News for the Week of June 19, 2005

The top story this week is about that fine line between cybersocializing and cyberbullying. The latter, of course, has nothing to do with gender or physical strength, and it can be just as, if not more, damaging than the old kind of bullying because of the way the Internet can augment and perpetuate its impact on it victims, 24x7...

When it stops being funny.

The "it" is people's behavior in IM-ing, blogging, and other online social venues. This week CNET pointed out three compelling stories, the first about a 13-year-old who stopped his 2-3 hours of IM-ing a day (that started when he was 11) because he and his friends were spending all that time just insulting each other, and after a while it made him "feel terrible." That's the only story of the three with an upbeat ending. No. 2 is really a phenomenon: happy-slapping. More well-known in the UK but happening in the US, it's "an extreme form of techno-bullying where physical assaults are recorded on mobile phones and distributed to Web sites and other phones via video messaging." Just recently, three 14-year-old Britons were arrested "in connection with the alleged rape of an 11-year-old girl whose attack was videotaped and sent to peers at her North London school," CNET reports. Story 3 is about "Moshzilla." A 19-year-old goes to a San Diego hardcore rock show, snaps photos of people "moshing" (dancing and slamming each other in the mosh pit), and posts them in his site. "One funny but arguably less-than-flattering picture of a young woman ... sparked the imaginations of viewers, who Photoshopped the mosher into a range of poses, including dancing in an iPod ad...." Some of the images depicted the girl in sexually explicit poses. She became known as Moshzilla (only an interview with her is left at Moshzilla.com, a site in her "honor" which was up on the Web for 48 hours, taken down, it says, at the girl's request). However, "within a few weeks," CNET continues, "the photos had spread to multiple message boards, some of which were attracting a quarter of a million hits and 30 responses a page." How online social cruelty, or cyberbullying, can go global and irretrievable is what both parents and kids *really* need to be aware of. For more on this, see "Cybersocializing, cyberbullying".