CONVERGINGMEDIACase StudyBullying Converges Online

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Throughout this book, we have discussed the important and interesting ways in which people have merged their real worlds with the digital world online. As we’ve seen, these digital frontiers can also have troubling consequences, perhaps the most disturbing of which is when harassment and bullying go online.

Bullying in particular has received attention for the effects it has on digital natives—people who have grown up with converged, digital technology. The Web site stopbullying.gov offers some helpful explanations of bullying and cyberbulling, defining bullying as aggressive behavior that exploits a power imbalance—physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity—to repeatedly make threats, spread rumors, attack physically or verbally, expose to ridicule, or exclude from a social group as a means of torment.¹ Cyberbullying, then, is defined as bullying that takes place using electronic technology, and can range from mean text messages or Snapchats, to posts on social media sites sharing embarrassing photos and videos, to the creation of false online profiles. The site lists three important ways cyberbullying is different from regular bullying, most of which revolve around the difficulty to escape the bullying:

Government researchers say that because of rapidly changing technology, it’s hard to get a precise picture of how many kids are victims of cyberbullying, but a 2013 survey showed around 20 percent of high school students reporting that they were bullied, with 15 percent saying the bullying had been electronic.³

Convergence means that many people no longer need to stay in front of a computer screen to access e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media; bullies, then, can follow their victims virtually anywhere. Though some of this harassment depends on anonymity, the most devastating form of cyberbullying is committed by people who know the victim. This was certainly the case in a series of widely reported teen suicides over the last ten years. In one case, thirteen-year-old Megan Meier ended her life after receiving an online message: “The world would be a better place without you.” Megan thought the message was from a cute boy named Josh Evans. But Josh Evans turned out to be the invention of a forty-seven-year-old woman named Lori Drew, who lived down the street from Megan. Megan had recently ended her friendship with Drew’s daughter, a decision that prompted Drew to create the Josh Evans account and, as she put it to another neighbor, “mess with Megan.” The problem is not limited to high school students. A Rutgers University undergraduate committed suicide after his roommate secretly used his computer’s Webcam to record and tweet about a private romantic encounter between the student and another man.

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In both of these cases (and many others), prosecutors struggled to find laws that applied. In the first example, Drew was convicted of a misdemeanor violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a conviction that was later overturned. In the second example, the roommate was convicted of invasion of privacy and some other minor felonies and was sentenced to a month in jail and probation (he is appealing the conviction). High-profile cases like these have prompted lawmakers from several states to attempt to pass an anti-bullying law, some mentioning cyberbullying specifically (the stopbullying.gov Web site includes a state-by-state map of anti-bullying laws).⁴

But passing laws targeting bullying, especially cyberbullying, can be tricky. As with the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1998, laws with the best of intentions can be worded too vaguely and also outlaw other, nonbullying, speech. For example, under the proposed Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would make it a felony to transmit messages with intent to cause emotional distress, it might be hard to distinguish between bullying and a particularly spirited political debate on Facebook, during which it’s easy to imagine someone feeling harassed.

Online bullying demonstrates another way in which the virtual world and the “real” world have converged, and that while some might still see online harassment as less real than its in-person counterparts, it can have equally dire consequences. As such, the ubiquity of the Internet makes it subject to the same tough questions regarding freedom of speech as other media, and raises even more difficult questions about what is considered allowable free speech and what constitutes harassment or hate speech. Hateful forms of speech may indeed be the acid test of a vibrant democracy—a test with such paradoxical implications as tolerating intolerance and defending the indefensible. Such contradictions are at the heart of living as an informed, media-literate citizen in a diverse and conflicted democracy.