CyberBullies

In class this week, we watched numerous videos on Cyber-Bullying. Teens and Tweens today have so much access to technology, it becomes something that they can abuse. It has become part of their social norm, and they use it to interact with each other in any way that they can, whether it be to talk online, post pictures of one another or publicly humiliate each other. Bullying is something that has gone on forever, but now that it has expanded onto the internet, it has become dangerous. Kids are being tortured online, and this torture has led to horrible tragedies such as suicides. One ad that we watched in class that stood out to me was the ad about the girl who got up on stage and started to bad-mouth another girl in the audience. The premise was that if you wouldn't say something to someone's face, then do not say it about them online. This ad reminded me of a website that my 14 year old cousin first turned me on too. One day, on her facebook page, my cousin Nicole posted a website called www.formspring.com onto her status. I clicked on it and was amazed by what I saw. You can anonymously post whatever you want about this person, any kind of statement, question, fact, dirty joke, and the person whose formspring it is can answer. Although I wasn't impressed by this website, Nicole's formspring wasn't horrible. It was mostly posts by her friends with inside jokes or "your so pretty, where do you get your makeup" etc. But occasionally there would be the post "You and your friends are stuck up b*****s" or something of the sort, in which she responded with "Who is this?". This kind of website opens up a whole new realm of cyber-bullying. The fact that kids are willingly creating an open forum for their peers to bash them is scary. Nicole told me that she has seen worse on formspring than her own; kids writing terrible things about each other which spark rumors etc, and lead to even more bullying. According to Conway, I think that this kind of "terrorism" wouldn't be classified as use rather than misuse. It is not causing any kind of real disturbance besides the fact that it has left multiple teenage girls distraught about their social status's. However, it could lead to worse, which makes it a threat. These are the kinds of websites that should be more regulated. Cyber-bullying is worse enough as it is, and websites such as formspring only feed into it.