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How can we prevent this from ever happening again?
by maaku 14y ago
How can we prevent this from ever happening again?
- Fuzzwah 14y agoHumans are social animals. Trying to remove pecking orders in groups of humans seems impossible to me.
- maaku 14y agoNot knowing a solution doesn't mean there isn't one. Rather, it means have failed at being creative enough.
- Fuzzwah 14y agoValid point. My phrasing was very short and easily misinterpreted . I'd love to be able to express it in some more positive way; this topic is something I've put a lot of thought into. My central concern is that as technology has advanced it has been easier and easier for humans to live in larger and larger groups. As the potential for our embarrassing moments to become viral memes which spread around the world has grown so has the potential for these kind of moments to utterly destroy someone's confidence, if not life. I do hope some kind of solution is found. I just can't see how. We're fighting against progress. Some kid making a fool of themselves in a small tribe of ~100 people is manageable. When the fool's audience suddenly becomes every internet connected person on the planet it is hard to sit everyone down and quietly explain "hey, maybe you should lay off starwars kid".
- wikwocket 14y agoOn top of that, many online systems are set up in such a way that king-maker behavior emerges. When there's billions of {videos, tweets, pics, statuses, etc} online, and both the media and these networks themselves feature 'viral' content, random uploaded bits can achieve fame (or infamy) out of nowhere. YouTube has a lot of Internet-celebrities that started out with one random video that went viral, and now they have thousands or millions of followers. And look at photo memes - those were just random Flickr/Facebook posts that are now everywhere. To change this effect would perhaps require changing the fundamental way people network online nowadays.
- mynameishere 14y agoBy telling kids not to make videos of themselves. (Good luck.) There are much more humiliating videos than Star Wars kid, but they never went viral. I'm just glad that in my stupid youth we only had BBSes.
- catshirt 14y agothis is pretty offensive. you're honestly proposing that the way to fix bullying is to teach the bullied to stop doing "stupid" things?
- nsxwolf 14y agoIn the short term it's good practical advice to not make yourself a target. Maybe we'll fix bullying in 100, 200, 300 years. But that doesn't do anything to help a kid that's going to be bullied in the near future.
- pyre 14y agoEven if they weren't bullied, having a billion people laughing at an embarrassing moment isn't going to be great for a teenager's self-esteem.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoMuch of the problem rests with the absolutely insane way that schools work. They encourage bullying and social isolation, they have become almost like prisons, and provide very little benefit in actual education in exchange.
- saraid216 14y agoThey're microcosms of the societies they're meant to prepare us for. And we have plenty of bullying in the adult world.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoNo. They're nothing like the real world. Some parts are similar, but some parts of prison are similar to the real world too.
- saraid216 14y agoPrisons are microcosms, too, and the way prisoners and guards interact is also a good indicator of what we do as a society. If you fix bullying in schools, you will help fix bullying in society in general. If you fix bullying in society in general, you will help fix bullying in prisons. I had the surprising insight a few months ago that rape culture is just the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large. It was an insight triggered by reading some commentary about Stuebenville.
- DasIch 14y agoI don't think this is at all a problem with schools. It's just that you can't avoid people in school as you can in the "real world".