The obligatory social networking post

Obviously, anyone reading this is going to be well aware of the incident at Rutgers. If one were a conspiracy theorist, one might imagine that the whole affair was a hoax to generate interest in The Social Network movie. I haven't seen the movie yet, though I'm sure I will, nor have I read more details about the story than is absolutely necessary to carry on a casual conversation about a big news story. I know some students at Rutgers and care about their well-being, but beyond that I didn't have much interest in the day-to-day activities of the student body and I still don't unless they point to something important about the population at large.

The first thing that you need to understand is that this case isn't about social networking. It's about casual cruelty, or bullying, which appears to be to be epidemic in certain groups. Forgetting about all of the details, let's boil this down to its core. Let me preface this by saying I know nothing about these people, the details of the incidents, or any of the relevant research. Everything I say here is a guess and it's up to you to decide if it makes sense. 

This was a case of a guy who didn't like his roommate telling secrets about him to his peer group behind his back. Did he expect or want the guy to commit suicide? I highly doubt it. He may have just wanted a new roommate, for whatever reason. He didn't really know his roommate, but he knew that he had secrets. Everyone has secrets they don't want told. Everyone does stuff they wouldn't want being broadcast to anyone who cared to look. And these represent a person's weak spots. Everyone has weak spots. Bullying is the act of taking advantage of the weakness of others for your own gain, psychically (feel better about yourself), socially (higher status), or materially (stealing an ice cream cone from the scrawny little kid).

Bullying is bullying, and there's absolutely nothing new about it. What's new is that there are new tools available to potential bullies, and the existence of those tools vastly expands the pool of potential bullies, in this case from the bigger and stronger to the more technologically savvy, as well as the potential venues for bullying, from one-on-one to public humiliation. As teachers, we've all been hearing about cyberbullying for a few years now- someone steals someone's password and sends embarrassing e-mails, vandalizes a Facebook page, or whatever. The people who do these kinds of things do them for the same reason the mean big kids beat up little kids. It makes them feel better about themselves somehow. 

Every day in school I see incidents of casual cruelty. People insult other people and then say "JK." But they don't say JK to make the other person feel better. They say JK to avoid being thought of as a jerk. It is impossible to anticipate how another person will react to something you do or say; it's even hard to anticipate how you would react if someone else said the same thing to you. There are too many variables- for example, it makes a big difference what the relative social status of the person doing the insulting is. Though that kind of thing isn't allowed in my classroom, I'm not naive enough to think it doesn't happen all the time. My observation is that people feel more free to insult people than before, and that one of the things that encourages it is the relative (or total) anonymity that the Internet provides.

So you have a larger pool of potential bullies with better tools at their disposal, and a culture that accepts a questionable standard of how it's okay to treat other people. I personally don't think it's ever okay to insult someone. You might call someone out and say they're acting like a jerk, but you shouldn't ever say that person is a jerk. Simple as that. It's been in the rules since the Ten Commandments. Don't treat others the way you wouldn't want to be treated yourself. Simple to understand. Maybe not so easy to do.

This is at its heart no different. A young man (allegedly, of course) used his technology skills to reveal secrets about his roommate. Was this cruel? Of course. Was it clearly dangerous? Not so sure. More dangerous than a big kid beating up a smaller, weaker kid? Not sure. This guy was a bully, pure and simple. The problem isn't in the technology itself. The problem is a culture that permits far more casual cruelty than it ought to at a time when there are more tools to facilitate cruelty, and this is only the most extreme case of things that happen every day.