"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me." We are taught this rhyme at a young age, but is it outdated? What about tweets, texts, or pictures? Can they hurt us? As a millennial, I've watched technology evolve from a very young age. What stands out the most to me, though, is cyberbullying in high school.
It's sad that my generation has lost the ability to confront one another face to face.
We ridicule each other from the safety of our bedrooms, hiding behind iPhones and computer screens. Bullying used to take place in school where adults usually witnessed the problem. Today bullying happens behind each other's backs and all over the internet. Teachers are not able to reprimand students for bullying if it doesn't take place at school though, so where does that put us?
The subtweet is the most cowardly creation ever invented.
Subtweeting is tweeting about a person in a negative way without including their name, making it extremely passive aggressive and hurtful to their target. For the bully, the subtweet seems genius, you can say whatever nasty thing you want about a person behind their back and never have to own up to it.
The funny thing about the internet is that once it is out there, it doesn't go away.
You can delete a tweet or photo, but someone has probably taken a screenshot. You can delete a text message you sent, but the recipient will still receive it. The pain caused from mean words posted on the internet can be much more painful than the pain caused from a mean girl calling you a dork in the hallway to your face.
Cyberbullying can hurt multiple people at once.
Another problem with cyber bullying is that people are bound to take sides. When a feud is visible to everyone, plastered all over Twitter or Facebook, the damage only grows. I remember one time when one of my friends was being cyber bullied, I decided to tweet something really nice about her to try to make her feel better, but that only sent her bullies after me as well. I became collateral damage in their war. Suddenly, I didn't feel like a good friend anymore because the cyber bullies made me feel small and stupid.
Why do we allow cyber bullying to exist? Why can't we just delete cyberbullying like we delete old pictures of ourselves from middle school off of our Facebooks? Why is it that cyberbullying is a trend that doesn't seem to go out of style? We need to take a stand and call out cyber bullies. The old saying is wrong, words can hurt, even more than sticks and stones -- especially if they're all over the internet.
