19 June 2013
Cyber-bullying.
That's a word that we see and hear a lot. It is now a crime, and it's a despicable crime, because it's a cowardly form of attack. Anonymously telling a 14 year-old girl who is already in pain to go kill herself is about as low as it goes.
A number of suicides have resulted from cyber-bullying, although I remain unsure as to whether those victims would have been victims anyway - the internet did not begin to reach even half of the population until 1998/99 and if we go back to 1993, the internet as we know it did not exist. Despite the claims of cyber-bullying and suicide, the actual suicide rate has decreased in the internet age. Since 1998, the suicide rate in NZ has gone down a significant amount, and while that's no cause for celebration as more people still commit suicide than die on the road, it pretty well explodes the popular notion that cyber-bullying is leading to an upwards suicide trend.
Cyber-bullies are attention-seeking trolls, that's all, and some of them are really, really good at it. (The oldest rule in the internet etiquette book is: Do Not Feed The Troll.)
Two recent examples seem highly ironic to me, when the same newspapers and TV stations that feature horror stories about cyber-bullying then turn around and feed the troll or indulge in cyber-bullying themselves.
Case 1
The Angelina Jolie story combined two of the world's most-popular items: celebrity and cancer. Cancer is ugly, so any story that is positive towards it gets immediate priority on the editorial desk, while one of the few things that rates higher than cancer is celebrity.
Despite the superficial nature of the coverage, the media was actually right in that instance - it was a story of courage, science and free will.
There can be few higher instances of bravery than cutting your tits off before you develop symptoms. I can't imagine many blokes would do that with their nuts!
At the time, the usual trolls came out and made revolting, and often revoltingly funny Tweets, Instagrams and posts. The media were universal in their condemnation of the trolls.
What are we, two weeks later? Now, someone has dug up a survivor of the same cancer, in the form of the sad old cow, Melissa Etheridge, whom some may recall as an average singer of moderate success a couple of decades ago.
Etheridge has come out and called Angelina Jolie a coward for not just facing up to the cancer. This revolting piece of excrement was reported as telling Jolie that cancer was caused by bad energy and attitude and she should have just stared it down like a real woman and not given in to having her tits cut off.
Aside from the fact that what Etheridge says is utterly insane, she is entitled to her idiotic opinion, just as Fred Phelps is entitled to his. In both Phelps' and Etheridge's cases, the media act abominably, offering free publicity to people who are not mentally ill, but are bitter, sad, twisted individuals who allow their hate to conquer all.
10/10 troll. The media bought it hook, line and sinker. I'd be happy to count searching out and printing comments calling Angelina Jolie as cyber-bullying.
Case 2
Right from the first internet graphic meme that featured a disabled child, I have stood and said it ain't right. There aren't many people who, when faced with the obvious point that their joke is an actual child, with real feelings and parents, brothers, sisters and friends who hasn't immediately stopped propagating the meme.
It's not just disabled people either. Excessively fat or thin, bald or bearded, there are a million different graphic memes out there that feature real people. In precisely the way that the Kim Dotcom Tui billboard was a disgrace, so it is to poke fun at someone for the way they look, and there can surely be no harsher form of cyber-bullying than being turned into a graphic meme, having your face and your life held as objects of derision all over the world, embedded in servers, hard-drives and archives for all time?
Then give a thought to Marissa Powell. Ok, she's bloody gorgeous and probably rich, and to some degree will be insulated from it all, but do you think she doesn't realise that everyone with an internet connection or TV set is laughing at her right now?
Copyright © Alan Charman