Fauxgazi Faux Jour

I never saw Fugazi live. My fandom came late to the band. I found them only after I was involved in my first real band in the late 90s. But, then, I loved them hard. My bandmate friends and I listened to them often. We played them on any rare jukeboxes we were able to locate them on. We even considered a cover of Suggestion, a wonderful song that deserves covering.

Tonight, more than 10 years after they disbanded, my partner and I attended our first live showing of Fugazi songs. He has seen Fugazi a few times, and, while we both adore the band, we were on the fence whether we should walk the few blocks up to see this touring band covering Fugazi songs: Fauxgazi.

We decide to go. Being old, it turned out that we arrived early by showing up at the show time. We moved down the street to our local bar for a couple drinks, and returned back in time to see Fauxgazi setting up (yes: someone resembled Ian, and someone else resembled Guy).

20-some others were in the bar as we settled in. About 12 of those of were in or with the opening band we sadly somehow missed on our hiatus. Among these was a very demonstrative couple: a floppy-haired tall dude who we learned was the drummer, and a clearly chemically impaired (but very upbeat) highly fem woman in high heeled boots, ripped tights, and lots of makeup painting her Debbie Harry-esque face. She could have been easily mistaken for me from a rough description of hair length, build, and coloring. They were hard to not notice before the show started. They circled the room, sitting in various booths, then moving on to another after yelling at each other. She stumbled and spun, and smiled. The two of them made out on the open floor in front of the stage, her knees buckling as he held her tight around the waist and reached up her short black skirt. Her eyes were glazed long before and long after these kisses.

“Ian” from the band came over to kindly introduce himself, and to let us know that the microphone set up on the floor was for anyone to use. We asked “Ian” how the tour was going, and talked about appreciating both that they were in town, and the guitarist’s Hiwatt amp. "Ian" was lovely, and happy to share what he knew. The tour was short, but going well. He let us know that the band members were all in different touring bands, but they aligned around love for Fugazi. Also, he said that Ian MacKaye even gave his blessing to Fauxgazi when they received high praise for performing Repeater at a Halloween show last year and contacted him to ask if he would not disprove of them going on the road to play Fugazi songs. The amp was the guitarist’s, with a “special story” attached to it that we never learned.

The show started, and Fauxgazi played Fugazi. They sounded great. Throughout the set, though, the stumbly woman made her presence known on the dance floor. She danced. She took to the mic. She clung to her headbanging not-drunk boyfriend, who moved her around to the front of him, holding her around the waist as he flailed her about. She laughed during this, collapsing to the floor when the songs ended and he released his grip. Once after this, her boyfriend put his foot on her slowly rising buttocks and pushed her forward as she tried to stand, causing her to crumple to the cement face first. She stood up after this, patted her hair, looked around, and quickly ran to her boyfriend’s side, oblivious. Her head nodded downward as she kissed him ardently. She moved to the front of the audience to shimmy around the mic stand before dancing back to hold on to her boyfriend, and to have him slam her around again.

At one point, "Ian," the bassist, jumped off the stage to play on the floor. After having his head rubbed insistently by the dancing woman, he backed up to another female in the crowd. Over his shoulder, he called to her, and instructed her on how to reach around his arm and play the bass line. On his prodding, she offered her left hand to the neck, and followed his lead. Quickly, she was playing his part. Pretty great. He cheered her on as the dancing woman was, again, back in her boyfriend’s arms. He whipped her limp head side to side, her tight black shirt pulled up to bare more of her midriff, her feet at times off the floor. She weaved her way back to the open mic, purring slurred complements to the band as she writhed clumsily about the stand. A tentative (but directed) stripper joke was given from the stage. The drummer, clearly frustrated with the woman, took to his mic to ask her name. His brewing anger and wit were diffused by others’ intentional decision to start a new song. A couple of the few audience members in the club (male) gave the woman the stern stink eye as she clung to her boyfriend in the pit. The room had found her deserving of derision, and had corroborated this from many points.

I had moved back from the dance floor a few times at this point. What the fuck? Where was security? What was protocol here? Why is this couple not getting booted? What the fuck? My partner attended a metal show at this club last night, but this was my first time seeing a show here. I didn’t know the culture. I didn’t want to offend the culture. I also didn’t want to keep having to watching this, or to have this continue. I get roughness and consent. I also get drunk fun. But this woman was clearly far too impaired to give consent. And she was being treated super roughly by the person who she went to for safety, to the point that he was flailing her about and kicking her to the ground when she was trying to stand. As a result, she was now being treated disrespectfully by others.

I didn’t go to Fugazi shows (and many other punk or metal shows in Chicago) when I was younger, in part, because I worried for how women would be treated. Mind you, I know Fugazi looked out for their audiences. It was one of the reasons I loved them. But still.

It should be noted that I was no shrinking violet. I played guitar for a punk band. I attended all of the rock and punk shows I could find in my small college town, and I had a small crew of friends that I knew I would go to the mat for at a moment’s notice if they were being messed with (and a wider group of associates who I would have done the same for). But it was different with some of the bigger bands I loved. I knew mosh pits and meathead dudes, and I knew that, for many shows, they were mainstays. Even if you tried to stay far to the side or to the back, out of the pit, odds were that some guy would decide to enlarge his (it was always “his”) highly self-involved path around the room to smash into me (I’m looking at you, Valient Thorr douche at Reggie’s last December). I would always push back if I could, of course. Unincited, I once shoulder-checked Jello Biafria at a show (it was Jello Biafra). Roughhousing is part of this scene. But still. Consent matters here. If there's not consent, roughhousing is aggression. And consent is not implied by entering the space where some choose to roughhouse.

I never wanted to pay to be in a space where I was not able to just focus on the action. I never wanted to pay to be in a space where those who were able to focus on the action were able to impose roughhousing on others, to treat others with self-centered dickishness. And, overall, I never wanted to be in a space where aggression against any group, against anyone, was normalized. These things were common in some of these show spaces. Not all, but some. And I didn’t want to be part of it.

So I often didn’t go.

Years ago, in GirlZone's final GrrrlFest shows and from time to time in playing with The Violents, we enforced female-only mosh pits. We called out audience members (read: males) from the stage who harassed or interfered with others' (read: females') ability to have a good time. We acknowledged some of the misogynistic norms held by audiences at live shows, and we made a point to disrupt them whenever we could.

Tonight, in a room with eight real audience members, this did not happen. Instead, a super drunk and messed up woman was being thrown around the floor by her partner and insulted by others, and nobody did anything but continue to pile it on her. She was sloppy, condoning, and overtly sexual, so the insults and aggression she received were brushed away perhaps even more quickly deemed justified.

I told the bartender I was very concerned about her. “Yeah,” she said. “She was on something. Then she had two Long Islands – one from the other bar. Now she’s totally messed up.” I asked if the bar could do something, since she was clearly being thrown around and seemed unconcerned but highly impaired. “We’ve cut her off.” Shortly after, a security guard who bonded with me earlier over lyrics asked if I was ok after I stepped back from the audience. I said I wasn’t, as I didn’t like seeing how this woman was being treated. The security guard let me know she was ok because with her drummer boyfriend. “I see she’s with him and that she doesn’t seem to mind it,” I said, “But she’s too messed up to give consent. He needs to stop doing this to her.”  Bad relationships are bad relationships. Ideally they don't happen at all, but I said that I would hope that someone would intervene to not condone this treatment in public. He talked to the drummer. Shortly after, the woman laid down on the floor. She unzipped her boots and pushed herself to the edge of the room, throwing the boots into a booth one by one. She stood up quickly and circled the room, then slumped over into a chair. Her boyfriend appeared next to her a while later. Soon after, she was gone.

Her boyfriend reappeared about 10 minutes later to listen to the band.

I spoke to the Fauxgazi drummer after the show. After our discussion, he agreed that it was best that he didn’t call out the woman by name. Still, I am having a hard time processing the following things: the boyfriends’ aggressive treatment of the woman. The ability of everyone in the room to dismiss the aggressive treatment against the woman because she was with a boyfriend. The ability of everyone in the room to dismiss the aggressive treatment because the woman was sloppy drunk. The privilege of the opening band's dick drummer in being allow to treat another person violently with that much impunity – to be able to treat a woman violently with that much impunity. The fact that, in the end, social scorn and ridicule was directed only toward this woman. By the end of the night, this woman who was repeatedly being thrown around was made fun of from the stage and jeered at by those around her. She was wasted and boisterous and dancing suggestively. Apparently, this meant she was asking for it.

I am coming off a week with a lot of thought given to structural inequalities, to publish or perish, to our race-to-the-bottom momentum and to how, as a critical scholar, I am lucky to not feel the need to be popular. I had hoped that a little faux Fugazi would be a welcome release.  Instead, it’s a pissy reminder of what I already know too well. A reminder of how easily we bond over others' weaknesses. A reminder of how females' overt sexuality and perceived damage renders them culpable and deserving of violence, of othering, of dehumanization. A reminder of how injustice happens and how we support each other in not getting involved.

I talked with my partner about the situation on the walk home. Would I have been as upset if the drummer was doing this to a guy, not to a female? Yes. If one had so much more power than the other both physically (with only one consistently aggressing the other) and mentally (with only one intentional and not fked up), as was the case here, yes. I would have definitely been as upset if some brah was aggressing and humiliating his super-messed up brah friend/partner who appeared to trust and rely on him. Nobody deserves that.  But I have a feeling I wouldn't have had to get upset, as others would have intervened. The theoretical arrangement is more difficult to steer clear of as another "domestic issue" or to pass off as another case of a "dumb deserving blonde fem slut." Guy-on-guy intimate aggression is just harder to normalize and, thus, to condone and look away from. As a result, I am guessing the aggression would have been seen as a problem here, not the person aggressed.

--> I interviewed Ian McKaye once. He was a lovely and generous human being. I would like to think that the real Ian would have responded differently to the action in the room tonight. More importantly, I would like to think that the tenor of the room would have been far less accepting of this crap at a real Fugazi show. I’d like to think that a wasted and highly fem woman being knocked around would not have been collectively understood to be deserving of ridicule and violence, that I wouldn't have felt my safety and validity in the space somehow feebly guarded by my sobriety, by my butch black skullcap, baggy clothes, and Chuck Taylors, by my invisibility. But I am left to seriously doubt it.

 

She does nothing to deserve it
He only wants to observe it
We sit back like they taught us
We keep quiet like they taught us
He just wants to prove it
She does nothing to remove it
We don't want anyone to mind us
So we play the roles that they assigned us
She does nothing to conceal it
He touches her 'cause he wants to feel it
We blame her for being there
But we are all guilty
-Fugazi, Suggestion 

OMG, it's Millennials with money who will ruin things for the poor!

Millennials have been facing the worst job market ever experienced by young Americans. But this is for the best, according to some media sources, as financially stable Millennials allegedly just turn conservative and will ruin everything.

A piece by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic proclaims that Millenials don't make any sense. "Millennials are more liberal than the rest of the country, particularly on social issues," Thompson writes, "but they get more economically conservative when they make more money." This is posted alongside a "No way, Jose and Wang Fang!" graph outlining Reason survey findings that Millennials become less welcoming of the idea of income redistribution as their incomes climb.

"[S]omething interesting happens when Millennials start making serious dough," Thompson writes. "They start getting much more squeamish about giving it away."

This is followed by a section on how young Americans' political views are all over the place. They are subject to being swayed in their opinion by choice words used by pollsters, Thompson laments. "Millennials don't know what they're talking about when it comes to economics" he states. Admitting that most journalists and even economists also struggle with economics, he concludes: "I think they're just confused. Overall, Millennials offer the murky impression of a generation that doesn't really understand basic economics." Confused, unprepared, and naive? That sounds like the Millennial we all know and love!

Clueless rich kids on the rise: How millennial aristocrats will destroy our future, Tim Donovan's article in Salon, makes good on his crash-scene title by fronting his piece with flashy, pouty images of Ivanka Trump and Paris Hilton before launching into a dire tale of how rich Millennials will be the end of us all. What with their lessened support for a living wage as their incomes increase,

 

their greater unwillingess to support the social safety net as their coffers fill,

and their repeated "no thanks" to income redistribution at wealthier levels, Donovan's rich, me-centric, constantly tech-wired Millenials are poised and ready to end welfare, social services, and basic human rights for all in the U.S. The nerve of Paris Hilton and her rich, entitled Millennial hoarde. The nerve!

Now, pay no mind to those economists reporting that Millennials are just slightly creeping out of the worst job market faced by young people in 50 years, and that employment rates are just incrementally higher for young adults than in 2010 when their levels hit its lowest point for this group since employment data began being collected in 1948. 

Pay no mind to statistics such as those presented by the Pew Center that found less than five years ago that "the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults— roughly 15 percentage point— is the widest in recorded history" (1).

Pay no mind to employment reports like the one named Failure to Launch out of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce that concludes economic security is far harder for young adults in the U.S. to achieve today than in the past. Reflecting on report findings, Anthony Carnevale, director of the center, states: "The millennial generation was the generation to confront this structural change first. . . . It has sorted them out in ways that have made them more unequal than any generation before."

But pay no mind to that, or to population statistics that find that all Americans become more conservative when they earn higher incomes, such as this report by Pew:

or this one from 2012 that points out that richer Americans directly experience less need for social safety nets or minimum wage protections (duh).

It's not just Millennials. Richer Americans are less likely to support social programs.

Millennials (particularly non-white Millennials) continue to reel from poverty levels and joblessness rates not previously experienced by any generation. “This is truly a lost decade,” Harvard Professor Lawrence Katz told the New York Times in 2010. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.” Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison concluded: “We’re risking a new underclass.”

In their staggering poverty levels, these poor young Americans receive few social services within a system that has succeeded in equating basic human supports with "entitlements." They are not being served by the safety net that existed for their parents in this country, and, for some, for their grandparents and great grandparents.

We say that Millenials will erode the social safety net to look past the fact that they are falling through it now.

The statistics above on Millenial poverty and joblessness come from the most trusted sources on employment. But, please, pay no mind to them. You wouldn't be alone; they are widely not considered when we think of young people today.

Instead, like our theoretical Millenials dropping everything to inhale the latest tabloid in the grocery store check-outline, we as a culture continue to center in upon those familiar discourses that feed what we want to believe about Millennials being the source of our troubles.

Social perspective shapes social policy. This shapes social realities. It did when G. Stanley Hall "discovered" the "unfinished," "savage" adolescent in 1904, providing psychological backing -- and, thus mass ideological justification -- to remove young citizens from jobs older workers wanted during Industrialization, and to roll out mandatory schooling and more surveilled existences for these newly-defined "children."

It did when the trope of the Young Black Male Superpredators was used to push fear into the U.S. collective consciousness in ways that fueled public acceptance of massive reallocation of tax dollars into prison funding in the 1980s.

And it is now, social perspectives are shaping our social policies as we erode our public resources and social safety net and place blame for this, again, on young people. 

All those many clueless, unprepared, naive, entitled, rich, me-centric, wired, made-up Millennials who will just ruin the social safety net for all the rest of us in this country when they grow up.

Someone clearly needs to do something to stop them, like keep not giving them jobs, or healthcare, or options for security, or meaningful involvement in society, or a living wage, or assistance in their poverty.

That will sure teach them, eh?

Millennials as the problem (again)

You can't have it both ways, Americans.

Young people can not be blamed for not voting in the mid-term election (as they have been in recent media), and then be blamed for their cluelessness causing "our current political troubles" (as they have been in comments made to this viral video interviewing Texas Tech undergrads, among other places).

Get it together, people. Millennials can't not vote and also be responsible for the current political system we are existing under.

They can, however, be painted as easy scapegoats for serious political, economic, and social problems we face the U.S. due to efforts aligned to consolidate power and focus the blame on the people. And they consistently are.

As a generation that is silently larger than the Baby Boom, Millennials can also lose any semblance of power they might have had in sheer number by being hated and mistrusted by the rest of the people struggling in America. And they consistently do.

The many are not powerful when they are told they are not supported. They are not powerful when we choose to affiliate with scapegoating, dehumanizing, divide-and-conquer oppressors over them. They are not powerful when we erode their education with No Child Left Behind testing over critical thought, when we take away their opportunities for meaningful involvement in society, when we decimate their parents' security, when set targets on their teachers' backs, when we tell them they are on their own and set them down in front of the screen to learn what is important in life.

You can't have it both ways. Drink the Koolaid, or live. It's our choice.

Never mind what they're selling anymore, it's what we insist on continually buying. While Millennials are not the reason we struggle as a country, their blame is one of the factors turning attention away from real sources of our current political troubles. I suppose if someone needs to be blamed, then, we might look in the mirror. Then we can make an effort to start looking at who is whispering in our ear and telling us to take our frustrations out on those rotten kids today.

What have we learned about our youth that keeps us from troubling inequitable power structures? What have we been recruited into buying about young people that deny their humanity and undermines our collective strength? How are marginalized youth used to divide and to conquer?

How powerful youth are, in the end.

Help! Millennials and a dingo stole my baby!

Mother Jones repeats NBC's hard-hitting analysis that Millennials lost the races for everyone last night by not showing up. Nice job, Millennials, you jerks! Ruining it all for everyone again, you loser jerks! You are the werst, always thinking about yourself and no one else. You're the reason that we're in this ... wait, what's that, Census Bureau? Under 30 has ALWAYS voted far less than the over 60 population? It's not new a new thing? Shush! That doesn't fit the narrative. Back to you, jerk Millennials...

Millennials are being blamed for the results of the mid-term election (of course). Many things are difficult to make sense of. The idea that Millennials are fallible and blameable is not.

The cultural trope continues.

Gender, media, and rape culture: Enough blaming the girl

Who gets protected? Who is disposable? Who is allowed to be visible? Who is shamed into hiding? Girls pay in spades for the sexist lessons they are taught about being pure, and for those they are denied about being sexual. Girls pay for the het lessons boys are taught about taking and deserving and scoring, with boys as the winner and girls as the loser slut.

Shaking, I'm so pissed right now, at Maryville and Steubenville and beyond, at the rich and connected being immune from recourse, at youth forbidden from alcohol so it can be sold back to them in ads associated with greater ideas of impunity, rights, and power and with this cocktail being associated with sex, about social-emotional learning curricula individualizing these cultures of violence and of compliance we feed here. So appreciative for Anonymous, for Daisy Coleman's words here, and for others who aren't willing to fall into the cowardice of sexism and brah-ism and silence.

Enough with the rape whistles. They are diversions; people have made clear that they are not willing to listen to what they say, to what girls say. They teach the girl to call, and expect to not be heard.

Being known is a social process. Identity is a social process. It's difficult to be anything but wrong in a culture that, at base, hates females, putting them on pillars in theory while both regulating and shaming their realities. Enough blaming the girl. Enough blaming the girl. Enough blaming the girl. Enough blaming the girl.

http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/daisy-coleman-maryville-rape?utm_medium=facebook

How I learned to stop worrying and love to trust my secrets to sites in sans serif

Study suggests that young people tell more secrets in unprofessional environments that ask questions indirectly, and that don't bring up reminders of privacy issues they might have been warned about. 

 A potential limitation of the study is that it doesn't consider the different bounds of "appropriate behavior" implied to students by these contexts. That is, while the "official" looking survey received few acknowledgments of deviant behavior, s tudents might be answering pro-socially in either of the three formats. Few kids will tell their school administrators directly that they do coke or break other rules of the student code. Because of this, it follows that few might be willing to do so on an official-looking online survey from their school. And is it possible that the "How BAD Are U???" survey received more positive responses to "creepy questions" because the context of the survey ("How BAD Are U???") suggested that "badness" is desirable/pro-social there? 

Still, interesting stuff. 

 Why We Blab Our Intimate Secrets on Facebook 
Published: December 10, 2012
Author: Carmen Nobel

Executive Summary:
Leslie K. John and colleagues set out to discover the reason behind a common discrepancy: While many of us purport to be concerned about Internet privacy, we seem to have no worries about sharing our most intimate details on Facebook.

A few years ago, when Leslie K. John was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, a classmate introduced her to a then-nascent website called Facebook. John took a look, scrolling through page after page of photographs, personal confessions, and ongoing accounts of people's every move. She found the whole thing perplexing.

"I didn't understand why people were putting all this information out there," says John, now an assistant professor in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. "There seemed to be a constant need for people to give status updates on what they were doing. It was very bizarre to me."

John's curiosity led to a raft of collaborative research about information disclosure in the age of social media. Her goal: to determine when we're most likely to divulge intimate facts and when we're apt to keep our lives to ourselves.

In short, the initial findings indicate that individuals are both illogical and careless with their privacy on the web. "We show that people are prone to sharing more information in the very contexts in which it's more dangerous to share," John says.

Creepy questions
Specifically, John and two colleagues from Carnegie Mellon set out to study a common contradictory attitude toward Internet privacy. On the one hand, studies show that Americans are wary of companies having access to their personal information. For example, in a February 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of 2,253 adult respondents answered they would not be OK with a search engine (such as Google) keeping track of their searches and using the results to personalize future searches. And 68 percent said they were uncomfortable with targeted advertising for the same reason: they didn't want anyone tracking their behavior. On the other hand, millions of people routinely share the most intimate details of their lives via various social media sites.

With a series of field and lab experiments, John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein shed some light on the discrepancy.

In each experiment, the researchers asked participants to answer a list of questions to indicate whether they had engaged in various sensitive activities—looking at pornographic material, cheating on a romantic partner, trying cocaine, and so on. "We basically sat down together and brainstormed creepy questions to ask," John says.

The experiments tested the idea that downplaying privacy concerns would increase the likelihood of disclosure. For example, the researchers set up laptop computers across the Carnegie Mellon campus and asked passersby to fill out a "Web survey about student behaviors," which comprised 15 yes/no questions. Unbeknownst to them, the participants were randomly assigned to one of three user-interface conditions.

In some cases, they took an online survey titled "How BAD Are U???" Deliberately designed to look unprofessional, it featured red font and a pixelated cartoon devil. Other participants received a deliberately professional-looking survey titled "Carnegie Mellon University Executive Council Survey on Ethical Behaviors," which sported the school's official crest. A third set, the control group, received the relatively neutral "Survey of Student Behaviors."

The questions were exactly the same in every case. Yet participants in the "unprofessional" condition were almost twice (1.98 times) as likely to admit to having engaged in the various behaviors relative to those in the "professional" condition, with the control group answers generally falling in the middle.

From a logical Internet privacy viewpoint, the results don't make sense. After all, an amateur website of unknown origins is likely far less concerned with data protection than a professional website of a firm or university. But according to John, the research supports the hypothesis that people often don't even think about privacy unless reminded to do so. Ironically, professionalism seemed to remind participants that airing their affairs might have negative consequences.

"When you're on a very official-looking site, it sort of cues you in to think about the concept of privacy," she says. "We argue that oftentimes, privacy isn't something that's at the forefront of people's minds until you cue it."

To further test this argument, the researchers repeated their experiment, but added a very deliberate privacy cue at the onset: Before completing the personal survey, some participants took a test called "Phind the phishing emails," in which they viewed screen shots of email messages and identified them as "just spam" or "phishing"—the common cybercrime of masquerading as a trustworthy source to acquire data such as credit card information. Others (the control group) took a test called "find the endangered fish."

Indeed, thinking about phishing caused participants to be equally judicious in their responses, regardless of whether they were taking the "How BAD Are U???" or the "Executive Council on Ethical Behavior" survey. (Looking at pictures of endangered Acadian redfish and Atlantic halibut had no effect.)

Indirect questions
The researchers also showed that people are likely to share information online if a personal question comes at them in a roundabout way. In another experiment, they teamed up with New York Times science columnist John Tierney, who posted a survey called "Test Your Ethics" on his official blog. Some 890 readers completed the survey, unaware that they were part of a research project. Upon clicking a link, all participants were presented with a list of 16 arguably unethical behaviors. For each one, they rated the behavior on a scale of "not at all unethical" to "extremely unethical" and answered questions about whether they themselves had ever engaged in that behavior.

However, the nature of the inquiry varied from participant to participant. In some cases the question was point blank: "Have you done this behavior?" But in others, the question was indirect: Participants had the choice of answering "If you have ever done this behavior, how unethical do you think it was?" or "If you have never done this behavior, how unethical do you think it would be, if you were to choose to do it?" Unfailingly, the researchers found that participants were far more likely to admit to a behavior when the question was posed indirectly.

Simply changing the order of the survey questions also had a direct effect on information disclosure. If shocked at the start, respondents would let their guard. The researchers found that participants were more likely to divulge personal information if the questions were presented in decreasing order of intrusiveness—starting with "Have you had sex with the current husband, wife, or partner of a friend?" and ending with the relatively tame "In the last year, have you eaten meat, poultry, or fish?"

Participants also were more likely to admit to unethical behavior if they were told that other participants had reported misdeeds, too. That herd mentality helps explain the propensity to air dirty laundry on Facebook, John explains. In fact, with so many Facebook members oversharing, it's gotten to the point that people get suspicious when their peers don't overshare.

In a recent experiment, John and HBS Associate Professor Michael I. Norton asked several college students to fill out a brief questionnaire, choosing to answer a personal question about either a desirable behavior (such as charity work) or an undesirable behavior (such as cheating). The students could respond to only one of the questions, with the understanding that another group of participants would be rating the answers on a scale of trustworthiness.

Many respondents chose to answer the question about positive behavior, assuming that this would show them in the most trustworthy light. But in fact, the group rating the answers tended to give higher trustworthiness scores to the students who chose to reveal unsavory behavior instead. "People tend to assume the worst about those who choose not to divulge," John says.

The broad implications
So why aren't most of us more logical and judicious in our approach to Internet privacy? "Broadly, the lesson of this research is that people don't really know how to value their own information," John says. "Because of this uncertainty about what the value of privacy is, people don't know when to value their information or how to care about it. And as a consequence, when people are uncertain, their judgments are often influenced by seemingly arbitrary contextual factors."

The research should prove useful to marketing firms, which often use online quizzes and games to garner detailed demographic information. But the findings also highlight a catch-22 situation for conscientious companies. While these firms want to ensure customer privacy for legal and ethical reasons, the mere act of ensuring privacy seems to suppress information disclosure.

What's the solution? "Perhaps the happy medium for marketers is to protect people's privacy, but don't explicitly tell them you're doing that," John says. "That may be a slippery slope. It may lead to the temptation just not to bother protecting people's privacy. But I would hope that the virtuous marketer would resist that temptation."

To read more: For detailed accounts of research by Leslie John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein, see "The Impact of Relative Standards on the Propensity to Disclose," in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, and "Strangers on a Plane: Context-Dependent Willingness to Divulge Sensitive Information," in the February 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Youth are increasingly "entitled" study problematically (but not surprisingly) suggests

This Daily Mail article pronounces, once again, that today's kids are "entitled." But how is entitlement defined? And why don't the data assess "entitlement"?

How are our deepening understandings of US youth as "entitled" fueling the erosion of their social support? How is the belief that young people are entitled justifying their deprioritization and poor treatment in society?

I can't see the data speaking to "youth entitlement" at all from this article. Overall, reads like more of the same tired youth-blaming neoliberal crap we've been seeing for a few decades. But, then again, I hear alarm bells when I hear declarations of "youth entitlement" attempting to drown out the sound made by dismantling social structures and chipping away at erroneously termed "entitlements." Prolly just me tho.