Graduate Defense: Jessica Boyer

Thesis Information

Title: Qualitative Investigation Of The Digital Ecology Of Fear

Program: Master of Arts in Anthropology

Advisor: Dr. John Ziker, Anthropology

Committee Members: Dr. Jerry Fails, Computer Science and Dr. Kendall House, Anthropology

Abstract

The invisible ubiquity of computing technology in our lives is based on a tradeoff between convenience, reliability, and almost unlimited access to information, resources, and social networks which are made possible by unimaginably lucrative corporate interests. To date, the tech industry has successfully resisted growing calls for regulation, through a combination of obfuscation and as yet unrealized promises of self-governance. This thesis supports the argument that consumers of online digital products, especially children, are in need of protections, and that the development of such protections should consider anthropological approaches to our evolved cognitive and behavioral traits. This thesis is composed of two chapters, documenting two phases of research. I took a leading role in designing and executing the first phase, and the second was undertaken as an independent investigator. My research team conceptualizes these digital environments as an evolutionarily novel landscape in which parental caregivers must make decisions without traditional environmental knowledge, introducing a high degree of uncertainty into technology mediation strategies. Using semi-structured interviews of parents (n=20) of children in middle childhood (ages 6-12) and a dialogic method of synthesis, we found that parents lack effective strategies for navigating online environments and cannot conceptualize the technologies and corporate powers shaping the online worlds their children encounter. I propose a continuous two-dimensional framework which describes observed patterns of intersection between parental investment and parenting strategies. Less intelligible threats are rationalized, while tactics aimed at more proximally actionable threats are prioritized. Building on environmental tradeoffs and risk and uncertainty, the second half of this thesis documents my individual thesis research. I explore parents’ capacity to understand and locally shape the dangers and benefits of child technology use. I propose that parental mediation strategies can be better understood through an evolutionary lens, and lay the groundwork for future investigations using optimal foraging theory as a conceptual framework. The concept of threat intelligibility used here describes an actor’s ability to understand and act on threats, given incomplete environmental information and the presence of risk and uncertainty. While no significant relationship was found between the saliency of specific threats and their (subjectively coded) intelligibility, this study found qualitative evidence that when information costs are too high, investing in mitigation of unintelligible threats is no longer favorable. This chapter also offers a cognitive map of the tradeoffs present in the digital ecology of fear which suggests that extrinsic threats are less highly prioritized than intrinsic threats.