The Unintended Consequences of Cyberbullying Rhetoric

I understand bullying from my teenage years. I picked on someone one time and I truely regret it. I looked like a total idiot but I felt if I started at the beginning of the year not putting up with it everyone would leave me alone.

Well, as an adult , there are many chat rooms where I am bullied and questioned on my comments. It takes every dignity cell I have in my body to reply in a nice way to the bully. Oh and there are several. The next day I can forget about it but teenagers face their bullies daily. This has been going on for centuries. What has changed?

That was a great paper!

I especially liked this summary of the gender issues, which struck me as very true and very sad.

"Drama is a deeply gendered process. It is primarily girl’s work. It simultaneously perpetuates a value system in which traditionally feminine, interpersonal subjects are seen as trivial and unimportant, and frames information as valuable social capital. It re-inscribes a heteronormative high school existence where girls compete for male attention, while boys stand one step removed. And it replicates celebrity narratives marketed to young women where minor and mundane interpersonal conflict is exaggerated for effect."

I also feel bad for my daughter because she's not going to be able to leave conflict at school any more than I can leave my work at the office when I'm at home with the always-on Internet. This made me sad from your paper:

Rashna, 16, Chicago: There’s no removal from what happens at school.Cause it can always continue on Facebook, and you have access to that atyour home. Which previously was considered somewhere where you don’thave to deal with everything that’s going on in school.

I completely agree that minimizing all conflict -- especially conflict between girls -- as drama is potentially dangerous. Some teasing or name-calling is low-level and a kid with decent self-esteem or a strong friend network can shrug it off. High school is a time to learn to cope and accept that not everyone in the world will like you or agree with you, and sometimes for no reason at all other than your shoes or your skin color or your grades. However, if something is really crossing the line, it needs to be addressed. I remember high school and I remember not having the guts to call people out at all when they had crossed the line, but it didn't happen that often because things didn't escalate to that level that often -- of if they did, I didn't know about it. With everything so public now I'm sure they escalate a million times faster and kids are so on the spot they probably cross lines faster, too. It seems like a really bad idea to have social media before you're ready for it.

And finally, I saw a lot of adult behavior in your observations about attention and how we as a society use social media. It's all still very new, and I know my own behavior about what I will or won't post has changed. I've become a lot more private as the world has grown more social. I started questioning a lot of my behavior, why I was doing certain things, what I hoped to get out of it. I think I matured about social media when I started asking myself those hard questions, not that I'm perfect now, but I at least think about it now whereas before I just did stuff with abandon.

We won't be able to tell if the kids go through something similar or if they just grew up.

My comments were too long, so I'm chunking them up.

It really bothers me when female anger or conflict is "drama" and male anger is "fighting." Fighting is fighting, drama is drama, let's not make it so genderific. Gender roles get so entrenched in high school.

I feel lucky not to have had social media in high school. Conflicts do often sputter out if one or both parties agree to keep it between each other without letting it play out in front of an audience. In my day, the entire school would whisper about you, but at least they were whispering and not writing it on the Internet where people who don't even go to your school could read it.

Amplification of a conflict almost begs for a reaction, too -- things that might otherwise have been dropped must now be addressed because good grief, everyone is waiting for you to do so -- they are all now sucked into your conflict because it's public.

I read your paper with interest. I immediately pricked up at the mention of the word "drama," because as you said in your paper (which is well written and interesting and the language and sentence structure makes it easy to digest) it is impossible to take something called "drama" very seriously. The word itself implies the situation is frivolous or exaggerated. Much like "hysteria," it also seems to be thought of as something females do or have, which bugs me a lot. You underscored that later in the paper with this:

Drama is a way to encapsulate and define a host of feminine behaviors – includinggossiping, romance, and indirect aggression – as something boys do not engage in. Giventhat gender is a social construct (Kessler & McKenna, 1978), the hyper-conformist genderenvironment of high school is brought into being through such types of classification. Butdespite these seemingly solid boundaries, it is clear that many boys do involve themselvesin drama, at least as spectators and sometimes as participants. Labeling drama as “girlstuff” is a way for boys to distance themselves from behavior they see as feminine andsimultaneously diminish the concerns of their female classmates as unimportant.