When people think of bullying, you probably think of the classic “give me your lunch money” scenario, or the physical bullying that happens to someone in the gym locker room. As times change, so does the way people get picked on or made fun of. People, especially teenagers, won’t just stop making people feel bad about certain things, because they need to find a way to hide their own insecurities. With the technology today you can see how it has become even easier for these kids to do this to one another. They can now hide behind a computer screen and say whatever they want, even if they don’t know the person at all.

In class we watched a John Oliver segment where he was shedding light on how the internet can take off and run with a story when they really don’t have the facts all lined up when they are circulating a misleading title for an article or a blog post. He was talking about the case of this little boy who jumped into his aunt, accidentally knocking her over. She ended up breaking her wrist and needing 3 surgeries to heal it back up. The story circulating was that she was suing her nephew for over 100,000 dollars and that she was this monster of an aunt. The catch was that this fact was not true at all. The real story was the insurance company that she had would not cover the costs, but the home owners insurance would that the boys parents had would. The family was happy to help with that and let them sue their son because they thought it would not be a big deal at all just some formality, but the internet had to twist everything and almost ruin this poor wombs life. She even said she had to go through great strides to just get her life back.

Another thing Oliver talked about that I want to touch on was the Jerry Springer show and how this was a pre form of what is going on today. Not going to lie it is a pretty interesting show and it is fun to laugh at how much peoples lives are a mess like that, but we have to remember these are real people.

One of the videos we watched this week was the “Bad Behavior Online: Bullying, Trolling & Free Speech | Off Book | PBS Digital Studios” video. Here they tased about how bad online trolling has gotten. What made me very upset during that video was how there would be memorial pages for people online and there were people trolling them and kicking their loved ones when they were already down. This ties right in with the article “How the internet created an age of rage” where they talk about how easy it is to just get angry and say mean things to someone you have never met. Honestly I think it is just a bunch of losers behind a computer trying to make themselves feel good.

My question to you is, Why do you think people do this online trolling and bullying?

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