My last blog addressed the dangers of all of the social media sites that we have and how they have added to the bullying. I wanted to see what studies have been done about cyberbullying and the effects that it has one pre-teens and teens that become targets.
I found an article by Corinne David-Ferdon and Marci Feldman Hertz explaining the health problems that adolescents who become subjected by cyberbullying suffer from. Something that I didn't even think about that has a huge impact on research and data collection about this topic is how little information we have about cyberbullying because it really hasn't been around for a long enough for researchers to collect a sufficient amount of data or done many observations. I started to think about bullying that occurred when I was in elementary, middle and high school and I only could remember my peers being bullied online around 8th grade and into high school. That wasn't even 10 years ago so in the research world that is an incredibly short amount of time to be able to collect accurate data and results about the effects of cyberbullying. I forget that aspect about cyberbullying and I think many other people do as well because it seemed to pop up very quickly and now everyone is scrambling trying to fix it.
Campaigns have popped up all over that are desperately trying to stop cyberbullying but it's such a hard thing to track and maintain because social media has exploded and become virtually impossible to ignore. The article talks about that and how that could potentially have a devastating effect on the victims because everywhere they turn they could be subject to harassment thanks to smart phones, ipads, kindles etc... That is also why the new technology is looked at to be so revolutionary.
With technology growing at such a rapid pace which also means finding a way to stop cyberbullying will get more and more difficult because there will always be new ways for adolescents to get bullied. In the article David-Ferdon and Hertz said that a lot of cyberbullying doesn't even happen in school because the internet allows people to interact with anybody which also makes it difficult to study and track. With technology growing at such a rapid speed how can we expect to slow down cyberbullying?
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
The downside to social media sites
Being harassed online
When facebook, twitter and other social media sites exploded all people talked about was the good it was going to do for out society and how convenient and easy it was easy to stay connected with people from all over the United States and the world. But just like anything else that we have, social media started to show it's ugly head when people started to get bullied via the internet using social media sites. Now cyber bullying has totally spiraled out of control and it seems to be worse then ever, that could also be because it's getting more attention then ever now. In the poll talked about in the article 56% of teens and young adults said that they were bullied online which was up 50% from a similar survey taken in 2009.
We are all aware of the recent news stories about teens killing themselves because they were being severely bullied by classmates both in and out of school. The very aspects of social media that people were raving about have had some major downsides because now these kids who are subject to bullying in school can't escape it when they go home. The effects have proven to be extremely devastating to the kids who are being bullied and their families. Is the convenience factor of being able to communicate with anyone anywhere who has an internet connection really as great as we all saw it to be or is it too good to to be true?
When facebook, twitter and other social media sites exploded all people talked about was the good it was going to do for out society and how convenient and easy it was easy to stay connected with people from all over the United States and the world. But just like anything else that we have, social media started to show it's ugly head when people started to get bullied via the internet using social media sites. Now cyber bullying has totally spiraled out of control and it seems to be worse then ever, that could also be because it's getting more attention then ever now. In the poll talked about in the article 56% of teens and young adults said that they were bullied online which was up 50% from a similar survey taken in 2009.
We are all aware of the recent news stories about teens killing themselves because they were being severely bullied by classmates both in and out of school. The very aspects of social media that people were raving about have had some major downsides because now these kids who are subject to bullying in school can't escape it when they go home. The effects have proven to be extremely devastating to the kids who are being bullied and their families. Is the convenience factor of being able to communicate with anyone anywhere who has an internet connection really as great as we all saw it to be or is it too good to to be true?
Monday, May 28, 2012
Why is twitter so capitivating?
The article that I am blogging about is here
This article was written almost 3 years ago and I was interested to see what is said being an avid twitter user myself. As Johnson stated in the beginning of the article I was also very apprehensive to join the twitter community myself and it took me a few tries to get into the groove of twitter because I really did not initially understand why people were so concerned about other people's lives and what they were doing at that exact moment. I soon learned that it is much more then that and can really captivate my attention for long periods of time. In the article it mentions the same thing, that twitter has an "unsuspected depth." I can scroll through my timeline and see what my friends and celebrities are doing at the exact time that I am possible doing something completely different. I think that in itself is very interesting and keeps me refreshing my timeline to see new tweets.
Another part of the twitter that is mentioned in this article is the hashtag (3) usage and how that can be used to communicate with people all around the world. Johnson talks about while at a conference he saw a conversation via twitter between the people who attended the conference turn into a global conversation with people all over...taking it from a private conversation to a public conversation about education reform. I do use hashtags and I love the idea behind them but this was the first time that I had thought about them being used to turn a private conversation into a public conversation. I started to think about all the inside jokes that my friends and I turned into hashtags on twitter and that immediately turned them into public knowledge...people may not have understood the jokes though. All of those tweets back and forth to each other keep them all in one place somewhere in the twitter world in cyberspace. Even though conversations such as these can be kept on facebook, twitter groups all the conversations around one hashtag in one place and clicking on hashtag links and reading what other people have said about the hashtags too. That is in itself I think is huge because there arent many places where conversations can occur with those kinds of influences and in that kind of environment.
The end of the article talks about how we are in tough times right now economically and people are figuring out new ways to communicate with each other. That is very true and I find it almost like a comic relief. Using twitter we can all see that we aren't alone when it comes to our thoughts and feelings because there are so many tweets that get favored and retweeted even about the simplest things like..."I love pizza." All of that shows how twitter has changes even since this article was written 3 years ago. Twitter is constantly changing and revamping the website and the apps on smartphones to make it easier for people to communicate with each other.
This article was written almost 3 years ago and I was interested to see what is said being an avid twitter user myself. As Johnson stated in the beginning of the article I was also very apprehensive to join the twitter community myself and it took me a few tries to get into the groove of twitter because I really did not initially understand why people were so concerned about other people's lives and what they were doing at that exact moment. I soon learned that it is much more then that and can really captivate my attention for long periods of time. In the article it mentions the same thing, that twitter has an "unsuspected depth." I can scroll through my timeline and see what my friends and celebrities are doing at the exact time that I am possible doing something completely different. I think that in itself is very interesting and keeps me refreshing my timeline to see new tweets.
Another part of the twitter that is mentioned in this article is the hashtag (3) usage and how that can be used to communicate with people all around the world. Johnson talks about while at a conference he saw a conversation via twitter between the people who attended the conference turn into a global conversation with people all over...taking it from a private conversation to a public conversation about education reform. I do use hashtags and I love the idea behind them but this was the first time that I had thought about them being used to turn a private conversation into a public conversation. I started to think about all the inside jokes that my friends and I turned into hashtags on twitter and that immediately turned them into public knowledge...people may not have understood the jokes though. All of those tweets back and forth to each other keep them all in one place somewhere in the twitter world in cyberspace. Even though conversations such as these can be kept on facebook, twitter groups all the conversations around one hashtag in one place and clicking on hashtag links and reading what other people have said about the hashtags too. That is in itself I think is huge because there arent many places where conversations can occur with those kinds of influences and in that kind of environment.
The end of the article talks about how we are in tough times right now economically and people are figuring out new ways to communicate with each other. That is very true and I find it almost like a comic relief. Using twitter we can all see that we aren't alone when it comes to our thoughts and feelings because there are so many tweets that get favored and retweeted even about the simplest things like..."I love pizza." All of that shows how twitter has changes even since this article was written 3 years ago. Twitter is constantly changing and revamping the website and the apps on smartphones to make it easier for people to communicate with each other.
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