Portmanteaus: juvenoia

Emily Bazelon in the NYT Magazine 6/26/11 — “The Ninny State: The danger of overprotecting your kids from technology” (about violent video games and teenage sexting) — cites David Finkelhor on juvenoia (juvenile + paranoia).

On NetFamilyNews:

Referred to variously as technopanic, predator panic, cyberbullying panic, etc., a lot of fear and anxiety has developed around the intersection of youth and the Internet. …last fall David Finkelhor – director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center (CCRC) and lead author of the US’s first national study on youth risk online in 2000 – used the term “juvenoia” in his recent groundbreaking talk, “The Internet, Youth Deviance & the Problem of Juvenoia.” He defined juvenoia as “the exaggerated fear of the influence of social change [including the Internet] on youth.” This week, the first of a two-part series on Dr. Finkelhor’s talk: why the fear is unsupported by the evidence and (next week) why all the fear.

[Both techno- and cyber- (in the passage above) are in the Quinion affixes list, here and here respectively. They occur as combining forms in learnèd vocabulary based on Greek roots, but also as new libfixes in words like technobabble and cyberpunk, conveying, roughly, ‘technology’ and ‘cyberspace’, respectively.]

The element -noia (from a Greek ‘thought’ root) occurs in a few other portmanteaus, with varying interpretations:

Nuke-O-Noia Could Be The Worst Threat To Japan [paranoia about nukes] (link)

12 tips for easing your ‘parent-noia’ [paranoia by parents] (link)

(If the Urban Dictionary is to be believed, the Noia (a clipping of paranoia) is the paranoia that comes from smoking pot.)

At the moment, it looks like -noia occurs in the occasional portmanteau but isn’t yet on track to become a libfix.