Search Engine had this as a topic this week and I’m amazed that there as some out there who think that this is a non issue or something that is “phantasmic”, but CBC went to the kids and pulled out some interesting things to think about. You can get the episode here. After this episode, I certainly think that the blames lands on the parents and society as a whole for allowing self centered and corrosive behavior to become some some respects, the norm. I certainly don’t agree that the cyberbullying is in any way linked to using the ‘net in a creative way. We seem to have forgotten our responsibilities as adults, parrents and educators when it comes to this new media, blaming everything from a lack of time to a lack of understanding.
CBC’s Search Engine on Cyberbullying
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I’ll go out on a limb here.
I’m not going to say this is a non-issue, but the media has done a damn poor job of doing one thing: isolating what is new and egregious about this type of bullying is really new/different/special. Outside of a few isolated and highly dramatized incidents nobody has explained to me what is going on that demands alarm.
What I mean by “new”, is that when I was in grade school there was a decent degree of bullying – I was on the receiving end of my fair share of it – but I think that experience was pretty integral to proper socialization. I wouldn’t be upset, say, if it was the same today. Which I’m sure it isn’t.
So what is going on here? I don’t know. All coverage I’ve seen remains superficial “people should be nice to each other” claptrap.
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You and I both certainly were dealing with our share of bullying growing up, and to some degree, it is certainly normal – there are bullies in the adult world as well. But the key difference here is how pervasive this form could be. It’s like having a propagator of some other kind of abuse always around. That is the part that I think makes this a much different creature than dealing with the Fords and Macks (odd that they are both named after trucks) that we dealt with in our younger days.
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