Well, prop2 is losing a lot of her sympathy credit in the office. She called at 9am this morning (she was due in at 8) and said that the power was out, and that she was waiting to hear back from FPL as to whether or not it was an inside the house thing or something else. What she *didn't* say was why her jobless husband was not available to do that while she got to work... She never called back to even say she's stuck at home for some nonsense reason... FPL seldom takes more than a half hour to get on the stick... I can't say as I remember any time short of a Hurricane that has caused interrupted service for more than an hour. Tomorrow, I visit the neurologist and hopefully get some good, progressive news to counter the lightening strike that's going to hit at work. I still feel bad for her, and sincerely hope that she finds another gig soon, preferably better suited to her.
I'm going to be in the print issue of December's Popular Science Magazine! (Well, the letters page.)
In my email this evening:
Of course, I promptly gave permission, and asked if I could post the letters in my journal, too. The reply was - "not at all, publish away. Cute cat, btw."
Hooray for Newton winning over folks! I wonder if I'll get a lot more hits to my site as a result of that? That's the first time a letters page sought me out to publish something of mine, rather than me sending them editorial commentary.
Randomly Placed Deep Thought:
LJdrama is a pretty angry, scary place. Interesting to read in a disconnected way, thought. Led me to Cliques, Clicks, Bullies And Blogs: "Say hello to the newest strain of the bullying virus, technologically updated for the 21st century."
The anonymous warning on the Internet bulletin board was posted to a popular eighth-grader at an exclusive Washington-area private school for girls. "I feel like throwing up just thinking of you," the author wrote, in a diatribe that soon degenerated into the frantic, grammarless prose so characteristic of children's online messaging. "Everything you do is just a ploy to raise your popularity. . . .u slut. . . . You may think ur safe now, but ur so gonna take a plunge down the popularity level, it is inevitable. . . . Most of us realize what a [expletive] loser you are, even if your few slaves don't."
The posted messages grew more menacing by the day, but it was not until the targeted girl was urged to kill herself that school officials were alerted and intervened, demanding that students delete their postings from the much-visited Web site.
Say hello to the newest strain of the bullying virus, technologically updated for the 21st century.
A recent spate of lawsuits against underage music pirates has finally focused adults' attention on teenage ethics and the Internet, but the news about what's been happening while grownups weren't looking is alarming. The Internet has transformed the landscape of children's social lives, moving cliques from lunchrooms and lockers to live chats and online bulletin boards, and intensifying their reach and power. When conflicts arise today, children use their expertise with interactive technologies to humiliate and bully their peers, and avoid reprimand from adults or foes. As parents plead technological ignorance with a my-Danny-hooks-everything-up sort of pride and many schools decline to discipline "off-campus" behavior, the Internet has become a free-for-all where bullying and cruelty are rampant.
I've spent the past four years trying to uncover the hidden culture of aggression in America's schools. Students, parents and school administrators have all pointed to Internet bullying as the latest, most vicious trend in children's social cruelty.
About 45 million American kids ages 10 to 17 are currently estimated to be online, spending hours every day at their computers. With the click of a button, they can e-mail rumors to scores of recipients for instant viewing, permanently damaging a peer's reputation and social life. Instant messaging (IM) is equally treacherous. Like the calculating three-way phone call where one person remains silent, two girls can hover at the same computer screen, harvesting secrets from the messages of a hapless member of their "buddy" list. And when friendships sour, it is common for children to steal each others' passwords and break into e-mail, IM accounts and personal profiles, sending destructive messages under assumed identities.
Weblogs, or "blogs," are the latest sites of Internet cruelty. Blogs are cyber reality shows, widely read diaries that publicly detail the social drama and fluctuating emotions of young lives. They are often scoured for personal mention, and they spare no language or feelings.
One 12-year-old blogger, writing on the popular Angelfire Web site, recently announced she would devote her page to "anyone and everyone i hate and why." She minced no words. "erin used to be aka miss perfect. too bad now u r a train face. hahaha. god did that to u since u r such a b -- . ashley stop acting like a slut wannabe. lauren u fat b -- can't even go out at night w/ ur friends. . . . and laurinda u suck u god damn flat, weird voice, skinny as a stick b -- ."
This isn't likely to be some child of poverty or deprivation speaking. Internet bullying involves a population that is largely middle-class, usually known as the "good kids" who are "on the right track" or, as many school personnel told me, "the ones you'd least expect" to bully or degrade others. The Internet foments outrageous behavior in part because it is a "gray area" for social interactions. Rebecca Kullback, a Montgomery County psychotherapist and former counselor at Sidwell Friends School in the District, believes the Internet deletes social inhibitions. "It allows kids to say and do things that they wouldn't do face-to-face, and they feel like they won't be held accountable in the same way. It gives them a false sense of security and power."
The kids themselves agree. "E-mails are so much less personal," says Elana Lowell, 18, a recent graduate of Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville. "They're so much less formal and more indirect, and it's easier for people to be more candid and even meaner because of that. People can be as mean and vicious as they want because they're not directly confronting the person. It's the same thing as when you're talking on the phone because you don't have to face the person directly. This is a step further removed. You don't even have to hear the person's voice or see their reaction."
If things get heated online, adds Stephanie Herrold, a 16-year-old student at Churchill High School in Potomac, teens "can just sign off and, when asked in person, act like nothing happened. They can even say that it was someone else on their screen name. They don't have to own their aggression."
Just as online cruelty may be intensified by the distance separating perpetrator and victim, it also changes the face of bullying itself. "Kids no longer have the safety of being able to go home and escape bullying," Kullback said. "Ten years ago, if a kid got bullied he could go home and sit in front of the TV." Nowadays, with children spending so much time on the computer, whether to shop, do research for schoolwork, play games or hang out with friends, Kullback says, they are easier to target for abuse. "Kids have access to one another 24 hours a day. They can bully each other at midnight."
In all but the most disruptive situations, school officials disapprove but do little else, arguing that the acts occur off school grounds. Yet as every child knows, "juicy" material is quickly passed around, in print or by word-of-mouth, indelibly marking the fabric of the school community.
Rosalind Wiseman, co-founder of the Washington-based Empower Program, a nonprofit organization that teaches anti-violence at schools nationwide, believes that administrators demur in part because they are intimidated by the technology being used. "So many principals do not understand the connection between e-mail that occurs at home and creating a safe environment in school," she says. "Adults' perceptions of kids are that they're so technology-savvy, and we, as people who aren't technology-savvy, have no ability to keep up. So we're just not going to try."
Where schools do intercede, new methods of investigation may be required. When two boys at Pyle Middle School in Bethesda devoted a Web site to pronouncing a classmate a "fag," school officials disciplined the boys and had them dismantle the site after a student notified the school. But not all cases are so clear-cut. As Robyn Jackson, a student support specialist at Pyle, told me, "Before there was the Internet, you could bring the bullies in. When the bullying goes online, you have to establish a paper trail. You have to get printouts. Oftentimes it's not archived." She added, "If a child is being bullied in the lunchroom or the hallway, typically children see it. Online, if there's no paper trail, no one sees it."
In matters of discipline, the proprietary nature of personal Web pages and blogs is pitting ethics against rights, or what kids know about bullying against what they know about personal freedoms of speech and intellectual property. When a child is reprimanded for negative or hateful speech on a personal Web page, she may invoke her right to write what she wants in a semi-private space. And the parents often go along. As Wiseman says, "Some parents are so concerned about respecting their children's rights that they see e-mail as a privacy issue." When a child is disciplined, the "parent has two reactions. One is, 'Who gave that to you?' And, 'These e-mails are the private property of my daughter. You can't admit that evidence into any court.'"
The best strategy for promoting ethical behavior online may be proactive. At Saint Ursula Academy, a Catholic girls' school in Cincinnati, students sign an agreement at the beginning of the school year obligating them to ethical use of the Internet, e-mail and the school network. School policy puts teeth into the agreement by defining bullying as actionable whether it occurs on or off campus, in writing or in person. Online bullying may be punished with demerits that may lead to probation or dismissal.
As part of its School Violence Prevention Institute, Wiseman's Empower organization provides schools with help communicating anti-bullying policy to the school community. In a sample letter to parents and students, a school would prohibit "e-mails that include malicious gossip and slander, 'hit lists' via e-mail or other methods of communication naming specific students and/or teachers, [and] changing other people's e-mail [or] personal profiles." Consequences for these acts include suspension or removal from extracurricular activities or school itself.
Education is just as critical. Most parents would not hesitate to assume responsibility for their child's behavior on a playground, at school, or in someone else's home. What happens online should be no different. Parents should talk with their children about computer ethics, stipulate rules of conduct, and -- most importantly -- establish consequences. They should instruct their children never to share their passwords or fight with someone online.
Classroom teachers can play an active role in instructing children about appropriate conduct online, even where there is no school policy on the issue. By promoting public discussion about their lives on the Internet, teachers and students can work together to share advice and develop "rules to type by" or similar Internet-minded guidance. Internet service providers such as AOL could develop software to monitor and regulate online socializing for children 13 and younger. Internet executives can help schools by establishing universal user guidelines for all children and their parents. Schools need to accept the reality of Internet cruelty and reevaluate, if not rewrite, their current policies on bullying.
The anti-pornography crusade successfully urged Internet providers to mount firewalls and other parental control devices to stop the young and sexually curious. Now, record executives are appealing to ethics to urge parents to stamp out pirating. Online social cruelty should be next.
LJ gender - (based on the previously mentioned Gender genie) Last time It thought I was a girl. Better guess this time!
Right!
Uh, Wrong-a-rino.
I'm going to be in the print issue of December's Popular Science Magazine! (Well, the letters page.)
In my email this evening:
Hi Scott,
I am writing to you from Popular Science magazine. We are seeking permission
from you to run your comments below on our Letters page for the current issue.
We are adding a section from blogs as a companion to our reader emails and
letters. We're planning to debut the blog box in our December issue.
Thank you very much,
Jill Shomer
Managing Editor
Popular Science
Astronaut was one that surprised me. I did guess Livestock Masturbator, though. I will be using the term "fistula feeder" as an insult sometime soon.
Of course, I promptly gave permission, and asked if I could post the letters in my journal, too. The reply was - "not at all, publish away. Cute cat, btw."
Hooray for Newton winning over folks! I wonder if I'll get a lot more hits to my site as a result of that? That's the first time a letters page sought me out to publish something of mine, rather than me sending them editorial commentary.
Randomly Placed Deep Thought:
"As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!!"Hand Shadows!
LJdrama is a pretty angry, scary place. Interesting to read in a disconnected way, thought. Led me to Cliques, Clicks, Bullies And Blogs: "Say hello to the newest strain of the bullying virus, technologically updated for the 21st century."
The anonymous warning on the Internet bulletin board was posted to a popular eighth-grader at an exclusive Washington-area private school for girls. "I feel like throwing up just thinking of you," the author wrote, in a diatribe that soon degenerated into the frantic, grammarless prose so characteristic of children's online messaging. "Everything you do is just a ploy to raise your popularity. . . .u slut. . . . You may think ur safe now, but ur so gonna take a plunge down the popularity level, it is inevitable. . . . Most of us realize what a [expletive] loser you are, even if your few slaves don't."
The posted messages grew more menacing by the day, but it was not until the targeted girl was urged to kill herself that school officials were alerted and intervened, demanding that students delete their postings from the much-visited Web site.
Say hello to the newest strain of the bullying virus, technologically updated for the 21st century.
A recent spate of lawsuits against underage music pirates has finally focused adults' attention on teenage ethics and the Internet, but the news about what's been happening while grownups weren't looking is alarming. The Internet has transformed the landscape of children's social lives, moving cliques from lunchrooms and lockers to live chats and online bulletin boards, and intensifying their reach and power. When conflicts arise today, children use their expertise with interactive technologies to humiliate and bully their peers, and avoid reprimand from adults or foes. As parents plead technological ignorance with a my-Danny-hooks-everything-up sort of pride and many schools decline to discipline "off-campus" behavior, the Internet has become a free-for-all where bullying and cruelty are rampant.
I've spent the past four years trying to uncover the hidden culture of aggression in America's schools. Students, parents and school administrators have all pointed to Internet bullying as the latest, most vicious trend in children's social cruelty.
About 45 million American kids ages 10 to 17 are currently estimated to be online, spending hours every day at their computers. With the click of a button, they can e-mail rumors to scores of recipients for instant viewing, permanently damaging a peer's reputation and social life. Instant messaging (IM) is equally treacherous. Like the calculating three-way phone call where one person remains silent, two girls can hover at the same computer screen, harvesting secrets from the messages of a hapless member of their "buddy" list. And when friendships sour, it is common for children to steal each others' passwords and break into e-mail, IM accounts and personal profiles, sending destructive messages under assumed identities.
Weblogs, or "blogs," are the latest sites of Internet cruelty. Blogs are cyber reality shows, widely read diaries that publicly detail the social drama and fluctuating emotions of young lives. They are often scoured for personal mention, and they spare no language or feelings.
One 12-year-old blogger, writing on the popular Angelfire Web site, recently announced she would devote her page to "anyone and everyone i hate and why." She minced no words. "erin used to be aka miss perfect. too bad now u r a train face. hahaha. god did that to u since u r such a b -- . ashley stop acting like a slut wannabe. lauren u fat b -- can't even go out at night w/ ur friends. . . . and laurinda u suck u god damn flat, weird voice, skinny as a stick b -- ."
This isn't likely to be some child of poverty or deprivation speaking. Internet bullying involves a population that is largely middle-class, usually known as the "good kids" who are "on the right track" or, as many school personnel told me, "the ones you'd least expect" to bully or degrade others. The Internet foments outrageous behavior in part because it is a "gray area" for social interactions. Rebecca Kullback, a Montgomery County psychotherapist and former counselor at Sidwell Friends School in the District, believes the Internet deletes social inhibitions. "It allows kids to say and do things that they wouldn't do face-to-face, and they feel like they won't be held accountable in the same way. It gives them a false sense of security and power."
The kids themselves agree. "E-mails are so much less personal," says Elana Lowell, 18, a recent graduate of Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville. "They're so much less formal and more indirect, and it's easier for people to be more candid and even meaner because of that. People can be as mean and vicious as they want because they're not directly confronting the person. It's the same thing as when you're talking on the phone because you don't have to face the person directly. This is a step further removed. You don't even have to hear the person's voice or see their reaction."
If things get heated online, adds Stephanie Herrold, a 16-year-old student at Churchill High School in Potomac, teens "can just sign off and, when asked in person, act like nothing happened. They can even say that it was someone else on their screen name. They don't have to own their aggression."
Just as online cruelty may be intensified by the distance separating perpetrator and victim, it also changes the face of bullying itself. "Kids no longer have the safety of being able to go home and escape bullying," Kullback said. "Ten years ago, if a kid got bullied he could go home and sit in front of the TV." Nowadays, with children spending so much time on the computer, whether to shop, do research for schoolwork, play games or hang out with friends, Kullback says, they are easier to target for abuse. "Kids have access to one another 24 hours a day. They can bully each other at midnight."
In all but the most disruptive situations, school officials disapprove but do little else, arguing that the acts occur off school grounds. Yet as every child knows, "juicy" material is quickly passed around, in print or by word-of-mouth, indelibly marking the fabric of the school community.
Rosalind Wiseman, co-founder of the Washington-based Empower Program, a nonprofit organization that teaches anti-violence at schools nationwide, believes that administrators demur in part because they are intimidated by the technology being used. "So many principals do not understand the connection between e-mail that occurs at home and creating a safe environment in school," she says. "Adults' perceptions of kids are that they're so technology-savvy, and we, as people who aren't technology-savvy, have no ability to keep up. So we're just not going to try."
Where schools do intercede, new methods of investigation may be required. When two boys at Pyle Middle School in Bethesda devoted a Web site to pronouncing a classmate a "fag," school officials disciplined the boys and had them dismantle the site after a student notified the school. But not all cases are so clear-cut. As Robyn Jackson, a student support specialist at Pyle, told me, "Before there was the Internet, you could bring the bullies in. When the bullying goes online, you have to establish a paper trail. You have to get printouts. Oftentimes it's not archived." She added, "If a child is being bullied in the lunchroom or the hallway, typically children see it. Online, if there's no paper trail, no one sees it."
In matters of discipline, the proprietary nature of personal Web pages and blogs is pitting ethics against rights, or what kids know about bullying against what they know about personal freedoms of speech and intellectual property. When a child is reprimanded for negative or hateful speech on a personal Web page, she may invoke her right to write what she wants in a semi-private space. And the parents often go along. As Wiseman says, "Some parents are so concerned about respecting their children's rights that they see e-mail as a privacy issue." When a child is disciplined, the "parent has two reactions. One is, 'Who gave that to you?' And, 'These e-mails are the private property of my daughter. You can't admit that evidence into any court.'"
The best strategy for promoting ethical behavior online may be proactive. At Saint Ursula Academy, a Catholic girls' school in Cincinnati, students sign an agreement at the beginning of the school year obligating them to ethical use of the Internet, e-mail and the school network. School policy puts teeth into the agreement by defining bullying as actionable whether it occurs on or off campus, in writing or in person. Online bullying may be punished with demerits that may lead to probation or dismissal.
As part of its School Violence Prevention Institute, Wiseman's Empower organization provides schools with help communicating anti-bullying policy to the school community. In a sample letter to parents and students, a school would prohibit "e-mails that include malicious gossip and slander, 'hit lists' via e-mail or other methods of communication naming specific students and/or teachers, [and] changing other people's e-mail [or] personal profiles." Consequences for these acts include suspension or removal from extracurricular activities or school itself.
Education is just as critical. Most parents would not hesitate to assume responsibility for their child's behavior on a playground, at school, or in someone else's home. What happens online should be no different. Parents should talk with their children about computer ethics, stipulate rules of conduct, and -- most importantly -- establish consequences. They should instruct their children never to share their passwords or fight with someone online.
Classroom teachers can play an active role in instructing children about appropriate conduct online, even where there is no school policy on the issue. By promoting public discussion about their lives on the Internet, teachers and students can work together to share advice and develop "rules to type by" or similar Internet-minded guidance. Internet service providers such as AOL could develop software to monitor and regulate online socializing for children 13 and younger. Internet executives can help schools by establishing universal user guidelines for all children and their parents. Schools need to accept the reality of Internet cruelty and reevaluate, if not rewrite, their current policies on bullying.
The anti-pornography crusade successfully urged Internet providers to mount firewalls and other parental control devices to stop the young and sexually curious. Now, record executives are appealing to ethics to urge parents to stamp out pirating. Online social cruelty should be next.
LJ gender - (based on the previously mentioned Gender genie) Last time It thought I was a girl. Better guess this time!
Right!
Uh, Wrong-a-rino.
posted by Scottobear at
6:19:00 PM
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