Post: The New Bathroom Wall
The New Bathroom Wall
We all remember the nasty words etched into the bathroom stalls at school.
It was usually an outward expression of girl-to-girl warfare. The same words were also passed in notes or traveled like the game "telephone," where children would whisper the latest news to each other, mangling the truth as it moved from one person to the next.
Today the bathroom wall has gone digital, and teens are able to spread gossip about each other online. While it's just as anonymous as the unauthored handwriting in the girls room, it's way more public when it's on a commercial Web site and way more viral -- traveling at the speed of copy, paste and send bulletin on MySpace.
We've also heard about lists -- who slept with who, the prettiest, ugliest, most likely to be gay. Teens will sit down together and make them. According to USA Today, police are looking for someone in Athens, GA, who decided to make a list of teen hookups and post them on an anonymous MySpace profile.
Just like the "Burn Book" in the teen flick Mean Girls, once the list spread, students argued with one another, disrupting classes. And just like the Burn Book was a group effort, my guess is that it was a couple of teens who worked together on this particular MySpace list.
Of course the email on the MySpace profile was an anonymous Yahoo! account. Lt. David Kilpatrick, from the Oconee County Sheriff's Department, said he would subpoena BellSouth, the Internet service provider used to create the e-mail address, to try to determine who paid for the Internet service. And while gossip itself is not a crime, if they find the student(s), he or she could be expelled, face lawsuits from the parents of the students named in the list, etc.
Posting these types of lists online or any type of embarrassing photos or video (whether the subject is waving a Star Wars light saber or in a compromising sexual position) is a tactic used in cyberbullying. Nancy Willard, the executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, describes the most common tactics used in cyberbullying as flaming, harassment and cyber stalking, impersonation, denigration and outing.
What happened in Georgia is a classic example of outing or sharing someone's secret or embarrassing information online. It's important to use these stories as examples when talking to teens about how to be ethical online, and to explain that the consequences of doing what we used to do on the bathroom wall on a public website like MySpace will be much harsher.
Find out more about Anastasia's new project, Totally Wired -- the blog and the book. For more on cyberbulling, click here.