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The Rise of Cyber Bullying
santos_douglas writes "The Detroit Free Press has an article detailing the problems schoolchildren now face in the form of online cyber bullying. As if parents didn't already have enough to worry about! Examples include rumor spreading typically via text messaging, threatening emails, invasive pictures taken with camera phones, and the most extreme - creating entire websites to criticize/threaten/harass another student. The article suggests many tips for combating the problem - chief among them being the establishment of specific school policies. I suppose this is another example of an inevitable downside to the interconnected world. Mandatory Google search for your added reading pleasure."
i'm totally at a loss for this one. what could suck more!? every embarassing thing i did in 6th-8th grade now only resides in the distant memory of classmates. i'd probably kill myself if it was part of the internet for ever and ever. (hell, i'm still embarassed by dumbass posts i made to usenet in the 90's!)
this is a very interesting side-effect of the 'net. i don't know if this can be remedied, but it does imply that children now have accept the possibility of total transparency in their lives. as hard as it is to swallow, maybe this is how the new culture begins...
i would say i'm glad i'm not her, but this could, in reality, happen to ANYONE. it's just harder to ignore as a child, and it's harder to sue for libel/slander. but still, who to sue?
gah.
the transparent society is gonna suck.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I guess we've found yet another use for micropayments.
Am I the only one who sees a problem with giving schools control over students' lives beyond campus grounds? Why is it that some people are so quick to abdicate control and responsibility of their children to a government beaurocracy? Are today's parents really that bad? Is the government that eager to monitor/regulate every aspect of our lives?
It's time for people to stop blaming the school system and making out kids the taxpayers' problem. If your kid is a fuck-up, be a goddamned parent and put them in their place! Stop automatically run crying to the government!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
In grade/middle school some people resented me because of my grades/intelligence. You know what I did when I got picked on? I picked back. A witty remark will often slow a bully quite well. Sure, this isn't a very civilized situation, but who ever said that kids were civilized?
At least, there is no physical harm done in cyber-bullying. There's also no reasonable way to stop it. Shall we enact rules for school children that they never say anything that isn't nice on school time or off? Some of the examples amount to slander, and if they get particularly bad, you could bring a suit, but c'mon there are enough lawsuits now without every school child suing every other child for slander.
I realize that being made fun of isn't very pleasant, but that's something that kids have to deal with. Their parents should help put it in perspective.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
For one thing, such e-messages are traceable records; bullying in person is insidious because they're usually careful to make sure that no one actually can prove they did it. Parents and school officials can use these to deal with the bullies promptly.
On the other hand, kids need to be taught how to deal with stuff like that, and probably the tabloid press is a good place to use as an example: show them how some celebrities take it too seriously and waste a lot of time an energy fighting it, while others make fun of it and ignore it.
They can also make use of it to find out who their real friends are. People who believe everything they hear without checking at the source aren't much of a friend in the first place.
Sorry, but "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me" doesn't hold true. Verbal abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. BTW, I didn't think SMS was anon - I thought it'd give you the phone number (there are many services that WILL send anon SMS, though - just over the internet)
The article sux0r5, and so does the author, MIKE WENDLAND!
MIKE WENDLAND, I've got embarrassing pictures of you!
And I know where you work, MIKE WENDLAND!
I'll be watching to see if you write any more of your "columns", MIKE WENDLAND!
Yeah, don't you forget it MIKE WENDLAND. I'll be watching every Monday and Friday, and alternate Tuesdays and Thurdays.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Revenge is sweet tho; all these big jocks are MBA's now and pay big $$$ for their websites, etc. Of course, my *own* sites are free... :D
Yeah, and they probably have to pay someone to fix that expensive Porche they have! And look at the money you saved by not buying breast implants for your trophy wife!! I guess the joke is on those losers!
Ironic that this would show up here on Slashdot because this kind of shit happens here all the time. Note: the vast majority of people here don't abuse this site...I have a small minority of abusers in mind as I write this.
/. journal almost like still having MsGeek.Org, the only diff is that someone else has to worry about security issues and assholes. It's too bad... /. used to be fun a few years ago.
Let's face it, guys, cyberbullying happens here all the time...a few twits calling each other queer, indulging in the cyber equivalent of towel-snapping in the locker room, modding people down as "flamebait," "troll," and "overrated" just because you don't agree with them or they rub you the wrong way...the irony is so thick it's not even funny.
MsGeek.Org closed down because of a group of cyberbullies and their extended attack on the site. Many of the people responsible still post here, and often. The crapflooders never have, and never will, provide anything of value on this site...they just shovel out the same crap, the same disgusting gay porn and disguised links to goatse and tubgirl. Someone needs to hit the entire lot of the crapflooders over their collective heads with a clue by four...it stopped being "cute" or "funny" years ago.
I kicked the WIPO Troll off my site and got his account pulled because he posted hardcore gay porn pics to my board using an IE exploit. He came by it rightly. I specifically started MsGeek.Org to give women in technology a "clean, well-lighted" environment to post on a Slashdot-like forum. The crapflooders ruined that, up to and including running exploits against the board software itself. The security issues got to be so much for the good people at Hosting Matters that we mutually decided it wasn't worth it.
I wish that Taco and Hemos and the rest of the founders here had the cojones to pull the accounts of those who have made posting here uncomfortable for many people. I have no problems dealing with it...I'm a 10-year Usenet veteran with the virtual purple hearts to prove it. But I have gotten emails from women who don't read Slashdot because the crap posts are so disturbing to them.
Anyway, this is why I continue to have comments turned off on my journal. I wanted one place where I couldn't be shouted down by a small minority of obnoxious idiots, and I have it. I am sorry that the stupid yahoo.com address always gets filled up with spam and people can't get email to me there. I intend to find another webmail account with a bit more space so you have some way of contacting me. I might even break down and pay Yahoo for a bigger mailbox. Whatever.
I was going to post this anonymously, but screw it...do your worst. Mod it down to Kingdom Come. I don't care anymore. Karma is worthless at this point anyway...I posted for awhile under an identity I used when posting from work, and it took me a grand total of 2 months to go from newbie to the 50 point cap. W00t. That account could have been used to troll like a mofo...instead, I retired it, Blade Runner stylee. I don't even remember the password on the account anymore, fuck it.
I'll chime in every now and again, but right now the main reason I use this site is to blog. My
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I agree wholeheartedly, I'm 15 and at high school in the UK. Today the latest rules to 'improve discipline and school image' were revealed, they basically consist of forcing girls to remove all make-up (on top of the extremely strict uniform we've already got) and pushing us all to have school IDs which do not, AFAICS, have any purpose at all.
Not only are they wasting their time with pointless rules, they're failing miserably in educating us properly. The fact is that all they are drilling into our heads now is facts to pass exams, not understanding. I generally have a good memory for this type of information and therefore get bored quickly - given the chance I could probably learn a years syllabus in a week and do OK on the exam. IMO the solution would be give the higher ability students the chance to understand the work on a higher level, but not according to the school, all I get is a conversation something along the lines of:
"Why aren't you working?"
"I finished it all."
"Is your shirt button undone?"
"Errr.. yes, sorry"
"Sit in silence for the rest of the lesson, and you've got a detention if that button's undone again"
This is the worse end of the teaching, but it's still a daily occurance.
A couple things to think about in regard to 'children' in schools and 'bullying'.
Children are
Worse, it's up to the victim's parents whether or not to act... leaving those with the worst homelives the most vulnerable... either to bullying or being bullied.
IMHO, if you can legally require the separation of the bully from the victim, you may have really helped one kid.
I also think the comment in the article that "... while these comments may seem silly to people who have matured, they are very devastating to the young people on the receiving end..." ignores the above reality.
It's tough to draw analogies to adult life, but what if you were legally required to show up for work? What if somebody spread a similarly scandalous rumour about you at work? Oh... let's see... while kids might think it cool to grab a peer's breasts, the reverse might just work for adults. So, your coworker starts telling people that you grabbed her breasts, and you're making passes at her all the time. So your coworkers begin to shun you. You can't quit... you're legally required to be there. You can't call the police, they won't do anything because this is just a little bit of workplace bullying. Now your boss... who happens to be 150% of your height, twice your strength and twice your weight, might just believe the person spreading the scandal, so it will be your word against theirs.
Your friends at work no longer want to be seen with you, because anyone can fall victim to such harassment... so you become ostracised... Some even join in to dispel rumours that they too might be perverts. Few people really believe the rumours, but they know you're not a safe person to be around because you... and anyone you're around is a target.
Seeing that you have no allies, people begin to pick on you, steal your office supplies, scratch your car, slash your tires.
So you keep going to work, despite all this, because you're legally forced to.
Now we're getting close except: kids don't get paid, have little control over their homelife and they've never known anything else.
This gets lots of laughs, and gives liqudsin the attention he craves. The net effect is to discourage outward signs of intelligence by belittling the "nerds." Ha Ha Ha. You sure are cool.
God forbid anybody is smart in this dumbed-down society.
Pathetic.
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