#934 Gordon Ingram: Adolescent Use of New Media and Internet Technologies
Show notes
RECORDED ON FEBRUARY 15th 2024.
Dr. Gordon Ingram is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at RMIT University Vietnam. His research centers on children’s and adolescents’ everyday communication online. He is the author of Adolescent Use of New Media and Internet Technologies: Debating Risks and Opportunities in the Digital Age.
In this episode, we focus on Adolescent Use of New Media and Internet Technologies. We start by talking about how to study the psychological impacts of the internet, the focus on adolescents, and moral panics surrounding new technologies and how scientists react to them. We then go through topics like self-concept and self-esteem; online identity; screen time; Instagram and body image; the link between social media and depression, and alternative hypotheses for the rising rates of depression; whether there is “internet addiction”; online social gaming; pornography and sexual life; privacy; educational opportunities; online dating; cyberbullying; intergroup and cross-cultural contacts; and how people interact online. We also discuss whether the risks associated with the internet are exaggerated, how we can enhance adolescents’ wellbeing, and the future of internet use.
Time Links:
Intro
Studying the psychological impacts of the internet
The focus on adolescents
Moral panics surrounding new technologies
How scientists should react to moral panics
3 different types of risk
Self-concept and self-esteem
Online identity
Is “screen time” a problem?
Instagram and body image
Is there really a link between social media and depression?
Is there such a thing as “internet addiction”?
Online social gaming, and violent videogames
Does pornography affect sexual life?
Privacy risks
Educational opportunities
Online dating
Cyberbullying
Intergroup and cross-cultural contacts
How people interact online
Are the risks associated with the internet exaggerated?
Enhancing adolescents’ wellbeing
The future of internet use
Follow Dr. Ingram’s work!
Follow Dr. Ingram’s work:
Our first interview: https://youtu.be/0jrTt0Mzx0U
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/49szbfe
ResearchGate profile: https://bit.ly/2vbcyLb
Adolescent Use of New Media and Internet Technologies: https://bit.ly/3txpjRA
Twitter handle: @gordoning
Transcript
Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain errors
Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host, Ricardo Lobs. And today I'm joined for a second time by Dr Gordon Ingram. He is now senior lecturer in Psychology at RMIT University Vietnam. And until recently, he was at the Univers the, at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. And today we're focusing on his book, Adolescent Use of New Media and internet Technologies, debating Risks and opportunities in the digital age. And of course, I'm leaving also the link to our first interview on the show in the description. So Dr Ingram, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.Gordon Ingram: Thank, thank you Ricardo and thanks a lot for the invitation and for having me back. It’s a great honor coming considering some of the names you’ve had on the show. So, thanks a lot.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. No, it’s totally my pleasure. And in fact, when I, as I was saying off record, when I got across your book, I was really happy because I’ve been I’ve already had actually a couple of conversations on the show about some of these topics and people tend to come from one extreme or the other when approaching the potential psychological effects of new media, the internet and other kinds of new technologies. And I think that your book is very balanced what in its approach. So te tell us actually about the approach that you have in the book to studying the effects or the potential effects of new media and internet technologies and how it compares to perhaps some of the more I don’t know, typical or mainstream approaches that we see that tend to be based on moral panics, fear mongering and stuff like that.
Gordon Ingram: Ok. Well, I guess, like as we were talking in, in the previous interview, which I really enjoyed by the way and, and, and thanks again for doing the interview so well that the first time I thought it was really, really good. But I always sort of come at psychology from an evolutionary point of view. So when you’re looking at new technology, I think it’s natural to have the assumption that we evolved in a different environment, you know, to be cosmides, talk about the environment of evolutionary adaptive. This obviously, and this didn’t include new technology. So it doesn’t seem, you know, coming at it from that point of view, it doesn’t seem implausible that new technology could cause mental health problems. The same way that say junk food, lack of exercise causes us physical health problems. And I think maybe that causes me to take a different point of view from some other social scientists who might maybe start from a more blank slate point of view. So they tend to think, well, if Children grow up with new technology, this is what’s normal for them. And there’s no reason why it should be any more harmful than any other kind of culture that, that Children grew up, grew up on. So there’s peop I think sometimes if you take a blank state of view, you might be quite skeptical of people who are suggesting special risks of new technology and think, well, they’re just engaging in moral panic because the digital world is very different, different to the world that they grew up in. So it seems kind of unnatural and threatening to them. But at the same time, I think also I’m coming at it from the point of view, you know, influenced by people like Joe Henry K who, who see the human adaptation is mostly about culture. So yeah, we are very flexible. So there may be risks but not necessarily huge risks. I think we’re capable of adapting to new technology just as we adapted to lots of other cultural technologies over time.
Ricardo Lopes: And so why do you focus in the book on adolescents specifically? I mean, is it just because you tend to focus your research on adolescents or is there any other special reason for focusing on adolescents in this specific case and not, for example, adults or Children.
Gordon Ingram: Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, it, first of all, it, it, it perhaps should emphasize that new technology is not, not just about adolescence and some, for some reason, they tend to kind of bear the brunt of the, the moral panics and so on or maybe go into that a bit later. But, but, obviously all ages these days are using technology and, you know, down from age one really to, to, to age 90 or whatever, everyone’s using internet tech technology, right. But I think it’s pretty clear that adolescents and young adults maybe going up to, you know, the mid twenties are really like the driving force in new technology adoption because older people, we tend to have our own set way of doing things. We do adapt to new technology eventually, but it takes us longer because of the kind of inertia of, of different habits that we, we built up over our lifespan. Whereas adolescents are going in with a, with a more open mind, they’re experimenting with everything and, and they’ll, they’ll, you know, master this new technology and adapt it to their own uses, much more, much more easily. And if you compare them with younger Children, younger Children don’t have as much freedom to explore new technology, to use it to develop new social relationships like teenagers do so I think adolescents are kind of in that sweet spot for, for a new technology adoption. And then the second reason really is that adolescents are uniquely vulnerable because they’re kind of separating emotionally from their families from the kind of dependence on their families, they’re developing their own identity in terms of the brain, the brain is still going through a lot of changes up until the mid twenties. So this means that they’re at a point in life where they tend to suffer a lot of psychosocial problems. Adolescents have the highest rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, delinquency, substance abuse, you name it basically, almost any mental health problem or behavioral problem. Adolescents have the kind of highest rates of it. So that means that they, if there’s any kind of effect of online actions on these mental health problems, they’ll probably be at their most, the the strongest effects will really be an adolescent. So for both, both those reasons, I think it makes sense to focus on that age group.
Ricardo Lopes: So something that I mentioned in my first question and you also talk about in your book is or are moral panics? And I I guess it’s also interesting to address that here because your book is not only focused on the potential psychological effects that new media and internet technologies might have on adolescent specifically, but also in understanding why people approach this topic the way they do usually. So to start off with, what is a moral panic, what characterizes a moral panic? Well, it’s a concept
Gordon Ingram: that really has been used more in sociology than in psychology. And there’s an awful lot written about moral panics and in sociology, it basically is a concern about certain kinds of behavior in a society, it tends to appear quite suddenly. So, you know, it’s a concern that wasn’t there, you know, the previous year or two years ago. And it’s shared across a broad section of society. So it’s not just religious fundamentalists or whatever, it’s so many groups of people are concerned about it. It’s not, doesn’t tend to be based on hard evidence. But more on anecdotes. So something like, you know, say the concern about COVID-19 a couple of years ago wouldn’t count really as a moral panic because there was a new disease there that was actually killing people. So it’s not just something that people have, have kinda have kind of taken to based on anecdotes. And finally, it tends to disappear almost as quickly as it appeared. So a good example would be, for example, in the nineties. I remember there was a lot of panic about new drugs like ecstasy, for example, young people going out to raves, taking these drugs and maybe dying from dehydration, that sort of thing. And so there’s a lot of media stories about this and then a couple of years later, you know, it just sort of became part of the accepted kind of youth subculture that young people went out and took these drugs and you didn’t see the same kind of media interest in it. So that was a kind of often drugs like that are, are kind of classic example of a moral panic that, that takes hold
Ricardo Lopes: and why is it that moral panics so many times focus on young people. Why young people specifically?
Gordon Ingram: Well, I’m actually writing a theoretical article about or trying to write a theoretical article about that at the moment. So, it’s, it’s, it’s very interesting, I think because if you look at the sociologists, the sociological literature, they don’t really tend to focus much on the, the content of moral panics. What they’re interested in is the kind of social reaction, you know, the politics behind it, the different social groups, how they’re, how they’re, how they’re responding to the moral panic as it were. And so what I was interested in when I looked at different examples of moral panics was that they nearly always seemed to concern young people more than other groups of people and often were to do with new technology, new cultural practices, which explains why the moral panic just suddenly appears out of nowhere because it’s something that people weren’t really doing before. So I think what I try to do in the, in the article is I’m trying to look at it from a cultural evolutionary point of view and say, young people are the ones driving cultural change. And this is something that can be maybe threatening to older generations. So it’s, it’s often the older generations who are particularly engaging in the panic. And I think there’s a sound reason for that, which is that older people have adapted their behavior, adapted their practices to a certain cultural environment. And then when they see young people changing that environment, it’s, there’s a kind of concern. Well, I taught my, my Children or we taught the younger generation a certain set of skills, these skills are not gonna be useless because everything is changing. They’re adopting these new ways which are often associated with other social groups, you know, other ethnic groups sometimes. So it’s, it’s something which can be threatening in terms of, of feeling that the skills that you taught your Children or the younger generation are not going to be applicable in the new digital world. So I think that,
Ricardo Lopes: and, and by the way, do you think that could also apply to themselves? I mean, perhaps that they themselves feel that they are no longer adapted to the new world they’re living
Gordon Ingram: in. Well, I think it psychologically it’s, it’s definitely probably generating some strong emotions. I think that explains a lot, the emotional charge with, with the moral panic is that it’s all very strange, unfamiliar and and there’s something threatening about it. You know, I think as humans, like I said, we, we evolved to live in a cultural environment to identify with the cultural practices of our kind of ethnic group. And so when you, when you see these new cultural practices coming in, maybe it, it can be linked you a lot of moral panics can also have to do with immigrants and, and, and it can be, can be linked to this concern about losing your own cultural practices, being replaced with another group’s cultural practices, which I think it makes sense. We’d be a adapted to be concerned about that really
Ricardo Lopes: and relevant to our conversation today. Why are these moral panics so many times focused specifically on new technologies or cultural practices?
Gordon Ingram: But again, I, I think it’s about cultural change. So it’s when there’s something unfamiliar, it, it’s seen as kind of alien in some way, what’s new is also seen as somehow alien as different. And what you notice as well. Another thing you notice with, with these things with, with these panics about new technologies, it’s not just about any kind of technologies. It’s there’s often sort of recurring themes in these moral panics. So things that really activate strong emotions. So things like suicide, drugs, sexual abuse, religious indoctrination, they’re often sort of connected with the use of, of new technology in some way. And it seemed, I think the idea is that with this kind of these interactions that young people are engaging in online, they’re not as kind of insulated from negative influences about these sorts of behaviors that they would have been in the power and the kind of idealized past that the older generation is thinking of where the community kind of had control of the younger people and protected them to some extent from, from these kind of damaging interactions. So I think that’s driving a lot of these concerns about new technology as well.
Ricardo Lopes: And by the way, it is, of course, doesn’t apply only to newer technologies like we have now the internet and so on, this is a very, or seems to be a very old phenomenon of older people reacting badly to new technology because I’ve listened to podcasts and read books about, since the 19 century people having bad reactions to romance novels, mirrors teddy bears, cars, bicycles. I mean, basically everything out there.
Gordon Ingram: And yeah, that’s a really good point and, and, and that’s, that kind of feeds the sort of standard liberal dismissal of these fears. Oh, well, you know, people have always been having moral panics. It’s just that you’re stuck in your own ways and stuff, but I’m not sure if it totally kind of negates the, the, the, the problems of it because, because I mean, one of the examples, I think, I think Christopher Ferguson in, in one of his articles, talks about this or, or his book talks about, for example, the panic about the Gutenberg printing press and when people could print the Bible in German or French or whatever language and every day people could read it. And the Catholic establishment got very, very panicked by this. But if you think about it, that that panic wasn’t entirely unreasonable because obviously the Gutenberg Grinding Press led to the growth of protestantism. And, you know, this everyday kind of engagement with religion that the Catholics were really trying to, trying to get, trying to stop, you know, they, they wanted to sort of have a monopoly on, on religious practice. So their fear in, in, in to some extent was, was, was quite reasonable. And I think, as, as scientists, we really need to think about, you know, are we just dismissing people’s fears or are we acknowledging that, that there is some kind of reason why they, why, why they, why they have problems with this, with these kind of changes that, that technology is, is, is wreaking upon society?
Ricardo Lopes: And so what would you say would be a proper scientific response to moral panics in society? Because I guess that the two extreme responses would be to just completely dismiss it because, oh, it’s just a moral panic. It doesn’t matter or to sort of jump on the bandwagon of the moral panic and go ahead with it and, and basically say that, oh, yeah, it is completely supported by the scientific evidence, even if it is weak. Right? So how should scientists react to them?
Gordon Ingram: Yeah, I, I think you’re totally right. The reaction has been very polarized. I think there’s also sometimes a different stream discipline. So I get the sense that in psychiatry, they’re a bit more sympathetic to the idea that new technology causes mental problems. A lot of psychologists have been more skeptical. And so you can get a lot of criticism kind of across disciplinary boundaries, which is interesting as well. But, but you’re right, there is people like J Twang, for example, in psychiatry is maybe sometimes has been accused of, of cherry picking the data, you know, focusing on the results of the studies which show harm in ignoring the ones that don’t. On the other hand, you have people in psychology like Chris Ferguson, Linda Kay who basically are almost reading between the lines, almost accusing people like twang who are, who are proposing a danger at or, or or it’s getting the name that’s Bradman, I think is another one in, in, in the US. But they they are accusing them of, of basically almost, you know, making up the, the risk to or emphasizing exaggerating the risk to, to sell books. And I, I think essentially, and I think this is, you know, I, I think there’s room to, to acknowledge that probably both sides are, are acting in good faith and, and are just seeing kind of different aspects of the picture. And we can be a bit more reasonable and just look at the evidence and take a more evidence based approach, acknowledge that there may be certain risks. But probably in the public mind, they have become a bit exaggerated because of the tendency to moral panic that I mentioned, but we can’t just dismiss these, these moral panics. I think sometimes the term moral panic is, is used as a way to shut down debate and just, you know, you’re being unreasonable, you’re engaging in moral panic. And it’s not acknowledging that people do have certain fears which are quite reasonable given our evolutionary history as cultural animals, as I tried to explain in the, in the previous, the previous ones.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. Actually, one of the reactions I tend to like the most are from people like Stuart Rie and other Zoo. For example, when it comes to the potential psychological effects of Instagram and social media on adolescents and particularly girls, I mean, they’ve looked at the evidence and when they write articles about it, usually the conclusion they write there is that we’re not, I mean, it’s sort of a mixed bag, but the evidence in favor of them of there really being negative psychological effects tends to be weak but we’re not sure. I mean, the, the moral panic probably is not warranted, but at this point we can’t really say much about it. Well, that, that’s
Gordon Ingram: what, it, it’s one thing that interests me is that often people like that are, are much more reasonable in the published articles than if you actually follow them on Twitter and, and things like that. They can be a bit more, a bit more kind of nasty in, in what they say in, in social media, which is interesting in itself, you know, maybe it’s just a kind of off the cuff response. They’re not putting as much thought into it as, as when they write an academic article. But you do see some statements basically sort of saying, oh, this is all a myth and, well, actually, you know, the, the there is some kind of evidence that kind of indicates that there are some risks. You can’t just say that there’s no evidence at all, but they, they do in some of the less kind of guarded statements you will, you will find people, especially, someone like Chris Ferguson is very kind of competent on, on Twitter will, will, will say a lot of, a lot of quite strong things on there.
Ricardo Lopes: No. Yeah, I’ve read Doctor Ferguson on the show and these very feisty words. So, we’ll, we’ll get more into the social media stuff later on. But, just before we get into the specific topics that you explore in the book, you focus broadly on three different types of risk, young people’s identity, the types of content that they access and social relationships. So why did you pick these three specifically? I guess I
Gordon Ingram: basically, they, they come when I was thinking of a way to kind of structure the different types of risks, I guess I was thinking about maybe the kind of level of of interaction involved the kind of different types of social interaction really. So the first one I saw was a kind of cultural identity. So for example, indoctrinate, if you think of like indoctrination into a certain group kind of behavior. So obviously an obvious example would be like political or religious radicalization. But also if you think about the availability, for example of kind of different cultural subcultural groups. So groups where they kind of advocate suicide that you do unfortunately get group groups where people kind of give tips for suicide and this sort of thing or even like pro self harm or pro anorexia. So these sort of things where the the online experience kind of facilitates someone kind of choosing a certain kind of identity, which could actually be quite damaging to them. Secondly, just in terms of passive consumption of content, so things like violent video games, they might have damaging effects, pornography, particularly extreme pornography, obviously could have certain damaging effects without any kind of social interaction. It’s simply through consuming content. And then finally, the level of kind of interpersonal interaction where the online media might facilitate some forms of exploitation. And there’s lots of different forms of of exploitation, even kind of economic exploitation sometimes. But I guess the classic examples would be like cyber bullying or online sexual abuse. So basically those kind of three levels of kind of community or cultural identity, passive consumption of content or or interpersonal one on one kind of interaction,
Ricardo Lopes: cyber bullying, by the way, is something that we talked about in our first interview. So for the audience, if you’re interested, please go and watch that one. So let’s start then here in terms of the topics with self-concept and self-esteem in Netherlands. So first of all, tell us a little bit about what these terms mean and then how do they play out online?
Gordon Ingram: Well, that’s a great question and self concept is basically basically kind of identity. So it’s like kind of what kind of person do you see yourself as? And it gets into, you know, it kind of links both personality, you know, what, what, how you sort of see your own behavior, how you see other people perceiving you and also you maybe kind of subculture cultural identity. So whether someone’s a goth or a, a jock or a nerd, you know, it’s kind of so the high school subculture kind of things and self esteem, I think is most people understand. But self esteem is, is kind of whether you see how, how, whether you see other people viewing you positively or negatively. So both of them are kind of linked with how you think of other people perceiving you. And this is something that’s quite new in adolescence. Basically, young Children have the the great luxury of not, not having to think very much about what other people are thinking about them, right? But then eventually you start thinking, hm, actually, you know, that person has a certain image of me and it’s positive or negative. And when you start having to do that over and over again, for all the people around you, it can, it can get quite overwhelming obviously for adolescents, it’s quite new to them. But
Ricardo Lopes: basically you get that sort of an age where you notice that reputation matters.
Gordon Ingram: Exactly. Exactly. And, and again, that’s, that’s, that’s very adaptive and, and I think we talked about that in the last interview as well. It’s something that’s unique to humans, really this kind of this kind of consciousness of their reputation in the whole social group. And pro probably had, you know, important inhibit inhibitory effects on, on, on our behavior in terms of the effects of the online environment on this. I think it’s, it’s a very good question and, and this is why I get a bit, ok, there are people exaggerating the risks. It’s true. But I also get a bit a bit frustrated with people just dismissing the risks out of hand because we really don’t know as, as you said about Stuart Ritchie concluding in his articles, we just don’t have enough evidence now to be really sure about the answer and probably it is gonna have profound effects, not necessarily damaging effects, but profound effects on how we conceive of, of our self concept or self esteem, et cetera. So if you look at adolescents, they’re obviously in a sensitive period, they’re going through massive changes in the self concept, the self esteem, they tend to suffer actually from a kind of cognitive illusion where they overestimate. Because this, this is kind of a common kind of cognitive bias, right? When, when something is new to you, you, you think about it too much. So because they’ve gone from not thinking at all about how other people are, how much other people are thinking about them, they tend to go too much in the other direction and think that other people are thinking about them all the time. Whereas obviously they’re not, I mean, their parents are are thinking about their kids, but most of the time, you know, they’re, they’re thinking about their job or, you know, other things as well. They’re not just thinking about the kids all the time and that’s even more true, obviously, for, for people who aren’t related to them. So you know, they, they’re, they’re friends also have other friends. They’re not just thinking about one friend all the time. They’re not necessarily offended by something they’ve done, et cetera, et cetera. And so they, adolescents can get overly self conscious because they suffer from this illusion that other people are always judging, always observing the behavior, always analyzing their behavior when really they aren’t, you know, devoting so much time for it.
Ricardo Lopes: That sounds very similar to the spotlight effect. Right.
Gordon Ingram: Yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a kind of version of that. Yeah, it is. But it’s particularly, there is a term for it in, in adolescence as well, which I’ve momentarily forgotten but it is in, it is in the book, if you, if you look it up. So, they, they basically have this kind of bias towards, towards sort of feeling themselves more observed than they actually are. And I think it’s interesting to think about how that will interact with online interactions because it does kind of give you maybe a biased view as well, but it can maybe give you kind of more information about how other people are actually judging you. So if you’re constantly posting photos saying different things, you can sort of see how people are reacting to you and it’s not all sort of just left in people’s heads and in ephemeral verbal conversations, you can actually think about it and sort of judge the reaction that your your actions are having on, on other people. So I think this will give in some ways. I think it it could actually be positive. It could help adolescents to get more socially mature and and understand the effects of their actions and their image presentation as on other people. But also in certain individuals, it could be problematic because if they’re very sensitive, they could take certain kinds of reactions quite badly online.
Ricardo Lopes: And are there any important gender differences in online identity?
Gordon Ingram: Oh for sure. Remember though the all gender differences are are statistical rather than absolute because I think there’s a tendency you know, the people outside academic circles can interpret, interpret differences between girls and boys in essentialist kind of ways as if so. So I’m not saying here that all girls are one way and all boys another
Ricardo Lopes: way. Yeah, I mean, we have to keep in mind that these are always average differences and there’s lots of overwhelm.
Gordon Ingram: Yeah. And I know you know that but just in, in terms of one set of viewers to to get the the wrong impression of what I’m saying. But sure, but I think generally we can look at some general statistical differences. So girls tend to spend more time over interacting over pure social networks like Instagram, Snapchat, et cetera. Boys can still have a lot of social interaction online but relatively will be more through the medium of gaming. And of course, there are plenty of girls who enjoy gaming as well. But in terms of statistical differences, boys will be more through gaming. Girls more through sort of pure social networks and, and girls tend to emphasize visual self pre presentation more while boys focus on their accomplishments, competing in things like games, et cetera. You can see this very clearly in the, in the, in the case of online dating as well. Kind of when we get on to maybe talk a bit about online dating later,
Ricardo Lopes: which actually follows the lines of what would be predicted by evolutionary theory,
Gordon Ingram: right. Yeah, this kind of I think this is one area where the evolutionary predictions have been quite well borne out. So there’s some some study by Frank mcandrew, for example, for an early study of Facebook use where they made some pretty clearly pretty good evolutionary driven hypotheses and found some pretty solid evidence that girls and boys were using Facebook in very, in very different ways. And I think it also explains the the the the kind of visual presentation in girls and their dominance in this sort of pure social network space. Kind of explains maybe as well why Instagram has become more popular than Facebook among young people? Because if you look at Instagram, the image is very much the kind of center of it there is text there and it, you know, the textural interaction can be very important on Instagram as well, but it’s like it’s secondary to the presentation of the image. And I think that makes suits girls better than the kind of more text driven interface that, that Facebook.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, those long written essays or texts or texts is something that you would find more on Facebook. Yeah,
Gordon Ingram: exactly. Exactly. Meanwhile, with, if you look at games, what are the kind of most popular games these days, there’s been an evolution in the sort of games that boys are playing. They tend to be things like for Fortnite or Valorant, which are very kind of social experiences, but they’re different kind of social experience than a social network because they’re more team based. So it’s more that you’re kind of cooperating with other people competing against other teams. So you are learning social skills, you’re engaging in social interaction. But it’s always for the purpose of getting achievements in the game, which is very different from how girls are interacting online.
Ricardo Lopes: We’ll talk more about gaming in a bit. But another problem or worry that many people have has to do with screen time. And I guess that in this particular case, people also worry about scree screen time when it comes to infants and young Children. But here we’re focusing on adolescents. So do we know if screen time really has any relationship with well-being? Does it have an impact on well-being.
Gordon Ingram: Well, there’s been an awful lot of debate about this as you probably, you probably know. And the consensus is that any effects are, are pretty small. So there’s one area where there does seem to be more moral panic than is really warranted by the data. And, and I think most, almost everyone would agree these days that it doesn’t make much sense to focus on screen time in the absolute, there was like an American Society of psychiatrists that used to recommend a two plus two rule, you know, sort of two hours a day and then incrementing that for each age or something like that from two years of age. But they kind of abandoned that sort of thing now because they recognize, you know, if you’re doing, say a zoom call with your grandparents, if the child’s doing a zoom call with their grandparents, you don’t really have to worry about how much time they’re spending. Zoom calling their grandparents. You know, this is pretty clearly a positive social interaction. So, I think it very much the focus is now much more on what, what Children are doing with their time online. Obviously there are extremes. So if a teenager is spending 18 or 20 hours a day on that, and there are teenagers who spend 18 or 20 hours a day online. Unfortunately, this, this is, this is a thing. It’s hard to see how that can be good. For them really because you know, it’s obviously going to interfere with sleeping, eating and bathing, et cetera. So then they’re not really doing enough things off outside the screen time that they should be doing. But likewise, we have to look at the other extreme as well, someone’s spending and, and often people have found this kind of U shaped curve where you find negative effects for both, for both ends. And if someone’s spending zero hours online, what you get is, is this person, how is this gonna person gonna be seen by other kids? The this teenager, you know, they’re not gonna have the same cultural references, they’re not gonna be able to interact, they’re gonna be missing out on a lot of the online interactions that, that the other teams are, are engaging in. So that’s not gonna be very good for them, good for them either. So, I think the extremes tend to be, tend to be quite bad, but in the middle, it’s not so much how much time they’re spending online as whether they’re engaging in positive activities and whether they also have positive activities outside of, of screen time. So whether they’re also doing exercise, meeting up with friends, you know, going to, to see music or, or, or, or other cultural community activities. And if they’re still getting plenty of those opportunities, I don’t think it really matters a great deal whether they’re spending, you know, 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week online. It’s, it’s just kind of lost in the, in the noise room. Yeah.
Ricardo Lopes: So another thing that we’ve already touched on a little bit earlier. And actually this is very interesting because back in September, October 2021 there was a data leak from Instagram that even again people like Stuart Ritchie wrote about and what he said back then I remember it was something along the lines of, oh yeah, we can’t really tell from these data that there’s any negative psychological effects of Instagram on girls specifically. But what do we know about the effects of Instagram use on body image? And I guess in this case, it would apply mostly to girls so
Gordon Ingram: well that that’s something I might, I might take issue with actually. And, and I think, I think there’s been a lot of focus on girls which is interesting, you have to think culturally why has there been this this this kind of focus on on girls? Maybe because like I was saying, we know that girls tend to present themselves more, more visually. So it seems natural that there might be a special effect on on girls. But actually, there has been a ton of study on a ton of studies on Instagram and body image in the last few years. And yet we still don’t seem to know very much there isn’t you, you look at the evidence, it’s kind of like, like like Richie says, it’s kind of like me basically this, there’s not much, there’s not much there. And again, I think it’s because there’s so many different ways of using Instagram basically. So if a teenage girl is sort of doom scrolling as, as we say, you know, through, through pictures of skinny models, you know, interacting very passively and just thinking, oh, you know, I’m so fat compared to, compared to these girls that I see online clearly, that can be a negative experience for her. But then there are also plenty of people using Instagram. You must have heard the term fits. So when people are following people to get exercise tips or diet tips, and they’re also using it as motivation. So they’re seeing people that they respect who are going out and exercising early in the morning thinking actually, you know, I should do that that’s working for them. I should do that as well. So it can be like a really strong motivation to, to, to get this visual evidence that people are actually engaging in this behavior. So it very much depends on the person and how they’re using Instagram as to whether they’re using it positively or negatively. And it’s very hard to get at this quantitatively. Maybe with qualitative studies, you can say this is working for people. This this aspect is problematic, but it’s very hard to scale that up to a proper quantitative study. And, and really sort of see what’s positive for people, what’s negative for people and going back to the to the gender issues. What you notice is, is a lot of the, the early studies on Instagram only included female participants. They, they actually just didn’t bother looking at, at males. Since then. There have been some other studies with men finding that they actually share a lot of the can share a lot of the same problems positively with, with body image that, that, that they actually it can make them less satisfied with their own body if they, if they’re constantly being exposed to, to kind of alpha male, both sort of figures online. And when you look at studies that most of the studies that I’ve seen that compared including a couple of my own students who, who did studies of Instagram use in Colombia. And when there basically weren’t any gender effects, I mean, and, and a lot of published studies are the same that you don’t see that girls are necessarily more con concerned about their body image than men are in relation to Instagram use. So I think it is kind of culture bias to think this is particularly damaging to girls, which may maybe it isn’t necessarily the case.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. And, and actually that’s a very interesting point because I mean, if we look across the internet, it’s also very frequent for us to see I mean, content targeting men and, I, I mean, pictures of blood. Yeah. And, and things related to levels of muscle mass and all of that. So, yeah, I mean, it would be at least intuitive to, to a certain extent, to expect that at least certain men would perhaps feel more insecure with their bodies if they think that those bodies that they see on Instagram or elsewhere would be the ideal or the ones that women or girls tend
Gordon Ingram: to are attracted to. Exactly. Yeah. And and maybe it wasn’t something that they thought very much about, you know, girls were already thinking a lot about their body image but men before it became so kind of in their face with Instagram maybe weren’t thinking about it. So, so that could be a problem as well.
Ricardo Lopes: So another thing that people have been worrying a lot about and going back to Jin Twenge and I guess Jonathan Haidt as well has to do with the impacts of social media on self esteem and depression and, and also on the extreme end se side. So what do we know about it at this moment? I mean, sh should we really worry that much about the potential negative psychological effects that social media might have, particularly when it comes to these issues, depression suicide and so on?
Gordon Ingram: Well, I think that there’s some really elegant series in that area. I remember some years ago, my friend Charlotte, please published a really great evolutionary hypothesis about social media use and depression and, and how depression might be linked to negative social comparison. So it, it, it makes a lot of sense theoretically. But when you actually look at the data, it’s not that there isn’t that much data to support it. Again, it it seems to be this kind of U shaped thing and that the extremes might be particularly bad. But if you’re saying is spending say seven hours a week on social media versus 14 hours a week, you know, both are kind of in the normal range generally. What’s bad for mental health is doing things which are outside of the normal range of behavior. So as long as you’re kind of keeping things fairly normal living a a fairly normal life, you probably aren’t gonna have too many, too many mental health problems as well. The psycho that I read that most of the psycho psychological evidence in that area anyway. So I think even with the extremes, the problem is as well that there isn’t necessarily causal evidence. So people tend to report a correlation as if it was evidence for a causal effect of social media use. But in fact, of course, it could be the other way around. It could be that the fact that someone is already starting to have mental health problems is what causes them to use social media in a in a very extreme sort of way. So for me, I, I tend to take a very pragmatic approach to, to academia these days. And it, it ii, I would prefer to kind of almost forget about the causal question because I don’t think we’re ever going to work out the causality in a way that everyone’s happy and everyone is satisfied about it and everyone agrees on it. So I would kind of tend to say, well, it is important to look at how someone’s using the internet. But the extreme forms of internet use might be more useful as a kind of warning sign that someone could be having or about to have some sort of mental health problems. So if you, if you find, for example, I know certain people like they’re always kind of, you know, you message them and they respond instantly or you, you leave a Facebook comment and, and they’re instantly kind of responding to it and you think you could think, you know, why is that, why is that person, you know, so kind of plugged in online that they’re, they may be a bit obsessive about instantly responding when looking at the phone, constantly checking the phone that the the kind of nomo phobias, it’s called the smartphone addiction. Yeah. And maybe that’s indicative of, of something they’re kind of trying to escape from in the, in the offline world. Maybe they’re not as, as kind of immersed as they should be always in, in their interactions with the people around them in the offline world. So that could be something that, that’s kind of a sign of a sign of risk in their, in their offline social interactions. But then conversely, if someone is using social media a lot and then one day and I’ve seen people do this as well. There’s a, I’m leaving Facebook, you know, I’ve had enough of Twitter and I’m just going and, and that’s actually been a big part of their life and then they just suddenly just cut that off. I mean, I don’t nothing wrong with, you know, decreasing your use over time. But may, maybe it’s a bit of a warning sign if someone is just going to zero social media use as well and maybe that it would be a good idea to reach out to that person, maybe make a phone call to them a few days later and just kind of check that they’re, they’re feeling ok and that sort of thing, you know, because so I think I would prefer to see these kind of extremes of internet use it not as so much in causal terms and more kind of possible indicators or warning signs that, that, that something might be wrong there. Did you see what I mean?
Ricardo Lopes: No. And I mean, here I’m just going to comment to make a comment because, it bothers me quite a bit when people focus solely on social media and are a little bit obsessed about it when it comes to the rising rates of depression and suicide among young people. Because, I mean, aren’t there other alternative or competing hypothesis to consider here? Like, for example, the social economic, political context that we’re living in, I mean, the future is very uncertain. We’ve had economic crisis. I mean, jobs are less secure. So I, I mean, I guess that there would be other factors to consider here. You totally
Gordon Ingram: anticipated what I was about to say though, actually about, about suicide in, in particular. You know, a lot of the discussion about suicide tends to be anecdotal. You know, say someone was on a, an online group discussing suicide and then killed themselves or someone was being cyberbullied and then killed themselves. The problem is you don’t, you don’t know, it’s impossible to know for sure that that person wouldn’t have killed themselves if, if they hadn’t been engaging in those, in those online activities. And when you look at the quantitative data, exactly what you were saying, there’s social and economic factors, particularly the economy, there seems to be a much stronger link between levels of suicide and whether the economy is doing well or doing badly than with the introduction of social media. There’s much, much clearer signal in, in the data, I think for the, for the effect. So you could say, if you really want to do something about suicides don’t go attacking social networks, focus on, on getting the economy better or maybe making more opportunities because young people are always saying, you know, and, and, and it’s very true that the, the opportunities for, for work and for security in the, in the labor market aren’t there that, that, that we’re there in their parents’ time or their grandparents time. So maybe we should be to, to really combat suicide. We should be focusing on creating those kind of opportunities and giving young people a sense of a, a productive future that they can have rather than rather than focusing on social networks.
Ricardo Lopes: So another topic then is there such a thing as internet addiction? I mean, and if there is what would be the criteria here to classify, be a particular behavior as internet addiction,
Gordon Ingram: I think that this is very kind of controversial idea and that there’s been controversy about being included in the World Health Organization, manual, you know, disorders. I personally think that the concept makes sense. It does exist, but a lot of people are, are really implacably opposed to the, the very concept of the behavioral addiction. They want to reserve the term basically for substance, substance addictions. And I don’t think we, we’re gonna resolve that debate anytime, anytime soon. I think people are very kind entrenched in those positions, but I think both both sides would agree that it’s not just about how much time, you know, again thinking of screen time, addiction isn’t just about how much time that you spend online. It’s, it’s more about whether it’s interfering with other aspects of your life and how good or bad you feel about the activity. The problem is that when people are measuring you know, the negative effects, they tend to focus on the time and not whether someone is, is using the internet in, in problematic ways, which might be a better indicator really of, of, of, you know, potential negative effects. So for example, if you think of something which is pretty controversial, whether someone can be addicted to online porn, it probably depends a lot on the kind of social context. Right? In fact, there’s some studies have shown, it’s someone’s religious from a religious, strongly religious upbringing. It’s more damaging for them to use online porn than, than someone who’s not from a religious background.
Ricardo Lopes: So, and actually, actually that bit, I’ve had an interview two years ago with Doctor Nicole Rosi and she has done work on that and at least according to her work and her conclusions, it seems that it, it is tied a lot to moral considerations, right? And mo most people who present themselves or claim that they are foreign ethics that are religious. So,
Gordon Ingram: And they may even have issues with, you know, masturbation and that sort of thing because it’s because they see it as a kind of something that, that is prohibited in the Bible or whatever. So, I think that kind of context and also, you know, you got to look at whether someone’s married or not. For example, if someone is using porn, only a couple of nights a week, but it’s when the wife has gone to bed and so they’re losing sleep because of it. They’re feeling guilty because of it. They may have more negative effects from that than a single guy who’s just using it in the early evening when he comes home from work. And it’s just a kind of way of relaxing after work. You know what I mean? So it’s, you’ve got to look at the social context and it’s not just about how much, you know, how many hours someone is engaging in a certain social activity, it’s about whether they feel a compulsion to do it, whether they feel that it’s interfering with other aspects of their life. And, and I think everyone can agree that that’s the kind of the damaging aspect of it, whether or not we call it addiction. It’s whether someone is, feels that it’s having negative effects on their life or whether no, it’s just something I do to, to relax and I’m not really worried about it, that, that really makes it damaging or not.
Ricardo Lopes: But if it’s the case that many people who say that they suffer from porn addiction are religious, I mean, would we then conclude that the problem there is the access to the program gray or the religious beca because, I mean, of course, it’s affecting their lives, it’s affecting their mental well being. But wouldn’t we say then that it’s mostly because of them having those moral values or?
Gordon Ingram: Well, I don’t think it’s, it does, come play a part in, in the propensity to see. But I don’t think it’s necessary, you know, it’s necessary to be religious to, to have problems with addict. And you could also look at, say gambling addiction, you’d probably find kind of similar phenomenon there. It might be more common for religious people to say they have, they have an issue with that. But I think it means you’ve got to look at the whole social context when you’re treating someone right. And not just say you can’t just sort of have a cut off and it’s amazing how many empirical studies will have a cut off of a number. Oh, if they’re doing this activity more than three hours per day, it’s, it’s problematic then. No, it, it’s, you got to look at the, the social context and that the person is in to say whether the, the addiction is something that’s going to be problematic for them or not. And I think really we need to listen to people more who are actually engaging in the activities and, and take a more, a less kind of number crunchy approach and more kind of pragmatic, you know, what are the problems that this person is, is facing in this situation?
Ricardo Lopes: So, let’s talk a little bit about gaming here, particularly online social gaming and the social bit here is very important because there are games that we play alone. So I guess the effects here wouldn’t be the same. So, but when it comes to online social gaming, what do you think are the most interesting psychological aspects to explore here?
Gordon Ingram: Well, I think that would, that would probably be an interview. So there’s so much you can look at. One of the things we’ve looked at a lot is prestige. So the the, you know, the importance of with, with some of my students at Los Angeles, we looked at the prestige and online gaming and you know how boys in particular might be kind of driven to by evolutionary pressures to kind of have this competition for prestige, which explains a lot of the, the sort of behavior in the games. But I think for me that if I could pick one thing to investigate, it would be gender, probably because I think that the special identity of female gamers is really interesting because it’s something that’s becoming much more common. If you remember back to the eighties and nineties gaming was seen as something very male, a very male activity. It still is probably a little more male than female. But I think females make up something like 40% of, of committed gamers. Now. It’s becoming much more, much more common for women and girls to, to engage in. So I think it would be really interesting to see how they navigate being a female gamer. Do they? We’ve seen evidence for my students that they do suffer discrimination. Men still make comments about, go, you know, oh, they’re, they’re only good for playing a healer, that sort of thing. They’re not, they’re not good as a fighter. So you do, you do see quite a lot of sexism still? So it would be interesting to see how they, how they kind of deal with discrimination and what they get out of gaming. Do they get the same things that, that males get out of gaming or are they getting something different out of gaming? And why is it such an important part of their identity? You know, how do they, they kind of navigate that identity? So, shout out to any potential postgraduate students if you want to, if you want to come and work with me on, on that topic, I’d be really fascinated to do kind of mixed method study of female gamers. And it would be really, really cool.
Ricardo Lopes: And so just to tackle another moral panic, what about violent video games? Do they really lead to any sort of violent behavior? Or is there not enough evidence to support that.
Gordon Ingram: Well, I think II I spent quite a lot of time that in the book and I genuinely came at it with an open mind and because it was, you know, as I say, the, the positions were so polarized, it was hard to, to see, you know, straight off with who was right. But, it does, after reviewing all the evidence of over, you know, decades of analysis of this question, it does seem like a fairly clear cut example of a, of a moral panic. I think so. And it is something which has gone down over time, you know. So back in with Columbine in the nineties, people were taking quite seriously the idea that video games were causing these shootings. It does seem to have kind of fallen out of the discourse a bit these days. And I think Ferguson in particular is very convincing, sing on this. He’s basically pretty much devoted most of his, his career to debunking us.
Ricardo Lopes: By the way, when it came to Columbine, there were, there were also people who said that the culprit was, Marilyn Manson and violent.
Gordon Ingram: Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking that when you said as well about other moral panics in history, you know, there’s a lot of history of rock music, rap music as well. You know, people say, oh, this is gonna, is going to corrupt the minds of our youth and so on. But, but, I think that the most, the most convincing piece of evidence for me was, the, the overall rates of, of aggression and violent behavior in society. If you look at the last 30 years, they’ve basically gone on quite a steep decline, at least in, in developed societies. And it’s, it’s, it’s hard to square that with the, obviously the huge growth in popularity in violent games. You know, if they really were making people more violent, wouldn’t we have seen exactly the opposite that, that rates of interpersonal aggression would have gone up. So if anything, they may, it, it more tends to support the kind of the, the opposite theory, which is that there can be an outlet for aggression and actually people can work off the the frustrations on these games instead of being aggressive in interpersonal ways. And I think that another convincing piece of data is Ferguson’s analysis of, of mass shooters where he shows that actually, although some of them played, you know, first person shooter video games, this is if anything lower than the rate in the general population. So again, that supports the theory that no, maybe that these things are actually if anything helping people deal with their aggression and not, and, and it’s the people who, who avoid them, who may actually in some cases are more problems. So, I think the only way that it, it’s plausible that they may have an effect is perhaps by improving the accuracy. So, if people have that should be nothing because it’s quite serious. But if, if people have been, practicing a lot of first person shooter games, if they’re in an actual mass shooting situation, they may actually kill more people because they’re just used to, more used to, to pressing the trigger, aiming and firing. But that doesn’t really seem worth kind of focusing legislation on in, in contrast with maybe restricting the availability of, of, of weapons to people who are mentally unstable and that sort of thing.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. So we’ve already touched a little bit on pornography earlier, but apart from the addiction side of things, what about some of its other supposed harmful effects on people’s sexual lives? I mean, does it have any or
Gordon Ingram: again another controversial subject? And one that’s difficult to, there’s a lot of people arguing very, very different things. And the other great difficulty with investigating pornography, particularly with adolescence is it’s there’s a real lack of studies on it. Particularly with underage people because there are obviously ethical, huge ethical difficulties with doing. So there’s some questionnaire based studies. But when at the level of, you know, in depth interviews or, and especially experimental studies, I mean, it basically just can’t, there’s no way in an experimental situation that you can show pornographic material to a minor even though that we know that most particularly underage males most underage males above about 14 years of age are watching pornography all the time, but you can’t actually study the effects of it in a lab. So that does lead to huge kind of evidence. Evidence gap really. I think there are some legitimate concerns there. There’s not a huge, as with screen time and, and violent video games, there’s not really much evidence or depression as well. There’s not really much evidence that, you know, say watching a certain number of hours per week, more than another person really affects your sex life or anything else in, in any other way. I I think one of the concerns with adolescents in particular is though, is that they might be getting a lot of their sexual education basically from porn, which obviously is a concern because porn is not particularly realistic in his depiction of real sexual relationships. So there is some evidence from positive studies that they may that young boys or adolescent boys may be pressuring sexual partners into repeating certain things that they’ve seen online. And this obviously can be quite distressing for the girls and lead to frustrations in the relationship. And it’s not a particularly positive thing in terms of their, in terms of their sort of learning romantic relationships and so on. So I think that is a genuine extent. I don’t think we should sort of dismiss that concern out of hand because it’s very, it because of it, because of the ethical problems, it’s impossible to show that that doesn’t have harmful effects. Right. So we can’t be sure that it doesn’t have harmful effects. So I don’t think we should just dismiss that sort of concern, but in terms of things like, you know, more severe problems like sexual assault, there isn’t really any hard evidence that, most porn use will affect rates of sexual assault, which is sometimes, you know, kind of a criticism of fem of some feminists, not all feminists, but that some feminists will make of a p some feminists are actually quite prop use, but some will make the criticism that, you know, it could, it could lead to more sexual violence, more sexual assault. There isn’t much evidence for that except in some studies, I did notice when they focused on violent porn use, they did seem in some of the meta analysis when they kind of controlled for that. It did seem that that might be again, maybe not causal but maybe a warning sign. If someone is, is watching a lot of of violent porn that they may be a possible possible offender.
Ricardo Lopes: So if I remember correctly in the conversation I had with Doctor Nicole Rosy again. I think that when I asked her if porn could have any harmful psychological effects or harm relationship specifically. And here we’re focusing mostly on heterosexual relationships. She said that it could have a negative effects in the sense that if the, if, for example, the, the man is watching pornography and then, his partner knows, then the woman might get a little bit insecure because of the, let’s say the kinds of women, the, the, her partner is exposed to. So, I mean, she might get in insecure because she doesn’t look like them, she doesn’t perform like them and stuff like that. So that’s something that she mentioned
Gordon Ingram: or even see it as cheating. I’m sure some women do do see it as a kind of as a kind of cheating or some men. That’s why I think as well that it’s not only with religious people that you might get kind of kind of negative feelings about porn news because you could have someone who feels like, you know, compelled to watch porn, but at the same time, they feel like they’re kind of cheating on their partner by doing it. So I think you need, you do need to look at the complexity of the, of the social relationship. On the other hand, you do get couples who will watch porn together and enjoy it. So it, it does very much depend on the, on the, on the social context and that’s why it’s difficult to really find patterns in the quantitative data because you’re kind of averaging a whole lot of positive, negative, neutral situations and there’s, there’s just not much signal in the data.
Ricardo Lopes: So one thing also that I would like to ask you about is privacy. Of course, this is something that, for example, people work in the ethics of technology, talk a lot about. But that’s from a philosophical perspective, but from a more psychological perspective, are there risks to privacy associated with content sharing?
Gordon Ingram: I think obviously there, there are a lot of risks. And there’s a lot been written about them. The one in terms of, of picking out one of the things that really stood out to me when it was, when I was doing a lot of reading for the, for the book. And I remember it is kind of one of the most kind of distressing things I was reading about in connection with privacy in particular was revenge porn. So there are some really horrifying stories of, of, you know, women who, who’d had stuff shared, including by, you know, their current husband and, and, and this sort of thing. So it really brought home that a lot of the debate about privacy and people being exploited online through having open privacy and this sort of thing. It, it’s kind of missing the point, which is a lot of this online abuse is, is by people who, who know you, right? So, es especially in the, in the case of women, it tends to be by ex-partners or even current partners and so to me, I, I would tend to, to actually, I think there’s a lot being written about privacy. I think teens and young people these days are actually very conscious of privacy. They kind of grow up like it. Like we were saying, at the start, they’re very concerned naturally about their reputation. So they very quickly learn and, you know, they’re very savvy about the controls and things. They very quickly learn how to restrict content to certain people and so on. I would, I would say that we should focus more on abuse by, you know, within social relationships and really, you know, criminalize more that kind of online abuse, you know, sharing images without someone’s consent, you know, very delicate, very sensitive images without someone, someone’s consent is something that has been criminalized in certain jurisdictions, but it’s still very piecemeal in, in terms of, of where it’s illegal, where not. And I think we really need to reach more in, in international standards on, on dealing with that as a, as a kind of crime, almost equivalent to in-person sexual abuse.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, when it comes to the criminology side of things, that’s actually a recurrent theme about how many types of abuse out there online and offline actually occur between people that have a, a close relationship than between strangers.
Gordon Ingram: Exactly. Exactly. And, and, and so privacy is kind of irrelevant because you trust that person, you share things with them and, and then, you know, the relationship goes so, and suddenly they, they, they’re really, kind of abusing you online. So,
Ricardo Lopes: so, another thing that sometimes people worry about is the negative effects that the use of technology might have on education. But actually, what do we know about? Perhaps the advantages that, the lessons Children can take from new technologies because the, there are some. Right.
Gordon Ingram: Yeah. II, I would love to see more research on that and, and in general on the, I think a lot of the debate has focused on the negative aspects of internet use. You know, I, I came of age in the, in the nineties, there was a lot of optimism about, about the internet. And sometimes I wonder where did all that go? Now all you hear is like, oh, the internet is making people depressed, is making people suicidal, et cetera, et cetera. And, and it’s, well, you know, it has, it still has a lot of potential. I think it still has an incredible potential for bringing, bringing people together. And one of the ways you can see that quite clearly is in, in education, the problem is a lot of the research has been on educational intervention. So someone will say, well, you know, we used a Facebook group in my classroom to teach a foreign language and, and this sort of thing and really what I think is lacking is, is an understanding of the, you know, the basic research of how students including both high school students and, and university students that are really using technology to help their learning. Because with my other hat, as a, as a university teacher, I really noticed that students will use technology in a way that wasn’t really available to me when I was at, at college. So they will have a whatsapp group when they have like a group assignment, have a whatsapp group and they will kind of allocate the tasks out. And so they’re really using technology in a very organic way to kinda share the knowledge in their, in their social group and help the learning. And there’s some evidence this may even sort of flatten out some of the differences in in attainment. So, you know, the the great majority of the class is actually reaching a, a kind of slightly higher level than they would have before before technology. And they’re really just, just AAA lack of basic research on, on how students are doing that and and whether it’s possible for us to work with that because we tend to just as, as university teachers and I’m sure even more as high school teachers just ignore this kind of back channel behind the scenes learning that’s taken place in the social groups. And if there’s some way that you could kind of tap into that and kind of help certain students lead sort of mini groups and use technology to kind of mentor other students I think could be really, really interesting. But I’ve never really seen any research but just looking into the the kind of basic social interest because it’s so private, right? A lot, a lot of this social network use, especially with something like whatsapp is just, it’s just really hidden and, and really difficult together.
Ricardo Lopes: So let’s talk a little bit about online dating apps. That’s something that people in recent years like. Yeah, sure. So are there also any important gender differences here in terms of its use?
Gordon Ingram: Yeah. Again, we’re in I did a study myself on Tinder with actually some, it was driven by some undergraduate students who wanted to do, like we kind of developed a lot of their, their their sort of semester project and with my, with my long term collaborator, Antonio Oliveira de Rosa as well, who has been a really, really good collaborator with me. So we had some evolutionary hypotheses, not all of them were, were supportive, but some of them were, were pretty well supported. So, if you look at the photos that people are posting on Tinder, women tended to show off basically their whole body. So sort of advertising, if you wanna take a kind of a kind of traditional evolutionary psychology approach, it’s easier to see why they want to sort of might want to sort of advertise that sort of aspect of their fitness. Whereas men were really, were not showing the, I mean, women do things that use the, the mirror selfies so that they use a mirror to show their whole body. Mirror selfies are quite a, my, my, my wife actually told me off once for, for posting on myself. She said no, only girls do that, only girls and gay men do that basically. So, you know, it’s it, it, it’s, it’s not something that men tend to do if you look at the sort of photos that men were, I think tend to be just the face or if it was the whole body, it was with something like cuddling a dog or something, you know, to show, you know, I have a nice kind of sensitive
Ricardo Lopes: or perhaps more focused on the upper body,
Gordon Ingram: right? Yeah, maybe a bit more on the upper body but not, you know, so much showing the body more themselves with something. So for example, with a nice car or with the Eiffel Tower, you know, just showing you can think of it as showing their resources, right? So travel, travel is like, I’ve got the resources to go off to another country and, and take a picture of myself there or maybe getting a university degree, that sort of thing. And also they tended to include more text. So they would have more information about their educational background. I’m an engineer or their profession, you know, their, their current job basically. What I’d be really interested in looking at and there was a study out a couple of months ago on the linguistic interaction. So I think there’s even more differences once the match has been made, there’s a lot of differences between, you know, who’s kind of leading the conversation, that sort of thing and, and the kind of different linguistic strategies that maybe the two sides have. But again, this is quite hidden. So there isn’t a lot of a lot of evidence on them.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. But do we see any changes as young people gain more experience interacting with potential partners in terms of their behavior in online dating apps?
Gordon Ingram: I think this is, this is definitely like a topic for for future research and future research needs to look at. I think the key question here is how will the new normal of online dating? Because there’s evidence that it has almost become the norm and almost the majority of people meet, meet new romantic partners online and how will it affect the the process of gaining experience of of gender partners? Are people going to have more partners on average before they settle down? I think that would be quite a reasonable hypothesis, but we, we just don’t know at the moment whether online dating is going to gonna lead to people taking longer going through this bigger kind of potential market of, of, of partners before they settle on a long term partner. And also there’s a question of if you meet your partner online, does that mean you’re more likely to start looking around when you become dissatisfied with your partner? Thinking? Well, I met them online. There were loads of others that I could have ended up with. So maybe I’ll go and take a look at this. I could end up with someone better if I if I go back to the online market. So it’s very difficult to answer those questions because really you need, we, we need to start looking at and I’m not really aware of any really long term longitudinal studies in this area, but that’s what you need to really answer those questions is kind of large scale long term longitudinal studies which are very costly and, and obviously time consuming to work out.
Ricardo Lopes: But at least at this moment, I mean, when you hear perhaps some more conservative people claiming that perhaps online dating apps promote hookup culture and short term relationships. I mean, at least as far as we know, I mean, we don’t know actually. Right. I, I
Gordon Ingram: think, I think it’s a reasonable with like with a lot of these things, I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis, but you can also see the political reasons they would have for saying that. So sure, I think, yeah, but so like I tend to get dissatisfied with people who, who just have a knee jerk response. So, ah, no, that’s crap. You know, because I, I think they’re just responding to the politics mostly and I think it is a reasonable hypothesis but actually answering the question would be, would, would be very time consuming and costly to do properly.
Ricardo Lopes: And so, and there are, there also cultural and personality differences to consider here.
Gordon Ingram: Again, this is, I think this is one mostly for it. It’s amazing. I mean, there is a lot of research on online dating, but a lot of it just seems to be kind of scratching the surface so you can get, you know, online dating in Turkey, online dating in the Philippines, whatever. But there’s a little, there, there’s very little which is actually really putting everything together or say doing a systematic comparison between eight different countries. There just doesn’t seem to be that kind of level of, of analysis. But you would expect, yeah, there would be a lot of, a lot of differences also with personality. Again, I’ve seen very little in personality, but you would imagine I would, I would predict that there would be a lot of personality differences. A problem there is obviously with self report. It’s, if you’re dealing with self report, there’s gonna be a lot of bias. A lot of social presentation bias. When you, when you’re talking about something like online dating, that’s why with our study, we were more just based on analyzing the profiles and the kind of differences in the profiles because it, it’s a sort of area where, where people are gonna, gonna really bias their, their presentation of what they’re doing quite a lot, I think.
Ricardo Lopes: Well, well, actually one very interesting thing I talked about. I talked recently with, an evolutionary psychologist from Brazil and he did work on behavior in online dating apps in Brazil specifically. So I’m not sure if this would generalize to other countries. And he told me that at least people online dating app users in Brazil tend to score higher on socio sexuality than the non users.
Gordon Ingram: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely predict that we did a, did a study with Antonio on, on socio sexuality as well on how people kind of evaluate different faces, but we didn’t kind of get, we didn’t really support that there wasn’t much difference basically in socio sexuality. But yeah, we definitely, and I think our members, I don’t know if it was the same guy that you were talking about. But I remember a study saying that showing that Tinder users were more likely to score score highly on sos I, I think so because it’s just that you’re kind of you’re kind of looking for. Yeah, again, again, this is maybe sort of short term mating strategy based was a short term mating strategy isn’t it? But then these days it’s not, it’s not uncommon to to, to, to, you know, meet your, your wife on Tinder. So it has become much more, much more common.
Ricardo Lopes: So, as I said earlier in our first conversation, we talked a lot about cyberbullying, but just to perhaps recap a little bit what we talked about back then and perhaps there’s also five years on new information about it. So, in what ways does it differ from offline bullying? Well, it can be
Gordon Ingram: One of the ways that the difference differs obviously is that you, you can always feel vulnerable to it. I think that’s one of the hardest aspects to deal with. So if you receive a message at home where you, you’re kind of used to feeling safe, you know, in your own bedroom and then suddenly a message pops up on your phone and you’re, you’re feeling bad. Th this can be quite psychologically distressing, but I think they can feel there’s nowhere to get away from it. Another another distressing aspect can be the kind of online dog pal kind of thing where, where you get sort of a lot of people engaging, sort of joining in piling on the, the bullying and, and that can be one of the most distressing forms. So for example, if you have a video that’s shared against someone’s will and then it goes viral and even people who don’t know you’ve never met, you are kind of mocking you online. I think that can be, be very distressing, particularly for adolescents who have this kind of this bias to focus on the reputation and how other people are, are evaluating them. They, they’re very vulnerable to that. On the other hand, there is, I’ve seen evidence that, not everyone agrees that cyber you, the kind of image that the public image that presented of cyberbullying is that it’s almost worse than, than, than traditional good old physical bullying. But actually, if you look at at victims a lot, particularly boys often tend to say that actually they find physical bullying worse because you have that you have the kind of physical fear factor. So the bigger boy is slapping you around the head or whatever, you can actually almost fear for your life a bit. You know, how far is this guy gonna go? You know, and it can be quite, quite intimidating. Whereas, you know, boys particularly will often take the, the cyber thing kinda, you know, they’ll just ignore it, just block the person, just ignore the messages. And then I, I think it depends a lot on, on the severity. Again, if, if lots of people are joining in and you feel lots of people are ganging up on you online, that can maybe be worse. But if it’s just one idiot kind of sending you stupid messages it’s just, you can, maybe it’s not as damaging as people think it is. So, I think in itself again, you got to look at the specifics of the act and in itself it isn’t necessarily more or less damaging, really.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. But perhaps one of the more complicated things there would be that it’s potentially something that would go around 24 7. Right. Because, I mean, if it occurs at school, it only occurs when you’re there but if it’s online it can occur anytime. Yeah, that,
Gordon Ingram: that, that, yeah, like I was saying that that’s definitely, but it, it’s kind of swinging some roundabouts a bit because then you don’t have usually at the same level of a physical threat. I think one of the, you know, one of the most sinister things people can do is sometimes sort of turn the online physicals, I’ve heard cases of say, delivering a pizza, or, or delivering other things to the person or the, or what do they call it? The, the swap where they do the swatting. So then they actually like, say that they’re suspecting someone of a serious crime and, and the, and the police can actually send a swat team around and, you know, that, that, that’s when it, it, it, it, you know, it may be the most sort of serious form of online or the, or the kind of doxing where you’re like, releasing someone’s, you know, with, with, yeah, not so much with young people, but you get that with, with old, with adults on, on Twitter and with, with someone who is sort of famous or something like that. But but yeah, the, the, you know, the, the, the kind, the kind of making the the that sort of crossing the line between the virtual and physical maybe can be quite intimidating thinking also maybe like sort of surveillance photos posting those that sort of thing. So, you know, that that can be maybe where it becomes extremely threatening. Yeah.
Ricardo Lopes: So on a more positive note, now, what are some of the benefits and opportunities on the internet when it comes to intergroup and cross cultural contacts?
Gordon Ingram: Well, I think with the, with the kind of more anonymous forms of communication, text based communication, there’s evidence that can be quite good for promoting intergroup contact in the early stages. Because one of the problems, if you, if you kind of have two groups who’ve been engaged in conflict, say, you know, we’ve got obvious example at the moment with with Jews and, and, and Palestinians in Israel where, you know, you can imagine at the moment, it would be be almost impossible to get them in a room together. And if things are quite if things are very kind of sensitive, you can actually get an unfortunate phenomenon when you try and get contact between groups in the, in the offline world that they can actually polarize and, and end up actually have a big argument and, and they come away almost. There have been examples of workshops like that where they, the groups unfortunately came away almost more polarized than they were before punta. So one, there is evidence that sometimes having the initial contact online because it kind of removes the the kind of salience of the cultural differences. You know, you don’t see the immediate visual difference that someone is wearing different clothes, different hairstyle or whatever. And you can just kind of talk about the things that connect you. So you kind of have, I guess it’s a bit like the sort of interactions and online dating where you have the hyper personalization where you tend to sort of see the positive aspects. So you can actually get that bias with the intergroup communication as well. But I would say you probably do need to have physical to get a really true and group contact, you would need to have still need to have physical contact at some point. And I think it would be interesting to think about the use of video video chat as a kind of halfway house. So you could kind of start with text based contact, then move to kind of having people have a big zoom meeting or something before you actually bring them together and, and, and, and that could be a way of ensuring that the physical contact is kind of safer because they’ve had all this interaction by text and video beforehand.
Ricardo Lopes: So another thing now that I think is very interesting from a psychological perspective is do we know in what ways interpersonal interactions online differ from offline interactions? And, and I mean, if there are differences, do you think that for example, when certain people worry that if someone spends too much time on the internet, even if they are interacting with other people on social gaming, for example, that that might damage their social skills because they are not interacting face to face. For example, I think that’s become
Gordon Ingram: less of a concern as the interactions become more immersive. So these days, we have to, you have to really distinguishing text based audio video communication. I really think, you know, it’s not all the same thing. And, and a lot of the classic studies from the early days of cyber psychology can almost seem a bit out of date because they focused on text based online communication. So they say, you know, it’s more anonymous, it’s more asynchronous, particularly the asynchrony now doesn’t seem much of a factor at all because, you know, we’re all used to like immediate responses by whatsapp video calls. So this idea that you had theories like reduced cues theory, hyper personalization, which I think don’t apply nearly as much to, to video based communication. So I think before you jump to conclusions about the effects, you should sort of see how someone is usually interacting online. If they’re doing it in a text based way, then you might still have concerns about the social skills, about the idealization of the people they meet online, et cetera. But I noticed, for example, when, when my sons are playing you know, games like valorant or Overwatch, they usually communicating by voice. And they, you know, it seems to me that that is could be pretty pretty useful as actually a way of kind of learning to work in a group, learning to develop a strategy together. It’s not some, not the kind of experience that I had as a as a teenager and it might have been quite useful for me in terms of developing my social skills if I was able to, to look at working in a team like that.
Ricardo Lopes: So it’s not at all the case that online people cannot develop their social skills, right? They, they can at least in certain context.
Gordon Ingram: Yeah, I mean, again, I think as, as in a lot of these areas, the hard evidence is really lacking. But I think potentially you know, it, it it’s maybe not, not to the same extent as if they’re regularly playing in a football team, but it’s very different from, from the kind of image how, how people, how teenage boys do gaming these days, I think is very different from the traditional image of a nerd kind of sitting in the basement. I think there’s a lot more social act interaction than, than older people might realize going on.
Ricardo Lopes: And so I think that you, you’ve already sort of answered this earlier, but looking at most of the risks that people tend to associate with the internet technologies. Do you think that overall they are exaggerated or
Gordon Ingram: not? I think it depends on on the group. I mean, just by the general public, I would say, yeah, probably there is some exaggeration. You know, just iiii I sometimes have slight arguments with my wife about her daughter’s screen news. She’s like, I don’t know, she’s like stuck at her phone all the time and it’s like, well, so are we, you know, so it, it seems straight. Why do people worry so much about again? It’s this kind of protection of overprotection of Children thinking about them as particularly vulnerable to these cultural influences, I think, which is quite natural. But why are particularly worried about Children and adolescents and they’re not worried about adults using cell phones all the time, you know. So it, it, I think it is, it is the new normal and, and you know, it’s not going away. So I think there is an exaggeration of, of the risk by older generations. But in terms of some of the scientists, I think, do downplay the risks, maybe a bit more than, than they should do. Especially in more informal communications, as I was saying, like on, on Twitter and so on. And especially policy, I would like to see more attention being paid by policymakers and in terms of not just leaving everything to the market, but actually thinking, you know, how can we influence without destroying people’s freedom of speech? But how can we maybe kind of nudge or, or tilt the kind of online experience so that it is a bit more positive for people. And I think there is people are starting to look at an example would be the five rights foundation Sonia Livingstone, professor at LSE in London. It’s been really involved in setting that up and they’re really like pressuring governments to kind of work with the industry to kind of create a safer environment for kids online. But they yeah, there, there, there needs to be more of that. I think more, more governments really trying to trying to influence the experience that kids are having online.
Ricardo Lopes: And with the goal of in mind of financing adolescents, well being, what would you say are perhaps some of the messages guidelines that people should take from your book when it comes to communicating about potential online risks, identifying, for example, at risk individuals and so on.
Gordon Ingram: I think, I think it’s difficult because as I was saying, adolescents often do, they kind of withdraw from their parents. But I think this is quite natural and you don’t as a parent, you know, I’ve got a 20 year old, and an 18 year old as well as a six year old and, and I don’t know, I can’t honestly say I’ve had, you know, I’m vaguely aware of what my sons do online but I haven’t had many kind of in depth conversations. So I have to hold my hand up and, and, and admit that, but I think you need try and be aware of, you know, what sort of, you know, I know what games they like, we have conversations about that sort of thing. So try and be aware of, you know, what sort of things they’re into online. At least I do think though. But as I was saying, I, I think a lot of responsibilities is put on to parents and, and this is maybe this kind of individualistic Western society kind of thing. We, we obviously don’t want to go all the way to kind of China model totally controlling people’s internet life. But I do one of the things I suggest at the end of the book is to do with algorithms, you know, the the companies like Meta and Google use all these algorithms to kind of control what they’re showing to us. But it’s very much just sort of market driven driven by advertisers, sponsored content and so on. I think they could be doing more and I think they are starting to do this but they could be doing more with algorithms to actually make the internet a bit of a safer environment. I’m very surprised sometimes when I, when my daughter, my six year old daughter is watching youtube and some of the things that pop up in recommendations that’s not appropriate for a six year old kid to be watching. You know, and so, you know, surely we have enough sophisticated, enough algorithms these days. It can be pretty obvious when I look at her youtube history, it’s pretty obvious that it’s a, a six year old girl’s youtube history, right? So they could be doing a better job I think of, you know, not, not recommending them videos which are, which are really not appropriate for, for that age group. And, and II, I think they do, there’s a bit of kind of holding up their hands, you know, freedom of freedom of speech. You know, we’re not gonna control what, what people view, but they could be a bit more proactive about creating a safer experience for kids. I think maybe applies more to younger kids than a adolescents. But also, you know, if you think about things like, extreme pornography and so on, they could probably be restricting those from adolescence as well, quite more productively.
Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. And do you think that knowledge about, adolescents use of internet technologies could also apply in a clinical context. And if so how
Gordon Ingram: well I’m not a clinician. So it’s hard to, hard to answer that, I think. Yeah, I mean, I, I do think it could help in terms of just not, like I said, some psychiatrists maybe take a, a bit of a knee jerk response. Oh, you know, it can’t be good that, that, that adolescents are spending all the time on the cell phone and not engaging with, you know, offline personal relationships with their families. But like I say, it’s been, it’s always been a natural feature of adolescence. So you tend to withdraw from your family, spend a lot of time up in your bedroom, you know, and, and I think the cell phone is just a kind of modern version of that really. So I don’t think it’s intrinsically bad. I think what, what maybe reading the book could give them would be an understanding of what kinds of usage might be particularly damaging to adolescents because of the particular vulnerabilities in the sex. The chapter on relationships. I talk about them learning about new sexual relationships and that sort of thing and, and how there could be particular risks for certain groups and that the same thing with body image eating disorders and so on. So there are particular vulnerabilities associated with particular types of usage. But again, it’s, it would be very much I would stress the importance of working on a case by case basis, looking at the overall social context of the person.
Ricardo Lopes: So one last question, then do you have any ideas about how internet use might change in the future? And if so where do you think this change might stem from? I mean, would it be from, for example, people becoming more aware of how they use the internet and perhaps the more positive and negative ways they can do it and perhaps becoming a little bit more literate about it.
Gordon Ingram: Maybe, I think, I think you can see with any new technology when people start, when people first use it, there’s a kind of lack of norms and, you know, there’s a time when people, it takes time for people to, to work out. I, I think I’ve seen it’s a bit anecdotal but, you know, people always complain about the amount of kind of trash talking that takes place on Twitter and, and youtube and so on. I have to say my impression is that that that’s, and it would be really fascinating to look at, you know, the historical records and look at it over time. But I think it’s actually gets a bit, it’s got a bit less frequent over time as people, it always sticks in people’s minds, right. So they, they just notice it and think that it’s happening more. But I, I think that gradually people adapt and, and kind of develop norms for kind of etiquette really for, for kind of influencing these interactions in, in terms of other things that are changing, I think. It was a bit embarrassing to me that Chat G BT came out just as my book was being published because there’s nothing in there about A I at all, basically a little bit of algorithms in the conclusion. But obviously, if I was writing it now, I would spend a lot of time talking about chat G BT, especially in educational contexts, how that’s gonna gonna change things. So that would be a big area where I think it’s gonna have really far reaching changes in how people interact online and offline even as well probably. And in terms of video communication, I think that’s something that’s less heralded, heralded, heralded than A I, but it’s becoming so much more the norm just to have video based interactions, especially with young people. And I think, for example, in Vietnam, they, they don’t use whatsapp so much. There’s another tool they have here called Zalu, which is actually more based, I think it’s quite common in other countries in Southeast Asia, which is more based on video communication. So it’s, I think eventually you could see how it might almost replace chatting quite a lot. And I think that could have quite far reaching effects on on how, how how, how we’re actually engaging in, in interactions. They can feel more, real, less kind of a technological interaction and more like a normal natural kind of interaction. I think from the point of view of education as well, it’s a little bit worrying because you do sort of wonder if, if reading is eventually going to disappear because ST students very much, you know, are, are, they, they’re kind of, they’re keen to just watch videos. Right. Well, it’s good for you for people like you, I suppose they keen to watch videos instead of, instead of reading articles. And also they will use, you know, something like chat G BT, something called Chat Beat PDF where you feed it an article. And it’ll like just, it’ll answer the questions that you have about the article. So I, I do, it’s not inconceivable but literacy rates could actually go down. And if you’re looking at sort of 100 years in the future as, as people just get used to kind of doing everything by video and you sort of think, well, what effects will that on society? Like I talked about the, the printing press, it could be very, very similar kind of level of effects on society, I think
Ricardo Lopes: actually something that I’ve heard about recently is that some people fear that young people will also lose their handwriting skills because they no longer write by hand.
Gordon Ingram: Yeah. And I noticed in my, in my, in my daughter’s school they told her like proper handwriting. And it seemed to me actually that made it more difficult for her to learn the letters and things than if they just because right from the beginning, sort of age five or six, they’re teaching them proper 100 it just, just traditional, it’s a traditional Catholic school. That’s what the way they do things. But you’d think it would be kind of easier just to learn on a keyboard just because she’s so used to kind of like seeing, seeing words on the, on the smartphone. But yeah, it’s so and then you’ve got the reverse flynn effect, right? That you must have heard of that where so it seems like the the IQ games in most of the 20th century are actually going into reverse and kind of controversial to blame that on smartphones. But you do, you do wonder what else exactly would have, would have caused it if it wasn’t this, this kind of not needing to depend on writing so much because you’ve actually got got more direct ways of communicating with
Ricardo Lopes: people. So I guess that let’s see how things go. And now with a I particularly it’s sort of a brave new world, right? OK. So the book is again, adolescent use of new media and internet technologies, debating risks and opportunities in the digital age. And I’m leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And Dr Ingram, apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find you when your work on the internet?
Gordon Ingram: Oh, I was, I didn’t really expect it. I mean, if you go to my Google Scholar page, I don’t know if you can link to that or if
Ricardo Lopes: you, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I can, I
Gordon Ingram: can if you search for Gordon in room, Los Andes, it should, it should come up. So, but yeah, I’ve got all my articles on on Google on the Google Scholar page.
Ricardo Lopes: Ok, great. So thank you so much again for taking the time to come on the show. As I said at the beginning, I really loved the book. So it was really fun to talk to you about it. Thank you. Thanks
Gordon Ingram: a lot. Very nice to be to have you on the record and I look forward to catching up with some of your other interviews. Thank you.
Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys. Thank you for watching this interview. Until the end. If you liked it, please share it. Leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by N Lights learning and development. Then differently check the website at N lights.com. And also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or paypal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and paypal supporters, Perego Larson, Jerry Muller and Frederick Suno. Bernard Seche O of Alex Adam Castle Matthew Whitting Bear. No wolf, Tim Ho Erica LJ Connors, Philip Forrest Connelly. Then the Met Robert Wine in NAI Z Mar Nevs calling in Hobel, Governor Mikel Stormer Samuel Andre Francis for Agns Ferger and H her ma J and Lain Jung Y and the Samuel K Hes Mark Smith J. Tom Hummel s friends, David Sloan Wilson, Yaar, Roman Roach Diego and Jan Punter Romani Charlotte Bli Nicole Barba Adam Hunt, Pavlo Stassi Na Me, Gary G Almansa Zal Ari and YPJ Barboza Julian Price Edward Hall, Eden Broder Douglas Fry Franka La Gilon Cortez or Scott Zachary. Ftw Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Giorgio, Luke Loi Georgio Theophano, Chris Williams and Peter Oin David Williams Di A Costa, Anton Erickson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralie Chevalier, Bangalore Larry Dey junior, old Ebon, Starry Michael Bailey. Then Spur by Robert Grassy Zorn, Jeff mcmahon, Jake Zul Barnabas Radick Mark Temple, Thomas Dvor Luke Neeson, Chris Tory Kimberley Johnson, Benjamin Gilbert Jessica. No week in the Brendan Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensley Man, George Katis Valentine Steinman, Perras, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Abert Liam Dan Biar Masoud Ali Mohammadi Perpendicular Jer Urla. Good enough, Gregory Hastings David Pins of Sea Nelson, Mike Levin and Jos Net. A special thanks to my producers, these our web, Jim Frank Luca Stina, Tom Vig and Bernard N Cortes Dixon, Bendik Muller Thomas Trumble, Catherine and Patrick Tobin John Carlman, Negro, Nick Ortiz and Nick. Golden and to my executive producers, Matthew lavender, Si Adrian Bogdan Knits and Rosie. Thank you for all.