Is the Internet Undermining our sense of Fellow-Feeling?
Wondering whether “the Internet has become our means of tapping into our inner sociopath“, Diane Dimond wonders whether “we are quickly becoming a people who have forgotten how to empathize with others.” And so she gets at the larger social issue behind what she calls, “cyber-bulling” and the recent rash of suicides of sensitive young people, most of them gay:
Five young people have committed suicide in the last few weeks after constant cyber-bulling made them feel life wasn’t worth living. Each of them was trying to sort out sexual feelings and did not yet have the adult ability to shrug off the ugly Internet attacks.
Maybe we do need new laws — or at least to adapt old ones to new technology.
Our laws and legal system must catch up to our technological ability to harass, defame and torture others through our computers. I propose prosecutors pursue the maximum penalty in the Rutgers suicide case (where two young people stand charged) as a signal to other hate-filled people that their behavior is just not acceptable. If we can teach people the proper etiquette for a bowling alley, we can certainly try for the same on the Internet, right?
Sounds like a step in the right direction.
Read the whole thing. And I mean that, read the whole thing.
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Perhaps they ought not to be on the internet?
Comment by ThatGayConservatives — October 11, 2010 @ 4:57 am - October 11, 2010
Or perhaps their parents and schools failed to teach them what they needed to know, to survive life’s shocks?
Young people dealing with false or unfair attacks, sexual identity and matters of reputation is nothing new, in the human experience. I just finished re-reading _Pride and Prejudice_. The specifics of the young people’s anguish and conflicts over their identities, reputations and futures are of course quite different from now. But they are none the less intense; you could well call them brutal.
I notice, in the present wave of concern for our troubled youth, how little we talk about what kind of upbringing they had: whether or not their problems have been developing for years, whether their parents were attentive to their problems, whether their parents were even present in their lives, whether their schools taught them reliance on “the group” when they should have been teaching self-reliance, etc.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — October 11, 2010 @ 9:42 am - October 11, 2010
Take this comment of Diane Dimond’s:
Ummm… sorry Diane, but… if constant cyber-bulling, as bad and wrong as it is, can make a person ‘feel life isn’t worth living’ (your words): isn’t it likely that the poor individual never knew in the first place, what makes life worth living? And what does? Do you know? Aren’t the kids who are clear and confident to begin with about what makes ‘life worth living’ able to shrug off the Internet? Shouldn’t we ask what made them that way, and try to put more kids in that happy condition?
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — October 11, 2010 @ 9:58 am - October 11, 2010
I have to agree wholeheartedly with the previous 3 comments.
Over 40,000 people kill themselves in the US every year. Five people over several weeks is not a trend, and in fact much research reveals that gay teens are better treated today than ten years ago.
Many gay teens come out in high school and go back in the closet as young adults, not because of bullying, but because they change their minds about their identity. The Internet probably helps expand their options.
I agree with the other two posts, when I say that laws governing the Internet are irrelevant. If you have a supportive community offline, then you will not react so sensitively to pixellated things on a screen.
Lastly, I think your earlier discussions about Dan Savage’s video project seem to play into this discussion as well. Savage’s idea of inserting himself into the private space of teenagers’ homes, in order to override the teens’ parents and talk about adult sexuality years before the audience can even understand all the implication, represents the wrong direction to take.
If the Internet is causing a problem, the solution is to look for solutions somewhere other than the Internet. That’s all I can say.
Comment by Coco — October 11, 2010 @ 2:38 pm - October 11, 2010
Coco, agreed.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — October 11, 2010 @ 2:51 pm - October 11, 2010
Cyber-bullying, ILC? You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?
Comment by Ashpenaz — October 11, 2010 @ 3:55 pm - October 11, 2010
Nope.
I know, from contact with you Ash, something about cyber-babies. (People who actively seek out confrontations with me, then whine when I don’t let them win.)
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — October 11, 2010 @ 4:25 pm - October 11, 2010
(To make this clear for the record: The implications of Ash’s cowardly attempted smear to the contrary, at no point have I ever – EVER – harassed anyone, whether online or in real life. At no point have I EVER attempted to have any contact Ash or find out anything about him, good or bad. At no point would I EVER want to.)
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — October 11, 2010 @ 4:45 pm - October 11, 2010
It’s not cyber-bulling when one engages in debate on a politically-oriented blog. IMHO.
Comment by Neptune — October 11, 2010 @ 4:56 pm - October 11, 2010
TGC, if I may offer a comment in response to #1 above. I don’t think the problem is the presence of the kids being bullied on the ‘net. You can take those kids offline, and the cyber-bullying would/does continue, by the spread of rumors, lies, insults, etc. to the other kids who are online. Online becomes a vehicle for making it worse off-line.
That being said, kids need to be disconnected more often. And need better supervision when they’re online. Too many parents these days are unwilling to do so.
Comment by Neptune — October 11, 2010 @ 5:01 pm - October 11, 2010
Neptune #9 – And never takes the debate outside that space. Much less, ever breaks anyone’s shield of privacy. Agreed.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — October 11, 2010 @ 5:03 pm - October 11, 2010
I just passed through a supermarket and saw People, the LA Times, and a number of other publications with headlines about gay teens killing themselves.
This is manipulation, and please, let’s be on guard against it. Maybe you can benefit if your constituency is viewed as helpless victims, but such a modality backfires eventually.
The problem with trying to get attention with a cause celebre is that it reinforces a false stereotype about gay males; namely that they are victims trapped in their biological fate, and only salvageable with intervention from a caring gay lobby that comes to make sure they continue to identify as gay. The discussion so far has also assumed that kids who are called sissy must be gay, which then causes everyone to equate homosexuality with effeminacy, weakness, and an inability to defend oneself.
Hidden in all these discussions is the little implication, implanted by the hysteria, that people are born gay, bisexuality isn’t real, and anyone who is deemed gay by gay experts but doesn’t adopt a gay lifestyle is self-hating and lying. What does this point to? It points to the corollary that we can tell who’s gay by how they act, once we identify them we can call them out for lying when they have interest in the opposite sex, and all of this is justified because we see gay celebrities and their friends outing everyone from Tom Cruise to Larry Craig based on a political agenda of gay liberation.
So much is wrong with the hysteria. It’s our job, honestly, to counteract it.
Comment by Coco — October 11, 2010 @ 5:34 pm - October 11, 2010
Coco, I do think the science has shown that being gay is biological (I will not say “genetic” exclusively; there could be other biological factors); and that men, at least, tend to be more either-or in which gender they prefer sexually.
You may have differing views based on your experience – just as my views are informed by my experience. I have never had any sexual enthusiasm for women that I wasn’t forcing, i.e. faking. So when I hear of some study saying that male sexuality tends to be either-or – that genuinely bisexual men do exist, but are statistically less common than genuinely bisexual women – I find it easy to believe.
All that is *not* to “reinforce a false stereotype about gay males; namely that they are victims trapped in their biological fate”. Because I don’t feel trapped. I am not a victim. The average straight male may be as equally biologically determined in his sexuality as I am in mine, but neither of us is a victim. Just like a person who is left-handed instead of right (or vice versa) is no victim.
As for the equation of “gay” with “sissy”… yes it is a stereotype; and every stereotype contains a tiny kernel of truth – while being wrong if you try to apply it wholesale, i.e. without looking at the individual. Some heterosexual men are effeminate and a great many gay men are quite masculine; yet I daresay that, on average, an effeminate man on average is a bit more likely to be homosexual. I treat that as a mere fact, not as a problem.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — October 11, 2010 @ 6:23 pm - October 11, 2010