Cyber Bullies Fueled By Sarcastic Abilities

Cyber bullying is a popular topic among adults who work with teens, and rightly so, nobody wants to see kids emotionally destroying one another. Its sad, it tugs at our heart and it motivates adults to step in before someone gets hurt. Cyber bullying is a complex issue with multiple levels of motivation mixed in with developmental limitations and inadvertent offenses. One very intentional ingredient though is sarcasm.

As early adolescents begin to think abstractly, the realization sets in that they have an ability to say one thing that implies something completely different. How cool is that! Its like discovering magic, and of course, practice makes perfect...

Give a kid a hammer and everything begins to look like a nail.

© Blotty | Dreamstime.com

Why sarcasm works is because it is a two sided coin. It tears someone else down while it appears to build someone else up. The majority of intentional cyber bullying activity occurs with a group of friends in front of a computer screen. Everyone wants to matter, but young teen girls constantly have their 'do you like me' radar on and this group of friends provide an unwitting audience to their cyber genius. Where off line bullying may end sooner because somebody sees the pain of the victim and eventually has the courage to step in, among more concrete thinking early adolescents, empathy for the victim will not come without intentional prodding. Someone who can think abstractly needs to connect the dots for a younger person who thinks more in the here and now.

Young teens do not intuitively have empathy for a person across a social network.

Educating young people can help, but it will not typically serve as an inhibitor for those who will choose to use sarcasm to cyber bully. Instead, we need to educate adults, equipping households with mental models that allows for adult awareness of and guiding participation with, adolescent Internet activity. Only adults living life online with their teens will help curb such a destructive behavior among early adolescents.

Questions: How have you seen or experienced the use of sarcasm to bully?

What are some ways that adults can be more aware of what teens are doing online?

Facebook Not Making The Wealthy Wealthier

© Eknarin Maphichai | Dreamstime.com

As the third day of trading gets underway, Facebook continues to not make the wealthy wealthier. By the end of trading the first day, fingers were being pointed. Close out the second and people are estimating where the bottom will be. Mark Z has said the business is driven by a social agenda and not investor's wealth. So far he is proving his point.

Other than the obvious over-valuation of the IPO, there is a fundamental difference in how Facebook operates compared to other Internet giants like Google. Companies want to be able to advertise in a way that makes sense to them, project a product in a manner that causes people to spend their money on it. Google can do that by target advertisements linked to search engine queries. As GM pointed out last week, Facebook was not effective in doing that, consequently they were pulling the plug on site advertising. From a return on investment evaluation, it was not working.

The adult majority population continues to see the Internet as a tool best utilized for disseminating information. Social networking sites however are not built on that, they are built on relationships. It is not the information a company wants me to know that matters, it is what my circle of 'friends' are experiencing that matters.

Facebook is a giant human web of relationships about 1 billion strong. Advertisers want to envision that as a giant crowd of people all staring at a screen as if they were waiting to buy something. TV did that - everyone watching experienced the same thing at the same time. A digital web of relationships does not operate simultaneously, it operates in waves. What is important is decided by the community, by the network, by the relationships.

Someday, somebody, somewhere will figure out how to make a boatload of money riding the waves of human relationships. Oh wait, somebody did...we call if Facebook.

Let me know, did you the think Facebook IPO would soar or tank? Gut feeling or valuation?