USA Today quotes one student who claims that I'm Shmacked gives students the ability to "express themselves" differently.

Other students are sensitive to the ways video and social media coax students into performing: "I'm worried that filming it will just exacerbate (students') dangerous behavior so they look 'cooler' on camera," said one student in the same USA Today news report.

Students are also divided on how appearing in one of these videos might affect their professional lives. One student thought it unlikely that he could be identified in the video:  "If my future employers were to watch the video," he said, "I doubt the likelihood of them recognizing me."

Meanwhile, another student told the New York Times, “To do this on a video that can go viral, you must have a train-wreck mentality.”

At the same time, we can't completely discount the co-founders claim. I'm Shmacked does document something, though it may not be an entirely accurate reflection of campus life. It seems to open a view onto students'  attitudes regarding campus partying and their motives to party in the first place.

I'm Shmacked offers students a chance to be seen and to "represent" their school. It's perhaps no coincidence that the videos often include shots of sporting events and/or shots of campus gear. The parties themselves are a kind of performance and competition. In several of the videos students proclaim their school is the "best." Undoubtedly a sense of competition fuels students to act crazier.

But then again, maybe we shouldn't get so worked up. Much of the actual footage is rather tame. Students screaming, dancing, or crowd surfing are pretty typical. A lot of the motion and action is in the editing.

Perhaps, then, I'm Shmacked offers campuses a way into a more nuanced discussion with their students about why they party. Why is this the story so many students seem to want tell about college? And if partying is about letting loose and forgetting yourself, why would anyone perform or show off for a camera?

In fact, I'm Shmacked has itself tried to open conversations on campus by adding short interviews with students about topics like "one night stands or relationships" or "drunk versus sober."

We don't have answers, but your students might. 

Sextortion, Tweets, and other Dangers of Social Media

This past fall, the FBI arrested 19-year-old Jared James Abrahams, a computer-science student in Southern California, for "sextortion."

Abrahams had infected young women's computers with malware that allowed him to control their webcams and collect compromising pictures of them. He then blackmailed his victims by threatening to go public with the images unless they sent him nude pictures or videos, or did his bidding for five minutes on Skype.

According to newspaper reports, one of his victims pled with him to stop. "Please remember I'm only 17. Have a heart," she wrote. He replied, "I'll tell you this right now! I do NOT have a heart!!!"

Abrahams threatened one young woman by telling her that her "dream of being a model will be transformed into a pornstar."

In November, he plead guilty to extortion and unauthorized access of a computer and now faces up to 11 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

Nor is Abrahams the first sextortion case. In March 2010, another young man, Luis Mijangos, was arrested for similar crimes. After searching his four laptops, the FBI found "15,000 webcam-video captures, 900 audio recording, and 13,000 screen captures" gathered from more than 230 victims, according to GQ magazine.

Meanwhile, as the Abrahams case was unfolding, on a Boston College Confessions Facebook page, where students post anonymous messages about their college experience, a student confessed to raping three women.

In the post, according to the Boston Globe, the student admitted to raping three young women while they were drunk and incapacitated. "On the one hand," he wrote, "I know that I need to get help, but on the other hand, I can't help but be driven to do it again."

After the post caused an uproar, the student who posted it turned himself into the Boston College police, claiming it was a hoax. The student was referred to the student conduct system.

These are admittedly sensational cases. But they illustrate the bewildering and potentially dangerous problems social media can present for college students. We've already written about social media and sexual assault, but cases like those described above make it clear that there are other dangers as well.

In their 2010 annual Campus Computing Survey, the Campus Computing Project found that roughly a sixth of participating campuses reported an incident (such as cyberstalking) related to "student activity on social networking sites." Over a quarter of public universities reported incidents related to social networking sites, almost double what had been reported in 2009.

As we enter a new year, it seems clear that the number of such incidents will continue to rise as more and more students arrive on campus thoroughly engaged with social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. According to the Pew Research Center's "Pew Internet and American Life Project," 72% of adults online use social networking sites. For young adults, the numbers are even higher: 89% of 18-29 year old internet users use social networking sites. 30% of 18-29 year old internet users tweet.

Interim Measures

Students already have a variety of advice columns, classes, and programs they can take to learn or even major in social media. But in response to the prevalence of social media use, some scholars and administrators want to go further by adding courses on digital identity to the core curriculum.

Writing for InsideHigherEd, Eric Stoller speculated,

Digital identity may be the next addition to 'the core'. The manner in which we engage, share, promote, and present ourselves online has become a major facet in many of our lives. No longer seen as being separate from 'real life', an individual’s digital identity is intricately connected to their overall identity... It’s no longer optional for institutions (and their administrators) to passively engage students via social media. Actively creating learning spaces that foster positive development of digital identity should be our mandate.

Interestingly, one place to look for guidance might be college athletics. Because of the high profile and role student athletes perform as representatives of their schools, their social media use has come under particularly intense scrutiny.

Last year, star Texas A&M quarterback and Heisman winner, Johnny Manziel ("Johnny Football") announced he was leaving Twitter. Manziel had over 330,000 followers on Twitter at the time. He was leaving because his tweets and social media posts had caused too much controversy. "It's fun to have," Manziel told ESPN, "but it can get to be distracting."

The self-imposed ban didn't last. The young star now has over half-a-million followers.
   
Some schools actively train athletes on how to use social media effectively. Recognizing that a ban on social media is unrealistic, programs encourage students to use social media more self-reflectively by asking them to set goals for social media use and then sticking to them.

In a blog post on athletes and social media, Kevin DeShazo of Fieldhouse Media, a firm that helps student-athletes and coaches manage social media, poses two essential questions for athletes to ask themselves: "Who am I? What do I want to be known for?"

DeShazo elaborates:

We all have different goals and reasons for using social media. Regardless of why you use the platforms, the answer[s] to those two questions are still important. While the answers may change over time, as we grow and mature and goals change, they are still questions that must be answered today. They impact not only what you share online but who you interact with, who you friend/follow, your bio, profile pictures, usernames, etc. Every action and interaction impacts your identity and your reputation.

In a world where social media is becoming a crucial aspect of many students' identities, not just those caught in the public eye of NCAA sports, that's good advice for any young student.

Social Media and Sexual Assault

Audrie Pott's sexual assault was just the beginning of her nightmare.  On Sunday night of Labor Day Weekend, Audrie passed out drunk at a friend's house.  Three male classmates took her to an upstairs bedroom, where they stripped her down to her underwear, drew on her naked body in green marker, and sexually assaulted her.  They also took pictures.  Audrie spent the next eight days frantically trying to find out how far those pictures had spread, and enduring the abuse of classmates who had already seen them.  Then she hung herself.

Sadly, this narrative of the tragic results of the combination of sexual assault, bullying, and social media is by now a familiar one. 17-year-old Rehtae Parsons hung herself after a year of bullying prompted by the distribution of photos showing her rape. The nationally infamous rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, in which two high school football players were convicted of sexually assaulting a sixteen-year-old girl, featured similar bullying and documentation of the assault on social media. Two thirteen-year-old girls were called "whores" on Twitter after a pair of eighteen-year-old football players were arrested for statutory rape.

In an age when everything that's newsworthy, and plenty that's not, is Tweeted, Facebooked, or Instagrammed, it may come as no surprise that social media has invaded even this particularly ugly aspect of our lives. However, sexual violence activist and expert Dr. Rebecca Campbell, whose research we've written about in the past, suggests that the relationship between sexual assault and social media may be deeper and more disturbing. "Sexual assault is a crime of power and dominance," she says. "By distributing images of the rape through social media, it's a way of asserting dominance and power to hurt the victim over and over again."

Of course, as the cases described above demonstrate, the continued trauma endured by sexual assault victims through social media isn't perpetrated solely by their attackers. Any number of their peers share photos and videos or use social media as a platform from which to bully victims, often for having reported the assault. In this way, social media discourages victims from reporting these crimes by facilitating a reaction to assault comparable to the secondary victimization suffered at the hands of law enforcement that we've previously written about. Such bullying seems to be both a symptom of and a contributing factor to a society that blames victims for their sexual assaults.

Yet the very photos and videos whose dissemination can torture victims of sexual assault can also lead to convictions for their assailants. Indeed, visual images like these can be essential to securing a criminal conviction in cases of sexual assault, where muddled recollections and conflicting accounts can make it very difficult to prove a perpetrator's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Moreover, some of the very aspects of social media that make it such a virulent breeding ground for bullying also make it the ideal platform for survivors to find communities where they can share their stories and receive much-needed support.  The anonymity of such spaces makes it possible for survivors not yet ready to reveal their experiences to friends and family to share their stories, allowing them to spread awareness and, in some cases, help the healing process.

Perhaps its most important aspect though is the potential role social media plays to prevent assaults in the first place by changing the culture that tolerates and indeed encourages such behavior. In an article for the Fordham Observer, Alissa Fajek argues that the outrage over cases like Steubenville, often fostered and spread via social media, can help to spread awareness and begin to change that toxic culture.

Clearly, the story of social media and sexual assault is more complicated than social media simply being used as a platform to fight sexual assault or as an extension of the crime itself. Because, like any other tool, the person using it must decide whether social media is used to hurt or to heal. Educating students about the enormous impact their decisions have on the survivors of sexual assault suggests the importance of harm-prevention training. The more students know about social media's effect on sexual assault victims — the damage it can cause or, alternatively, its power to solve the problem of sexual assault — the better equipped they'll be to use social media in way that heals instead of hurts.