Writer's Block: Personality goes a long way

[seawasp]

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I'm not sure what "cyber-bullying" is. Bullying in school worked because there was an inequality of power that allowed them to get away with it, and retorting to them in-kind would result in worse which you couldn't counter.

Here, if someone says nasty things to you, you can respond with just as nasty retorts, ignore them, or whatever you feel like, and the worst that can happen is they say nasty things again. If it's Email, you can delete it without reading, if it's in an online forum, everyone else can see it too and it'll become obvious what's happening.

So I really don't know. I've had people say nasty things to me, I've had people announce with great drama that they were going to "drive you out of this group" or "shut you down" or whatever, but they had no power to do so and I just mocked them a lot. The closest I suppose was one guy who threatened to sue me for saying the truth about him (that he was a whining stalkerboy with no life), and as he has a history of actually suing people I decided that the amusement of calling him a stalkerboy wasn't worth the small but actual chance that he'd sue and thus cost me a lot of pain-in-the-ass for my whole family. But that's, to my mind, not the same as bullying.

Comments

[meril.livejournal.com]

"cyber-bullying" is, as far as I know, just another word for good old fashioned RL bullying that gets extended to online--it's the same bunch of kids who bully people they know offline bullying them through texts and Facebook.

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

Yeah, like that. It lets the creeps reach parts of the target's life that they wouldn't otherwise be able to appear in; allows the harassment to work pretty much 24/7 if the villain can be bothered, at relatively tiny expense to the villain; expedites the spreading of vile rumours and the siccing on of issue-based net.kooks who don't necessarily know either villain or victim from Adam... Or so I understand, never having been targeted myself. Like the perpetrators, it's really just another tool.

I imagine it works much better on somebody who's already oppressed by it in RL: the mere constant reminders of the oppression, and denial of mental safe space, could be more significant most of the time than any particular content.

[seawasp]

Except that I'm not sure how that works as BULLYING. Bullying was confronting me in the hallway and shoving me to the ground and kicking or punching me with force I couldn't match. Bullying was following me around and calling names at me when I couldn't respond.

The key point -- that I can't respond -- doesn't exist on the Net. You wanna call me names? I can do that too, and unlike RL bullying, you can't then escalate by shoving my head in a toilet. I can mock you in detail, in ways I couldn't have managed in RL (because you-the-bully wouldn't have given me the time to detail the response), in ways that make you-the-bully look small and laughable.

As I said, the only time I encountered something even vaguely equivalent was when I ended up dealing with a stalker with a history of litigation, and even then what kept me from continuing to mock him on a daily basis was simply that with a family I can't take the risk that he'd become a *legal* pain in the ass (rather than just a NOISY pain in the ass).

[elainegrey.livejournal.com]

I think cyber bullying makes more sense in the school context. What i've read described is that the in-school bullying doesn't stop when one leaves school now, but instead the bullying continues as a the bullies txt, email, or post harassment of the target. But making the school community always on, cliques perpetuated in social media, hallway gossip expanded to 24x7, the network makes escape from bullying "impossible."

Since i escaped to books, i hope i would be able to "escape" the contemporary environment. I'm not sure though. My escape was to shut out the auditory, to not listen to what was being said around me about me. To see it in text might be harder to shut out.

[seawasp]

Hm. Well, to me there's an absolutely key difference that doesn't make it anything like bullying was in MY experience: power. If I told the bully that he was a microcephalic chimpanzee without the ability to string two words together without getting one of them wrong, he would respond by having him and his friends use physical force to try to shut me up. I also couldn't ban the bullies from my classroom or flame them in public.