I think Mel in her blog post “The Internet and Social networking sites- should we be worried?” raised a lot of interesting issues about social media, but more generally on the impacts of technology on crime in general.
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| Is a second life just a second oppurtunity for bullies? |
As Mel notes, the act of cyber bullying are well on the rise and while older generations might look back with nostalgia and claim that it is down to the natures of increasingly deviant youths, a more practical view is that it is the simple by-product of growing use of social media. Though there is very little academic literature on the phenomenon, an overview of the available non-academic literature is very revealing; major social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube feature in all lists of top 10 most popular websites with a variety of lesser known blogging platforms typically taking up another 1-2 spaces (My Top Ten 2011, Most Popular Websites 2011, Google 2011), while the Nielsen Company (2010), has determined that the average person in their sample (data is taken from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy) spent an average of five and a half hours on social media websites over a month, an 82% increase from the previous year. Australia weighed in at second for highest level of social network usage at over five and a half hours. Notably the Nielsen Company (2010) data excludes popular video sharing platforms such as YouTube and forums.
An important intermediary, before we link the growth of social media to the growth of cyber bullying, is the increasing significance of our online selves. It is both commonsense and legal principle that physical provocation is more serious than verbal, and using the same logic it should be seen that cyber provocation is even less serious. Yet the growth of the phenomenon of internet bullying, and indeed of internet usage in general, forces one to consider otherwise. People are increasingly emotionally, psychologically, and even financially vested in their internet lives; for proof we need look no further than the game ‘Second Life’(see video at end) in which users are known to spend hundreds of thousands of real world dollars on virtual entities, in which there are documented (and very serious, to the participants atleast) cyber-weddings and adulteries (Woods 2008), and in which there are documented cases of parents being so preoccupied with ‘Second Life’ offspring that they neglect their own (Torgovnick 2010). Without doubt it can be said that our identities and interactions are increasingly being subdivided into real life and digital life, our 'second life', with the latter growing in significance with time.
An important intermediary, before we link the growth of social media to the growth of cyber bullying, is the increasing significance of our online selves. It is both commonsense and legal principle that physical provocation is more serious than verbal, and using the same logic it should be seen that cyber provocation is even less serious. Yet the growth of the phenomenon of internet bullying, and indeed of internet usage in general, forces one to consider otherwise. People are increasingly emotionally, psychologically, and even financially vested in their internet lives; for proof we need look no further than the game ‘Second Life’(see video at end) in which users are known to spend hundreds of thousands of real world dollars on virtual entities, in which there are documented (and very serious, to the participants atleast) cyber-weddings and adulteries (Woods 2008), and in which there are documented cases of parents being so preoccupied with ‘Second Life’ offspring that they neglect their own (Torgovnick 2010). Without doubt it can be said that our identities and interactions are increasingly being subdivided into real life and digital life, our 'second life', with the latter growing in significance with time.
If we make the reasonable assumption that bullies are as prone as the rest of the population to indulge in these sorts of websites, then it would appear that bullies are simply moving from the playgrounds to their keyboards; as identities and interpersonal relations have shifted from the real world to the digital, so too have the very real notions of hatred and degradation. So whilst the crime of cyber bullying is a new crime, I feel there is little that is new about it with the same principles simply being transferred to a new platform. The main problem, as Mel has identified, is how to catch the bullies out or to monitor victims in a platform that is inherently anonymous.
References:
Google. 2011. Top 1000 sites on the web. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/. [Accessed 07 May 11].
Most Popular Websites. 2011. Most popular websites on the internet 1-50. [ONLINE] Available at: http://mostpopularwebsites.net/1-50/. [Accessed 09 May 11].
My Top Ten . 2011. The ten most visited websites on the internet. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.mytopten.com.au/top-10-most-visited-websites/tag/top-10-most-visited-websites-on-the-inte. [Accessed 09 May 11].
Neilsen Company. 2010. Social network monthly use: 5.5 hours. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2010/3496/social-network-monthly-use-55-hours. [Accessed 05 May 11].
Torgovnick, K. 2010. Parents so obsessed with second life baby that they neglect real baby. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-parents-so-obsessed-with-second-life-baby-that-they-completely-neglect-/. [Accessed 01 June 11].
Second life is an interesting example. There have been some prosecutions over activities on there, including money laundering and even virtual rape (sorry I forget where the cases were, I know they were not in Australia though). Also today there were developments in Victoria making bullying online a crime under stalking laws. The law is certainly trying to grapple with the new challenges crime online presents to the community.
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