by Warren Longwell

Created on: November 10, 2010

Overcome with humiliation and shame, a college student ends his own life after his single flirtation with gay sex is exposed on the internet. At about the same time, a teenage girl is accused by a friend on facebook of being "ugly," and after failing at her own attempt at suicide, she enters into psychological treatment and counseling to repair her shattered ego. These and numerous other incidents of cyber bullying take place within a social network where popularity and status seems to be viewed as a zero-sum game, and one person promotes himself or herself in stature by driving down the reputation or image of someone else. There is additional power, at least in the mind of the bully, in the ability to electronically communicate the slander and negativity to the entire world while using a channel that is outside of the school system's ability to keep track of the things that are being said.

These and similar recent incidents happened this fall against the backdrop of the 2010 political campaign season, and in this arena, every politician used outrageous accusations and egregious falsehoods to degrade the opposing candidate's image and reputation. The number of negative attack ads playing on TV had tripled since 2008, funded in a large part by outside corporate and special interest money. Factcheck.org reported that fully 85% of the attack ads were either manipulative distortion or outright lies. This political contest truly was a zero-sum game where the goal was to totally destroy the opposition. Here, too, the squalid negativity and outright lies were communicated electronically to the greatest possible audience. I believe that these two different scenarios are connected.

I don't hold a very high opinion of my fellow American citizens. I think that basically we're a nation of nitwits. However, my low opinion of the population doesn't extend down to the teenage level. I believe that maladjusted teenagers, as well as the dysfunctional public school system which incubates them, are all just reflections of the greater adult society. Teenagers don't invent their despicable actions, they mostly just copy them from the adults they see. And when it comes to destroying reputations, the recent examples in the 2010 political campaign seen by the teenagers came from the adults at the very top of the food chain. Moreover, half of the politicians in this competitive mess were rewarded for their efforts by being elected to office. And we wonder why teenagers turn into bullies.

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