Were you the kid with a mohawk in the 70s or pegged pants in the 80s? Maybe you were goth, a skater, or straight-edge. Teens of every era love to experiment with creative expression and explore new philosophical ideas. The internet offers boundless opportunities to follow cool influencers andchat with like-minded others in online forums. Visiting random virtual neighborhoods can be mind-expanding and fun, but it can also be dangerous. Today’s GKIS article explores the world of online counterculture. Being in-the-know is a critical element to great parenting in the digital age.
New Age Counterculture
As adolescents begin to form their unique adult identity, they look to their peer community for ideas for current, creative interests, how they want to come across, and what they want to look like. Especially attractive to teens is anything that their parents ARE NOT. Trends that are new, fresh, and totally different from parents or social norms are aptly named counterculture.[1]
The concept of countercultures isn’t new. From the anarchists in ancient Greece to the punks of the 1970s, countercultures have always influenced trends and fashion. Because kids today form multiple identities in their real world and in various virtual worlds, they love to explore constantly-evolving countercultures.
Fun Curated Online Platforms
These days, online influencers define counterculture for kids and teens. Sometimes that results in harmless fun. Other times, influencers post sexualized and edgy content designed to shock and titillate, engaging their audience in active discussions and
sharing.
To help you become familiar with counterculture online content, we’ve selected some content creators for you to check out and explore. Please keep in mind that because we don’t monitor these sites, we can’t vouch for their choices or the choices of their followers. Only you can best decide what makes sense for your family.
Kathryn Loo, Youtube username@hellobatty, posts videos about crafts, outfits, vlogs, and more. Her gothic Lolita style and love for all things Halloween inspires her viewers to embrace their interests and gives viewers ideas on how to get creative in her own spooky aesthetic.
Alex Weaver, Instagram username@thegothicalice, posts artwork, fashion, and for-sale creations in her goth/punk style. She frequently posts about books she’s interested in, artistic projects she’s working on, and creative outfits she puts together.
Aurel Nelson, Instagram username @phonyghost,is a skilled costume creator who makes amazing images of her cosplays (meaning dressing up and portraying a specific character). Some of her costumes include superheroes. She frequently collaborates with other costume makers to make a spin-off of our favorite Disney princesses as punk rock girls.
Tae-Seon Hall, Tik Tok username@tae.seonrise,posts videos on funny reactions to how her style is perceived by the public, videos of her cat, and quick makeup looks.
Mary Rose, Blog @TheEveryday Goth, creates fun posts relating to counterculture events, fun reads, fashion posts, and references to goth classics such as The Addams Family. She also links goth themed stores and songs she loves.
Pros to Trendy Counterculture Sites
Opportunities to meet and interact with like-minded fans
Exposure to creative ideas and unique ideas that may not be reflected in your community
Encourage your child to develop independent thinking
Help to build self-confidence
Their participation reflects that your child knows your home is a safe place for expression and communication
Cons to Trendy Counterculture Sites
Unregulated, unmonitored messaging boards
Exposure to inappropriate content like sexuality, vulgarity, and cyberbullying
Exposure to hate groups, radicalization, fake news, and conspiracy theories
Conversations of that may encourage serious mental health-related behaviors like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide
Pop up ads and marketing
Tips to Navigating Counterculture Sites
Dr. B offers the following tips to protect your child from inappropriate counterculture sites
Tell your child you’ll be monitoring their online activity and explain why you think that is important.
Have an ongoing, fun, cooperative dialogue to stay current with their interests, challenge their ideas, and teach family values.
Monitor sites your child is interested in by creating a bookmark and following the creators. Be alert for subtle messaging and links to other sites and music.
Insist on having your child’s login credentials to their devices
Review browser searches
Do not save your credit card information on sites you share with your child.
GKIS Parenting & Safety Tools
If you feel overwhelmed when it comes to keeping your kids safe online, we got you covered. Our GKISScreen Safety Toolkit offers tried-and-true tech tools to help with filtering, monitoring, and managing your child’s screen activities. We also share links to apps and social media safety guides for platforms popularly used by influencers. This parenting step is what Dr. B calls protectionism in her bookScreen Time in the Mean Time, an important part of parenting in the digital age.
If you’d love a more comprehensive parenting course to help understand not only how to manage your child’s media, but how to optimize creativity and learning potential, check out our GKIS Connected Family Course. Dr. Tracy Bennett, can even personally guide you through this process during a personalizedworkshop orin-person coaching. Our GKIS CEO is passionate about assisting families with these confusing moments and is available to you at a click of a button. Coaching is an efficient, cost-efficient alternative to in-person psychotherapy. Prevention is always better than treatment.
The Overall Verdict?
The GKIS mission is to help families achieve screen sanity, prevent digital injury, and form deeper, more meaningful relationships. That includes joining them where they’re at in experimenting with identity formation. Just like punk in the 1970s and new wave in the 1980s, online counterculture helps today’s kids discover all that this crazy world has to offer.
Special thanks to Aroni Garcia for researching and co-writing this article. If you want to learn more about the mentioned social media platforms of the GKIS approved counterculture influencers, check out the GKIS parents sensible guides to Instagram and Tik Tok.
[1] CrashCourse. (2017). Cultures, Subcultures, and Countercultures: Crash Course Sociology #11. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV50AV7-Iwc&feature=emb_title
[2]Daschuk, M. (2010). Messageboard Confessional: Online Discourse and the Production of the “Emo Kid”. Berkeley Journal of Sociology,54, 84-107. Retrieved February 6, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/40999937
[3] Hawkes, N. (2015). Young goths may be more vulnerable to depression and self-harm, study finds. BMJ: British Medical Journal,351. Retrieved January 31, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/26521636
Persuasion plays a big role in our interaction with the world and the people around us. We persuade our friends to watch our favorite movie with us and are persuaded to elect a new president. Some manipulations are transparent. Others are well-thought-out psychological hidden tricks to make easy money. With the rise of technology, methods of manipulation and persuasion are commonly used. From advertisements to get you to buy products to being kept in the dark about what the company promises you, these methods of manipulation are known as dark patterns.
What are dark patterns?
Dark patterns are persuasive techniques used by companies to trick people into buying and signing up for things.
The term dark pattern was coined by Harry Brignull, a cognitive scientist.[1] He describes dark patterns as, “A user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things. they are not mistakes. They are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interest in mind.”[2]
Why do companies use dark patterns?
The Internet is a business platform. Websites are designed to capture your attention. To stay competitive, companies must have offers that set them apart, like the end-cap items at the grocery store.[3]
Intentional product placement forces customers to view more expensive merchandise on their way to grab their everyday purchases. Online websites have similar methods of forcing users to see attractive products.
Dark patterns come in many different styles, all with the same intention of keeping the misleading strategy somewhat hidden. Sometimes, dark patterns can be illegal. Brignull says, “Many designers, and possibly even most, hate using dark patterns in their work, but they are forced to implement them by managers. These managers only care about one or two individual metrics, not the experience of the site or brand as a whole. So, a manager who is tasked with increasing the number of people who sign up for a company’s newsletter might order a website designer to use a dark pattern to capture email addresses, because it’s an easy short-term solution that doesn’t require any effort.”[4]
Types of Dark Patterns from Dr. Brignull’s website, darkpatters.org.
Bait & Switch
The bait and switch technique refers to the act of advertising a ‘too good to be true’ price that is not stocked. By grabbing the customer’s attention, the chances of purchasing an alternatively higher-priced item go up.
Disguised Ad
Disguised ads are advertisements designed to appear like the content the user was searching for, so they’ll mistakenly click on them. They are typically presented to people during informational searches.
Forced Continuity
The forced continuity dark pattern is used when a company offers a free trial period. The company holds the customer responsible for unsubscribing from the free trial period, otherwise charging them for their subscription.
Obstruction
Obstruction refers to the strategy of making a particular task more difficult than it needs to be. The intent is to frustrate or confuse the customer so they give up before completing the task. A common obstruction is hiding the unsubscribe link or instructions, so the customer gives up and keeps on paying their monthly subscription cost.
Friend Spam
Friend Spam refers to the devious act of asking for access to your social media friends list and then spamming them with ads. The user agrees because they’re rushing through the signup process or under the impression that your friend list will be used for a desirable outcome, like finding more friends. LinkedIn was sued for $13 million in 2015 for using this dark pattern.
Hidden Costs
Hidden costs typically appear in the last step of the checkout process when the company asks for additional and unexpected charges, like delivery or shipping charges. Because the customer has already invested enthusiasm and time in the purchase, they are less likely to bail on the transition at the end of the process.
Price Comparison Prevention
This dark pattern is in play when the retailer makes it hard for the user to compare the prices of an item with another item to prevent them from making an informed buying decision.
Privacy Zuckering
Privacy Zuckering occurs when the customer is tricked into publicly sharing more information about themselves than they intended. This dark pattern was named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg because, in the company’s early years of development, Facebook made it difficult for users to control their privacy settings and easy to overshare by mistake.
Today, ‘privacy zuckering’ works more deviously, using data brokers to collect personal information that they sell to other companies.[8] These techniques were described in Facebook’s lengthy ‘terms and conditions.’ But most users won’t read them because of the overly burdensome legalese.[9]
Roach Motel
This dark pattern technique makes it easy for you to get into a certain situation but hard for you to get out of it.
An example is if a customer wants to delete their profile or content on social media but is punished with unwanted consequences if they do so (like requiring you to lose all of your photos or contacts as a penalty for deletion).
Sneak into the Basket
Sneak into the basket happens when the customer attempts to purchase something, but somewhere during their purchasing journey, an additional item appears in their basket.
Trick Question
A trick question compels you to answer thinking one thing but, if read carefully, it asks for another thing entirely.
Fear of Missing Out
This dark pattern technique is made to look like the item you’re thinking of purchasing is in high demand, pressuring you to make the decision quickly.[10]
Examples include a reminder of the number of people looking also at the specific item. The marketing technique of scarcity will alert you, “Only 3 left!” Booking hotel rooms, airplane flights, and merchandise on Amazon use this persuasive tactic to trigger your urgency and thus increase sales.
Nagging/Forced Action
A popup appears that requires action before you can move forward with your online task.
Sneaking
Sneaking refers to hiding, disguising, or delaying relevant information to force uninformed decisions.
Intentional Misdirection
Intentional misdirection is a persuasive technique that offers a promise for a free or inexpensive item, only to eventually inform you that the free item doesn’t apply to you after all, and you must purchase a different solution.
An example of this type of dark pattern is that was used by the company Turbo Tax. In this instance, Turbo Tax offered people the option to file their taxes online for free. But once in the sales funnel, customers discovered that the free option only applied to people needing to file a simple W-2 form (which is a small minority of taxpayers). Once customers purchased the paid option that applied to them, they would discover the extra $60 to $200 charges for any forms that deal with loans and mortgages.[5] That moves what looks like a free service to an unexpected paid service.
Our GKIS favorite podcast Reply All covered dark patterns in episode #144. They reported that Turbo Taxes’ second option, known as Turbo Tax-Free File/Freedom, was not advertised and the link could not be found anywhere on their website. Further, Turbo Tax-Free File was only free for people whose adjusted gross annual income was $66,000 or less.[6] When the producers searched online for TurboTax Freefile/Freedom, Google offered two options, an orange button asking if you qualify or a blue button saying “start for free.” Most people would choose the option of the blue button that offers free tax filing. But choosing the blue button takes you back to Turbo Tax-Free, where only simple forms are free. Finding TurboTax Free File was only accessible through a link from IRS.gov.[7]
How to Avoid Being Victimized by Dark Patterns
In Dr. Bennett’s book Screen Time in the Mean Time she writes, “Due to screen technology, this generation of children are more marketed to than any other children in history. Why? Because there’s BIG money in child and teen products. If you can’t see the product, you are the product.” GetKidsInternetSafe courses help parents and kids be educated consumers.
Thanks to Andrew Weissmann for his research and help with writing this article.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Your heart is racing, your chest is constricting, and it feels as if you may vomit. The logical part of your brain tries to soothe the panic that’s building in your chest by informing you it’s due to the three cups of coffee you’ve consumed in the last hour. But instead of listening to your better instincts, you turn to Google. Article after article feeds your worst fears with information about heart attacks. And just when you think your “diagnosis” can’t get any worse, a dreaded link takes you to a site for cardiac tumors. Before you know it, you are texting your mom to tell her how much you love her and escaping into social media rather than paying your bills. All you can think about is how painful it’s going to be to die from this fatal medical condition. While you are preoccupied with your heart, a muscle spasm occurs in your lower back which drives you into more panic. Now you’re convinced your kidneys are shutting down…
What is Illness Anxiety Disorder?
Illness Anxiety Disorder is a relatively new concept that has replaced the diagnosis of hypochondriasis. Individuals who suffer from this disorder are frequently preoccupied with worry over becoming extremely ill or developing a rare life-threatening condition. They may fixate on a specific part of the body or a certain medical condition like cancer or tumors.
Although illness anxiety or health anxiety will not kill you, it is extremely distressing and can be debilitating. According to Mayo Clinic (2018), illness anxiety disorder typically develops in early to middle adulthood and can get progressively worse over time.
Symptoms of Illness Anxiety Disorder
Repeatedly checking your body for signs of illness or disease, like checking your breasts for lumps or checking moles constantly
Frequently making medical appointments for reassurance
Frequently searching the internet for causes of symptoms or possible illness
Worrying excessively about a specific medical condition or your risk of developing a medical condition because it runs in the family
Having so much distress about a possible illness that it’s hard for you to function.[1]
Cyberchondria
With information just a click away, it is very easy to become a victim of cyberchondria. Cyberchondria is a subtype of illness anxiety disorder. It occurs when an individual seeks Dr. Google to research their ache or pain. Cyberchondria refers to preoccupation with a feared illness paired with compulsive Internet browsing.
What the Research Says About Illness Anxiety Disorder
A research team from Microsoft found that, although people reported low levels of health anxiety when Googling their symptoms, the searching provoked anxiety, leading to more compulsive searches. From there, many went on to schedule exploratory doctor or specialist appointments.
Although occasionally triggering unnecessary anxiety, White and Horvitz (2009) pointed out that a benefit of Googling a pre-existing medical diagnosis is an opportunity to become acquainted with accurate medical terminology. With this knowledge, a patient can give a more informative history and be a better advocate for appropriate treatment with their doctor.
Illness Anxiety Disorder Often Occurs with Another Psychiatric Disorder
Research has shown that illness anxiety disorder is more commonly comorbid with other anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder (worrying excessively), panic disorder (impairment due to fear of panic attacks), agoraphobia (avoidance of everyday life experiences due to fear of panic attacks), and even phobias (excessive fears).[3] It can also be seen in those who suffer from depressive symptoms but is most commonly seen in those with anxiety disorders.
Not much information is known on illness anxiety disorder because individuals who suffer from this will seek medical help first over psychiatric help. That means the client undergoes expensive medical diagnostic procedures rather than cognitive-behavioral therapy (the psychological treatment that is the most effective treatment).
What Causes Illness Anxiety Disorder?
While the exact cause of illness anxiety disorder is still unknown, researchers believe certain events contribute to the early onset of an illness anxiety diagnosis.[2]
Possible contributors:
History of abuse as a child
Excessive screen use overall
A serious medical diagnosis as a child or a parent had a serious medical diagnosis
Experiencing a major stressful life event
Excessive worrying related to health
Difficulty asserting oneself or impoverished social skills
How to Help Individuals Suffering from Illness Anxiety
If your child or teen is demonstrating tendencies, use the tools offered in our GKIS Screen Safety Toolkit. They will allow you to identify risk by monitoring browser searches, emails, and inquiring text messages.
Limit screen time and Internet access to WebMD and Mayo Clinic
Develop a positive, healthy relationship with your doctor by informing them about your tendencies
Find a psychologist for cognitive-behavioral therapy
Develop ways to ease stress, like exercise or meditation
Thank you to CSUCI intern, Kassidy Simpson for providing parents with the knowledge they need to help recognize and become aware of the signs of illness anxiety disorder. If you learned something new from this article, please talk to your friends about us and “like” our GetKidsInternetSafe Facebook page so other parents can find us!
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Onward to More Awesome Parenting,
Tracy S. Bennett, Ph.D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
White, R. W., & Horvitz, E. (2009). Experiences with web search on medical concerns and self-diagnosis. AMIA … Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium, 2009, 696–700.
Scarella, T. M., Laferton, J. A., Ahern, D. K., Fallon, B. A., & Barsky, A. (2016). The Relationship of Hypochondriasis to Anxiety, Depressive, and Somatoform Disorders. Psychosomatics,57(2), 200–207. doi:10.1016/j.psym.2015.10.006
