Merely Another Weapon

While exploring the topic of cyberbullying, the students in learning.21st had an opportunity to ask the School Police Liaison questions, discussed some student case studies on Netsmartz and also watched a great video from digizen.org. To my surprise, the students took the topic of cyberbullying very seriously.

This is a student blog post about the topic by Jack.

Bullying has existed since people first started interacting with each other. To bully can be defined as the act of physically or mentally intimidating another person or persons. When we think of bullying, the thought of kids on the playground may come to mind. However, we live in the 21st century. The same way everything else has evolved, so has this child's cruel game of torture.

As we have become slaves to the social networking sites, they have become merely another weapon in the hands of a bully. In the same way a nuke can decimate so many more lives than a conventional bomb, cyberbullying can so much more thoroughly destroy one person than conventional bullying by bringing the insults world wide. On the netsmartz videos that we watched, we saw what cyberbullying did to two different individuals. One guy went on to a sight and rated some girls but ended up facing a possible expulsion and the other girl shared her password and had her myspace modified badly.

When you are on the web, it is probably a good idea to think before you do. The guy who visited his friend's website and rated the girls should have ignored it and done something else. As for the girl, the thing about the password is like your toothbrush is a good piece of advice.