It is suitably fashionable to decry cyber-bullying, wherein high school students and younger (and others) go online and say terrible things about other high school students and younger (and others). This is often directed at real or imagined flaws in the person being bullied, and ... well, you know what it is.
"What it is" is simply an electronic version of what has gone on, in schools, since there have been kids and schools. Kids can be cruel, and are perpetually competing with each other as their hormones kick in, some earlier, some later. Give a kid a computer and Al Gore's Amazing Internet, and kids will do exactly what they have always done, except that now the whole world gets to hear it, instead of just those within earshot and the immediate network of gossipy peers.
Of course, the fact that the "whole world" now sees and hears the cruel things that kids say to each other, and that we can add pictures and even videos to amplify the assault, makes the impact much worse. The added pain of worldwide distribution has elevated the problem to where it shows up on morning TV shows as an official Issue.
Now, I'm sure not minimizing it and don't intend to. I was bullied 50 years ago by larger peers and I didn't like it. Kids are being cyber-bullied and then killing themselves. It needs to stop, and if you've got an answer, the world needs it.
But I'm going to remind us ("us" being the adult world) that we are far, far from innocent in all this, and close to being complicit.
I speak, of course, about our own propensity to cyber-bullying that even I have engaged in. I refer, as you probably have not yet guessed, to the Yelp Phenomenon.
Who among us has not purchased a product or service over the years with which we were particularly unhappy? In recent years, especially with the overwhelming tendency to online purchases, there has not been a human being to see, or call (without being routed to Mumbai or Manila). Our anger at the defective product is elevated by the inability to speak to anyone, so we have to reach out and strike!
Enter Yelp (and every other online medium for rating a vendor and complaining). We take to our laptops and write a scathing, one-sided and anonymous review of our memory of our experience. I've done it myself, and I've done it far more often than I've written complimentary reviews of vendors I've really liked.
I have also been the owner of a business which had to complain constantly to Yelp about reviews that had factual inaccuracies, but with the writer's anonymity were difficult to address -- how could edf129553, who had a late delivery, get her problem solved if we didn't know who she was? And this is rich, but follows the FTM theorem -- if you actually advertised with Yelp you had a much easier time getting inaccurate reviews removed.
But that's not the point.
We can be as sanctimonious as we like about cyber-bullying in our schools. But it is exactly like the old cartoons where a kid swears and the father asks the mother "Where the #$%%* did that kid learn to say $^$%^&* like that?". We are the original cyber-bullies, and we provide the examples to our children.
We are partly to blame when the kids follow our lead and use the Internet to do things like bullying that in the good old days would have stayed close to home. I don't know the cure, but it seems that putting a big blanket over the Yelps of the world would go a long way toward returning civility to Internet dialogue. Certainly we would be helped by good, sound and accurate consumer reviews of product and service companies.
But the anonymity and the venom are an unpleasant and counterproductive mix. Moreover, they set an atrocious example to our children, who layer another weapon on top of their own, basic instincts.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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