My original idea was that I would continue researching famous cases and doing different blog entries about all the different social media websites that were utilized by people in cyber-bullying. However, I am almost depressed to keep doing this. I have already discussed MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger in the two famous cases so far.
One of the reasons I wanted to stop looking into famous cases of bullying is because of the article I read on Alexis Pilkington. When I searched for "famous cyber-bullying cases," the second article that Google showed me was Cyberbullying Continued After Teen's Death. Alexis Pilkington used the website FoamSpringMe.com, whose tag line reads: "Find out more about your friends by asking and responding to interesting questions." Her parents have said it was much more than Internet harassment that caused Alexis' suicide, but the scary fact in this case is that nasty comments did not stop even after Alexis was dead. This additional CBS article states that someone posted anonymously: "She was obviously a stupid depressed [expletive] who deserved to kill herself. she got what she wanted. be happy for her death. rejoice in it." A father of one of her friends compiled all the harassing posts on her the memorial page created of Facebook. I tried to find this page myself on Facebook, and was a little happy to find pages dedicated to deleting FoamSpringMe.com, pages about anti-bullying, and a page about the non-profit memorial foundation dedicated to her.
My central question in my first entry was simple and I wanted to look how the Internet contributed to bullying and the whole creation of the idea of cyber-bullying. However, now I want to begin to conduct research on how the Internet can also help spread the message that cyber-bullying is something that our society will not tolerate and is actively working to stop.
Some keywords that I have developed, some of which I have not identified yet in the blog but will in future entries.
- Bullying
- Cyber-bullying
- Social media
- Popularity
- Anti-bullying movements
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