Can we find a quick fix?

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?