As Cajun noted yesterday, the state of New York is trying to strip the Internet of its anonymity to prevent cyberbullying, you know, because it’s very important that teenagers limit saying cruel, thoughtless, awful things to each other’s faces instead of doing it anonymously on the Internet.
It ties into this whole bullying social concern that I touched on a few weeks ago: I’m not trying to dismiss concern over bullying or teenage suicides, although buying a movie ticket and saying you’re concerned about it means less than nothing unless you actually do something, and I’m not talking about recording a YouTube video.
But I can speak to the difference between the coordinated real-life harassment some people experience and people saying mean things on the Internet, and how different they are. And they are different — profoundly so.
Seriously, none of this coordinated harassment crap is new. People call it obscure, but it isn’t: whisper campaigns against kids who’ve drawn the ire of the mob happen in every high school — perhaps you just didn’t notice.
I know because I went through it back in the ’90s.
I was the new kid for a good chunk of my time in high school, and I was a six-foot-tall nerd who hated sports and didn’t hide the lofty perception I had of my own intelligence (in other words, I was obnoxious, which didn’t help). I never had to deal with violence directed towards my person, but I had to deal with a lot of crap otherwise. To this day, there are people I went to high school with absolutely convinced I’m a closeted homosexual and drug addict.
My parents cared, my school administrators and teachers cared, but the parents of the kids responsible didn’t. So it didn’t stop. There was no way to stop it, because the parents either didn’t see the problem or refused to accept there was one, and there was just no way to make them take responsibility. And keep in mind, this is without any physical violence. I can count the number of actual fights I got in in high school on one finger.
Cyberbullying is different. Cyberbullying you can turn off: you can make your profile private, you can take screenshots to use as documentation, or you can simply turn off the monitor and step away.
I can’t emphasize what a difference this is: if you’re surrounded by people who you think hate you in real life, it’s really hard to go somewhere you feel like they don’t. If you’re surrounded by people who hate you on the Internet, you can just essentially erase them from your online life, or go somewhere they can’t find you by typing in a string of characters in a window.
Bullying is about making other people feel powerless, and the fact of the matter is, on the Internet, you have way more power than in person. You control where you go, what you do, and most importantly, who you are. That’s what makes the Internet great and horrible at the same time. Taking away controlling who you are, which is what stripping the anonymity from the Internet would do, is not going to magically improve things.
Does this mean we shouldn’t care about people being awful to each other on the Internet? No, we should, although we should temper that with the understanding that not everything in our lives is as important to others as it is to us, and try to sort out who’s being a douche from who’s just being honest.
So, is there a solution here? Yes. But it will never be implemented.
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“they are perfect and therefore their crotchfruit are perfect by proxy.” Well done sir. Well done.
The issue with cyberbullying is when it bleeds into real life. Things people post on your facebook profile get repeated in person, especially in a school setting. Or the rampant use of Topix as a community defamation board in small towns has real life consequences. Even removing yourself from the internet will not stop others from discussing you.
Yes, and other people disucssing you behind your back is not bullying. Ergo …
You’re right, you’re right, you had it soooo much worse. Kids these days don’t get how much better they have it because their bullying takes place on the internet, which is now a completely inextricable part of a teenager’s social life. It really IS just as easy as turning off their computer, just like it was as easy for you to “just ignore them.” Vile, damaging rumors will, of course, stop once the target is off their computer. If they take down their facebook page, no bullies would ever just, you know, create a fake one with their name and start new and possibly more damaging rumors. This article is not just in bad taste, it plays directly into the willfully ignorant mindset of today’s adults who refuse to believe that something online cannot hurt a child as much as something which takes place “in the real world.” Do you not get by now that for millions of teenagers the internet is just as much a part of their daily lives as “the real world?” Telling someone to “disappear” their digital selves is like saying you should have just hidden better from the people bullying you. The onus should NOT be on the victim to do a better job avoiding the guilty fuckers out to get them…
I always preferred rumors and glittery MySpace insults to being beaten while waiting for the bus in the morning. . I even preferred the insults spray painted on actual walls. But you’re right, my life wasn’t as based on the internet as the “kids these days”. Maybe going off line is the equivalent to me switching schools to hide, back in the young days of the internets. But it also seems like you’re reading a lot more into the tone of this article then is there. I didn’t get the feeling that he’s just an old crank complaining to the kids about “back in his day”. Maybe from the title, but not from the rest of the article.
I don’t think Dan said he had it worse. I mean, I assume “real-life” bullying still happens for these kids as well, so they have everything Dan had, plus the cyber-stuff.
Anyway, of course the onus shouldn’t be on the victim — that’s why the second page of this article is there. But the shitty reality of the shitty world in which we live is that bullying will likely never go away, and the only practical approach to dealing with it is for the victim to be strong (and smart) and well-supported.