Cyberbullying (Blog Post 7)

The discussion of cyberbullying this week was particularly important to us as future educators.  Educators are hyper focused on the idea of ‘bullying’ in the school environment right now, which is an important reaction to behaviors that may have been accepted and almost expected in the past.  However, the issue of cyberbullying is particularly important– important not only because it is so prevalent among K-12 students (see these statistics from the CDC), but also because cyberbullying continues into adult life in various aspects of our digital lives. 

Infographic by www.toptrackingapps.com

The Seven Deadly Sins discussion of envy struck me as providing a poignant description of how social media behaviors impact an adult’s day-to-day happiness – if a person is forced to constantly compare himself to the idealized social media lives of others (some which he may not know in person), is he not going to feel that he is in some way lacking?  Rather than engaging with our lives or the lives of our children, family members, etc., we carefully control a ‘perfected’ life online – or post carefully perfected posts about aspects of our life that are ‘not perfect’.  This Time magazine article describes the negative psychological impact of the social media feed on adults and adolescents.  Similarly, these sites tend to allow for commentary and political/religious posts, which frequently results in cyberbullying behaviors, even among adults.  We can hardly expect adolescents to be able to control their behavior better than adults, but perhaps teaching students about cyberbullying behaviors and how to behave in digital formats can help them not only to treat one another with respect online as adolescents, but to have healthier online habits as adults.  

This site gives a great overview of cyberbullying tactics (many of which I was not aware of).  Some of these are fairly obvious – saying mean things, racist comments online, etc., but there is also the idea of catfishing – an individual creating a fake identity in order to bully or otherwise deceive a victim - and doxing – exacting revenge and/or bullying by exposing personal information online.  There is also a page of tips for parents and one for teachers.  As a parent, I think it is particularly important to have supervision of your adolescent’s online behaviors and social media profiles – certainly they deserve some level of privacy and independence, but as adults we can’t expect adolescents to fully understand the consequences of their behavior.  Children constantly engage in bullying-esque behavior without necessarily being a bully or a mean child – the child may not really understand the implications of her behavior until an adult intervenes.  Similarly, it’s unrealistic to expect a middle school student who has unsupervised late-night access to a group text not to engage in inappropriate behavior.  Providing supervision and guidelines for digital behavior allows the adolescent to learn how to behave digitally while an adult is taking ultimate responsibility for his actions – and hopefully when he is an adult he will have enough experience to function in the digital world in a responsible fashion.  (Although who knows how I’ll feel when my daughter is a teen…..)