Ion’s blog

The anonymous warning on the Internet bulletin board was posted to a popular eighth-grader at an exclusive Washington-area private school for girls. “I feel like throwing up just thinking of you,” the author wrote, in a diatribe that soon degenerated into the frantic, grammarless prose so characteristic of children’s online messaging. “Everything you do is just a ploy to raise your popularity. . . .u slut. . . . You may think ur safe now, but ur so gonna take a plunge down the popularity level, it is inevitable. . . . Most of us realize what a [expletive] loser you are, even if your few slaves don’t.”. The posted messages grew more menacing by the day, but it was not until the targeted girl was urged to kill herself that school officials were alerted and intervened, demanding that students delete their postings from the much-visited Web site

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The Internet has transformed the landscape of children’s social lives, moving cliques from lunchrooms and lockers to live chats and online bulletin boards, and intensifying their reach and power. When conflicts arise today, children use their expertise with interactive technologies to humiliate and bully their peers, and avoid reprimand from adults or foes. […] Weblogs, or “blogs,” are the latest sites of Internet cruelty. Blogs are cyber reality shows, widely read diaries that publicly detail the social drama and fluctuating emotions of young lives. They are often scoured for personal mention, and they spare no language or feelings.

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Just as online cruelty may be intensified by the distance separating perpetrator and victim, it also changes the face of bullying itself. “Kids no longer have the safety of being able to go home and escape bullying,” Kullback said. “Ten years ago, if a kid got bullied he could go home and sit in front of the TV.” Nowadays, with children spending so much time on the computer, whether to shop, do research for schoolwork, play games or hang out with friends, Kullback says, they are easier to target for abuse. “Kids have access to one another 24 hours a day. They can bully each other at midnight.”