OF BYTES
& BULLYS
It cannot
all be blamed on the Internet.
Parents
really need to step up and into their children’s lives.
TAGS:
TEEN BULLYING, CYBER BULLYING, TEEN PRESSURES,
DESENSITIZED
YOUTH, MALADJUSTED FOR ACTUAL SOCIALIZATION,
TEACHING
REAL VALUES IN THE HOME, PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY
(Tuesday December 31, 2013 Anytown,
USA) This is the time of year when every news media
outlet, magazine, publication and tabloid rate the best and worst of the year
just about to be concluded. TIME
magazine names their “Person of the Year” and there are endless lists and
ranking of trends, fads and milestones in pop culture and our society as a
whole. There are seemingly endless lists of winners and losers, of those to watch
in the upcoming year and those that imploded in the one about to end. Some lists
rate the best and worst news photos, defining moments in national and world
events, politics, fame and infamy. There are no stones left unturned in this oddball
subjective annual craze. From top notch
sports teams and individual athletes, to journalists, politicians and, of
course, that uniquely American breed that is considered “celebrity” for no
apparent reason other than earning the ersatz tiara of celebrity. This is a ritual
practice and often sheds light on some aspects of our lives and times that
would otherwise remain unnoticed by the majority. Typically, The Brooding Cynyx refrain from this
annual ritual compiling lists of Best This and Worst That and have generally
avoided getting caught up in the muck and mire, the hype and hyperbole that
others in the media seem to thrive on when it comes to quantifying, qualifying,
critiquing, assessing and summarizing.
But this year is a bit
different for us; this last twelve months have brought us events and stories
that have compelled us to affix a label to 2013: we have designated it “The
Year of the Bully”. This year has been
tragically wrought by far too many stories of young lives destroyed, ruined and
taken due to bullying. Technology and all its unintended consequences
contribute to and add a level of stress in the lives of our teens never before
possible. Now awkward adolescent moments
can be caught on a cell phone camera and Tweeted, texted and shared in a truly
viral form reaching an audience of dozens or hundreds within minutes. These moments are forever alive in whatever
digital devices they have traveled though, the “social networks” that
facilitate their spread and, in what becomes for many, the loss of the ability
or means to defend themselves.
OH HOW THE TIMES HAVE CHANGED
In his brilliantly written 2001
book “Wireless Nation”, James B. Murray, Jr tells the fascinating story of the
cell phone industry in America having been involved in it for over two decades,
the time that took a concept that many in the communications and technology fields
said was not viable, to the full out bandwidth wars between the “telcom” carriers.
In the 1980’s one would have been hard pressed to find any serious support from
investors for a national cellular network.
Most of the heavy hitters in the industry from AT&T to a number of venture-capital
backed startups simply lacked the vision to see beyond the familiar horizon. Those that had that foresight and vision took
cellular communications technology from a small novel gadget accessible only to
the very rich and nurtured it into what it has become today; a global force
that has even defied “Moore’s Law” regarding the exponential growth of digital
capacity. Cell phones have come a long
way from their brick-like clumsiness of the late 1980’s into ultra-slim, lightweight,
miniature computers with a broad array of capacities and applications. Cell phones have come to replace “landlines”
in each of the last 4 years at a rate near 40% annually. Cellular is now the standard, now the norm.
But, as we have seen time and
time again, the Law of Unintended Consequences is as embedded in our
sophisticated technologies just as are the nano-sized silicon chips that make
them operate as they do. Virtually every cell phone today has a camera built in
and, with the explosive rise of “social networks” in just the last six years
our connectivity has exceeded everyone’s wildest imaginations from the
engineers behind the hardware and software, the carriers, investors and this
connectivity has forever changed the world in which we live. Cellular technology has “downsized” the
Earth. With the proper equipment, either
a cell or satellite phone, there is nowhere on the planet that is too remote to
not be accessible. So too is it that
even within the realm of proximity there is a connectedness that no one could
have truly anticipated and is just now beginning to be understood on many
levels.
We are all aware of what is
happening in this regard. No matter
where we live or work, how we commute or communicate, cellular technology is
ubiquitously obvious, often intrusively so, in America today. This reality is particularly evidenced in our
children, adolescents and teenagers all seem to be forever listening through ear
buds to music while texting and Tweeting friends that might be as close as the
next table in the cafeteria. Through the
social networks they are tethered to each other and can share anything from
simple messages and video clips, to “selfies”, games and any of the over 400,000
apps now available for cell phones, sleek multiuse “pads” and “tablets” as well
as the growing array of other hybrid miniaturized digital devices.
All of this advanced
technology has created platforms for new ways to bully, embarrass, harass,
tease, taunt and otherwise ridicule anyone.
As if being a teenager wasn’t already sufficiently laden with the
awkward, often difficult process of maturing, socialization and taking the first
small steps into hormonally-charged new vistas of fear or desire or identity,
now anyone else, a classmate, neighbor or stranger on the subway, can document
it moment by moment and share it for all the world to see if they so
choose. Any awkward moment, any mistake,
miscue or misstep that every teen has ever made, can be captured for posterity’s
sake or posted on YouTube for the enjoyment of others. Total strangers are interacting via social
networks in truly “viral” ways that are more susceptible to be malignant than
benign. What one person finds
embarrassing can be viewed a virtually unlimited number of others on the small
cellphone screens they appear to be riveted to despite what other activity they
may be involved in.
Up until this new digital age
the pitfalls and pains of the teen years where witnessed only by those in real proximity,
in real time, in the actual physical presence of each other. Then all a teen had to worry about was being
the brunt of a joke, being humiliated for a few days on the school bus or just
forced to suffer from the cruel exclusionary - inclusivity practiced by
teenagers probably since time immemorial. Whatever the clumsy moment or prank
played, its effects never transferred further than your neighborhood, school or
immediate peers. The high school years are notoriously perilous and each of us
either looks back on them with wistful pleasure or grinding anger or something
in between. But to have our lives open to a cruel sort of chroniclization
is more than some teens can handle.
HOLD THE PHONE
Our technology is here to
stay, there is no going back. That some
of our advancement in technology has created some fallout is not a broad
condemnation. It is merely stating the
obvious, an after effect that can linger dangerously in cyberspace and have a
detrimental influence on our children during their most formative and impressionable
years. Is our “culture” or society to blame?
Can we pin this disturbing trend of digital bullying on poor parenting
skills? Broken families? Who knows? We do have a tendency in this country to
extrapolate from the micro to the macro, from the local to the national, from
the rare and isolated to the common and pervasive when it comes to looking at
aspects of our lives. In this type of
thinking there are inherent flaws and unquantifiable, unidentifiable variables
that obscure other perspectives. This
also allows us to jump to conclusions and proffer assumptions that serve only
to further confuse and muddle the issues.
Is our “culture” partially complicit? Yes,
in some ways. Are our children growing
up more familiar with strangers on social networks than with their own Moms and
Dads, brothers and sisters, kids next door?
Sure, in many cases this is reality.
The pace of our lives today is astonishingly rapid and blurrily
confusing to most people over 30; perhaps even 25. It is hard to draw a generational line that
demarcates the fork in the road that shunted us all onto the “Information
Highway” of President Bill Clinton’s description yet maybe that was the point
of bifurcation. My generation did not
grow up with any of the sophisticated technology that was still a distant dream
to futurists and some in the fields of engineering, computer science and
associated disciplines in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.
We had a black and white TV, three major networks and a rotary dial phone
hanging on the wall in the kitchen. We
went to libraries to get information for homework and projects, learned to type,
used carbon paper and made mimeograph copies.
In high school we took chemistry, calculus and physics with a slide
ruler and scratch paper. In the simple
linear nature of human and technological progress the road ahead seemed natural
enough; a ride up a gently slopped gradient of advance that made our lives
easier and impressed us mightily. We put
a man on the moon in 1969 with no more computing power available on the Lunar
Module than in a common microwave oven of today. We have not been back to the moon in decades
however we have continually been moving forward and faster.
OF VIDEOS AND VALUES
There is a large vocal chorus
laying all of society’s and, in particular our youths behavior on “violent”
video games, graphic 3 dimensional movies filled with blood and gore and how
their intimacy with these realms merge and have “desensitized” the children
born during and since the 1980’s. This
is a reasonable yet not complete assertion regarding some of the emerging
trends evidenced by how our youth approach and perceive the wider world. Their
experiences have largely been in relationships with the digitalized parallel
universe of cyberspace in all its unlimited vistas. Certainly they are less well adapted,
socialized, than we were. Yes, their
endless hours travelling the social networks, gaming sites, chat rooms, Facebook
pages, web sites has desensitized them, it can be argued, as have the real life
news reporting from war zones around the world.
There appears to be the
absence of a contravening force, any counterbalancing influence. This is not the fault of the nation as a
whole. It is foolish to believe so. And
this returns us to the “extrapolation affect”.
We see a truly tragic, reprehensible news item about a school shooting
and immediately the hue and cry to enact stricter gun control, screen children
for mental illness or arm teachers can be heard. When we read about teens who had been the
subject of intense cyber bullying who commits suicide automatically factions on
both the political Left and Right toss out their own tired rhetorical grenades
hoping to score political points and further fuel the flames of divisiveness
that are constantly aglow just beneath the surface. What has become of person
accountability? Why is it always a
larger “them” to blame when it was just one person or a small number of people
involved in the commission of whatever the atrocity might be?
The Right will blame the
absence of “God” in our schools for all that ail our youth while the Left will stridently
call for more regulation, laws and intervention. In both cases everyone is attempting to find
the needle of causation in the haystack of a diverse and disparate population
of over 400 million Americans.
What may be a beginning remedy
must take place on the micro scale; at the level of individual families. Our children need to be taught values and
that does not refer to the gauzy material once taught in civics classes and
Sunday schools. Concepts of conscience,
right and wrong, winners and losers should be instilled in our children to
provide a counterweight to all they are consumed with in cyberspace and in
their small cliques and groups. There is
a strain of “meanness”, of callousness and cruelty throughout our culture that
is naturally absorbed by those in their formative years. We live in a violent culture but, and this is
no doubt a controversial point of view but, it is not nearly as violent, all things
considered, as it could be. Yes, every
crime of violence, every act of cruelty is troublesome but, given the
composition of our country thins could be much worse.
Statistics and metrics are
malleable. The numbers as illustrated in
graphs and pie charts assembled by scholars and ‘experts’ in a wide range of
disciplines can always find numbers to support their own beliefs or their
favorite theory. Statistics as collected
and analyzed for academic monographs and peer reviewed journals are notoriously
flawed particularly as when they are extracted from polling data and other
subjective means of acquisition. All the
“Blue Ribbon Panels”, working groups and “national debate” engaged in amounts
to just so much rubbish. We don’t need a
“national dialogue” about anything even if such an activity were even
possible. We have had far too much
emphasis placed beyond an individual’s immediate reach, on factors and
influences that are purportedly the cause of this or the reason for that. Again, the responsibility for our children
and how they develop rests with us.
Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Grandparents, our kin should have an active role
with our children and extended family.
Yes, over the years there has been much made of the “broken home
syndrome” and the single Mom scenario and these are indeed the root of some
problems for some of our youth. But many
a good and decent child raised by a single parent, a grandparent or even an
older sibling has developed into stable well-adjusted teen “normalcy”.
Perhaps the time has come for
each of us to stop looking for the causes for what disturbs us about our youth’s
indifference and behavior that may be completely baffling to us. The causes may be much closer to home;
perhaps rooted within the home and it is at that level we must approach the
issues. We must teach our children well.
Copyright The
Brooding Cynyx 2013 © All Rights Reserved
