I'm feeling particularly lazy today, so here's a more serious block of text on internet culture from a few years back. There's a whopping one paragraph on trolling (referred to in the article as cyber-bullying), but it's got a story that might strike a couple of chords on someone's head.
Excerpt taken from here.
"Due to the ease of access and the largely public display of information, cyber-bullying has become one of the biggest problems facing teens today. Over one third of teens say that they have been affected by cyber-bullying. Technology allows conversations that were previously private to no longer hold any promise of secrecy. A private email conversation can be forwarded to a listserv of a 100 of your closest friends with only a few clicks of a button and within minutes. In the case of Megan Meier, a 13 year old who faced depression, cyber-bullying was taken to far, to a point where she committed suicide. After a parent of a neighboring child posed as an attractive 16 year old boy who stated that he had a crush on Megan, he “dumped” her, calling her all sorts of names. End: hung herself by a belt. Read the full story here. As a growing number of bullying cases leave the class room and enter the world wide web where can the discipline take place? Who is the principle of the internet that will sent the offending children/parents to detention?"
Heavy, ain't it? There are countless other stories mirroring the one given in this article. A lot of things I can say about how to prevent this sort of thing, but that's for another post.
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