in control . . . on Facebook, you can be as mean as you want.” 16 Of course, she’s right. It’s a lot easier to write “you’re such a slut” than to say those same words to someone’s face. The Cyberbullying Research Center says it found that one in five middle-school students are being bullied via the Internet or text. One in five! That’s a cyberbullying epidemic! 17 Vicious sexual comments, ethnic and racial slurs, and derogatory references to income and class are common. Often kids can do it anonymously.
To stay one step ahead of their parents, kids often jump from one social-networking site to another. Formspring.me is a relatively new social-networking site that was singled out by the New York Times as “a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation . . . it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.” 18
When a seventeen-year-old Long Island girl committed suicide in March 2010, cops wondered if the vicious taunts she had received on social-networking sites might have been a factor. Perhaps most horrifying, the online taunts continued even after her death. “She was obviously a stupid depressed—who deserved to kill herself. she got what she wanted. be happy for her death. rejoice in it,” someone wrote. 19 One parent whose child was a friend of the victim noted, “There are posts of photos with nooses around her neck. It’s disgusting and heartless.”
Does this callousness have an addictive component? Of course! We know that teens are texting 50 to 100 times a day and then posting a slew of other messages on social-networking sites. That’s called being hooked. We know that addiction leads to moral bankruptcy. Alcoholism, for example, routinely leads to domestic violence in the home with spouses, kids, and even pets brutalized by the drunk family patriarch. Kids are not immune to this phenomenon of addiction-based cruelty. Addiction creates a single-mindedness that kills every other voice inside one’s head, silencing the conscience.
There is a growing obsession with being the cool, cold texter with the pithy putdown. Since all addictive behavior is progressive, it follows that the anonymous comments will become nastier as the teen’s texting addiction spirals out of control. This is a social contagion of the first order! So where are the adults? Getting and sending emails on their CrackBerrys, of course. Remember the first time you heard “You’ve got mail!”?
Ping! Ping! Ping!
It’s the tantalizing sound that tells us somebody is knocking on our cyberdoor. There’s that moment of suspense as we wonder . . . Is it her? Is it him? Is it that good news I’ve been waiting for? Is it that bad news I’ve been fearing? Who is it? What do they want? That moment of anticipation as we scramble to open the message gives us a dopamine rush. Dopamine, a chemical similar to adrenaline, influences our ability to experience pleasure or pain. It’s the same kind of rush a gambler gets as the roulette wheel spins. Where will it land? W hat will I win? What might I lose? And then, if the message is a winner, we get another hit of pleasure, another surge of dopamine. This is really what it’s all about. Getting the rush from the ping!
I should know. I hear a lot of pings. Like many people who work in the news media, I have two BlackBerrys, one for work and one for personal use. I, too, text and e-mail dozens and dozens of times over the course of an average day. So am I a total hypocrite for beating my chest about cyberaddiction? Yes . . . and no. It always comes back to this: What is my intention in using a given device to send a message?
Let’s All Get Honest About Why We’re Hitting SEND
Two guys are
To stay one step ahead of their parents, kids often jump from one social-networking site to another. Formspring.me is a relatively new social-networking site that was singled out by the New York Times as “a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation . . . it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.” 18
When a seventeen-year-old Long Island girl committed suicide in March 2010, cops wondered if the vicious taunts she had received on social-networking sites might have been a factor. Perhaps most horrifying, the online taunts continued even after her death. “She was obviously a stupid depressed—who deserved to kill herself. she got what she wanted. be happy for her death. rejoice in it,” someone wrote. 19 One parent whose child was a friend of the victim noted, “There are posts of photos with nooses around her neck. It’s disgusting and heartless.”
Does this callousness have an addictive component? Of course! We know that teens are texting 50 to 100 times a day and then posting a slew of other messages on social-networking sites. That’s called being hooked. We know that addiction leads to moral bankruptcy. Alcoholism, for example, routinely leads to domestic violence in the home with spouses, kids, and even pets brutalized by the drunk family patriarch. Kids are not immune to this phenomenon of addiction-based cruelty. Addiction creates a single-mindedness that kills every other voice inside one’s head, silencing the conscience.
There is a growing obsession with being the cool, cold texter with the pithy putdown. Since all addictive behavior is progressive, it follows that the anonymous comments will become nastier as the teen’s texting addiction spirals out of control. This is a social contagion of the first order! So where are the adults? Getting and sending emails on their CrackBerrys, of course. Remember the first time you heard “You’ve got mail!”?
Ping! Ping! Ping!
It’s the tantalizing sound that tells us somebody is knocking on our cyberdoor. There’s that moment of suspense as we wonder . . . Is it her? Is it him? Is it that good news I’ve been waiting for? Is it that bad news I’ve been fearing? Who is it? What do they want? That moment of anticipation as we scramble to open the message gives us a dopamine rush. Dopamine, a chemical similar to adrenaline, influences our ability to experience pleasure or pain. It’s the same kind of rush a gambler gets as the roulette wheel spins. Where will it land? W hat will I win? What might I lose? And then, if the message is a winner, we get another hit of pleasure, another surge of dopamine. This is really what it’s all about. Getting the rush from the ping!
I should know. I hear a lot of pings. Like many people who work in the news media, I have two BlackBerrys, one for work and one for personal use. I, too, text and e-mail dozens and dozens of times over the course of an average day. So am I a total hypocrite for beating my chest about cyberaddiction? Yes . . . and no. It always comes back to this: What is my intention in using a given device to send a message?
Let’s All Get Honest About Why We’re Hitting SEND
Two guys are
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