School seminars are devoted to preventing bullying, as is extensive news coverage and several educational films. Still, it persists in spite of all of the condemnation it receives. UW-Madison recently conducted a study in which researchers taught a computer to scan the social networking site Twitter to identify bullying-related tweets. About 15,000 of them were tied to bullying. As seen in many cases today, though bullying used to be a face-to-face encounter, it is now digitized and depersonalized. The thing that keeps most people from bullying, the reason why they don’t terrorize and taunt others at will, is an inability to face their victims. Social networking takes this barrier completely away from the situation and allows for bullying to take place from behind a curtain.
In today’s information society—a community ruled by knowledge and ideas moving at incredible speeds—bullying happens in a matter of seconds. Because of the ease at which people can post, tweet or blog about their peers, time for thought is sacrificed and people negligently harass others. But if the bullying that mindlessly takes place over the Internet has this strong of an impact, launching a well-thought-out online campaign against bullying should have an even stronger impact. Whitney Kropp, a self-described social outcast at her high school in West Branch, Michigan, was often picked on. As part of a cruel joke, her classmates voted her the sophomore representative for the “class royalty” of her high school. A Facebook support page was subsequently created for the devastated girl, and after the page received over 130,000 “likes,” she decided to remain class representative and embrace her position. Taking the anti-bullying movement in a crowdsourcing direction allows people to band together and move toward a common goal.
Popular media should have more of a purpose than discussing the inner workings of the Kardashian family, and social media can be used for much more than live-tweeting a history lecture. Media’s power to influence others and help shape the way people think about given issues is incredible, and it can be used against bullying just as it is used for it. But it would have to be uncensored and done in a relatable way. Cheesy educational films from the 90s don’t cut it, and given that bullying has only recently made national headlines, it seems as though they never have. Real stories from real victims are the only ways for people to realize the real effects of the torment that some kids, as well as adults, endure.
In 2011, a documentary film entitled “Bully” was released and was praised as a “wake-up call” for society. However, immediately upon its release, the MPAA slapped it with an R rating, effectively restricting the documentary to only those who are over 17 years of age, a demographic that has arguably already surpassed some of the most strenuous years of bullying. The reality is that this type of explicit material should be the new tool to educate kids about bullying because personal connections can be made more easily to actual events than to staged ones. But people shy away from the topic because it is not pleasant to dwell upon. Although UW-Madison students rallied against this in April of this year, holding a “Break the Silence” march down State Street, most people don’t want to be inconvenienced by an upsetting issue, so they brush it away. This is how bullying thrives.
With social networking, people can continue to disregard information if they choose, but more people can be made aware of information at a faster rate than ever before. On Facebook, a simple search of the word “bully” directed me to an anti-bullying page that has been around for barely a year, yet already has well over one million “likes”, not to mention the countless number of chain statuses containing anti-bullying sentiments that flood Facebook.
But social media statuses and groups are truly just the first step; social networking is merely a way of making people aware more than anything else. The key to using media to stop bullying is not to spam everyone with fragmented thoughts on the evils of bullying, but to flip the tables on the bullies, to belittle the role of the aggressor. The old stereotype of the jock or bully who makes friends by stepping on others needs to be erased from our minds, or better, kept in our minds as a reminder of how demented that concept is and how that is where our society once was. This is, of course, assuming—hoping—that we eventually dig our way out.
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