In the past few weeks I had the unfortunate experience of learning the difference between cyber harassment and cyber stalking. Unfortunate not because learning it was unhelpful or boring, but because it even exists. The sole fact that such activity goes on and requires lingual differentiation is disgusting. Danielle Citron in her book, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, briefly summarizes the difference: “Although definitions of these terms vary, cyber harassment is often understood to involve the intentional infliction of substantial emotional distress accomplished by online speech that is per sis tent enough to amount to a “course of conduct” rather than an isolated incident. Cyber stalking usually has a more narrow meaning: an online “course of conduct” that either causes a person to fear for his or her safety or would cause a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety.” The extent to which these forms of cyber bullying go are beyond belief.
As someone who has used the internet since I can first remember, I have always been aware that being online comes with a responsibility to use caution and wisdom. It can be a dangerous place and most people are only looking out for themselves. I have witnessed cyber bullying many times, but for some reason it has never really made the impression that the sources we learned in class did. I think the difference is that for the most part what I have seen appears impersonal. YouTubers threatening each other and calling each other nasty names, friends on Facebook giving each other a hard time, or even tweeting something mean at a personal account. All these can be linked to a specific person but they don’t have the level of depth that cyber stalking might. They don’t make you think, “This person explicitly wants to hurt me. Not because of who I am or what I’ve said, but they have a personal vendetta against me as a person.” That kind of thinking is disheartening as a human being.
The worst part, is that there is no good solution to this problem. Because of the anonymity and ease of access to the internet, the only course of correction would be through censorship, limitation of free speech, and government surveillance. I am fully against all of those and almost nothing would be able to persuade me otherwise. I would rather have an anonymous idiot stalking me than the government looking over my shoulder telling me what I can and can’t say. That being said, the only other solution I can think of to stop cyber bullying is just raising better people. But raising citizens to be empathetic and compassionate is easier said than done, otherwise I hope we already would have done it.
I do have a suggestion for one small step in the right direction. Since we cannot control the bullies and their abuse of others, what we can control is our reaction to it. Clearly some of these instances can cause serious ramifications in real life: women being sexually harassed at their homes or workplaces, people have nude photos distributed to their friends and families, identity theft, possible mental trauma from constant online harassment, and the list goes on. The people that have things like that happen absolutely need a place for their voice to be heard and they need resources to help them cope and recover from whatever the abuse is. But what needs to stop is serial victimhood. I have seen recently a rise in serial victimhood and I believe it is a cancer to society. It is almost trendy to be a victim of something. What many of these people do not realize is by drawing attention to themselves for something not worth complaining about, they take away attention and resources from real victims. This extends beyond the cyber realm and into all aspects of life. Of course the line needs to be drawn somewhere between serious and ridiculous instances of harassment/hate/assault/violence or whatever it is, and that is a hard thing to do, but it needs to be done. I think we have somehow created a culture of thin-skinned people that are easily offended, immature, attention-seeking, and often very spoiled. Many of these people are probably the ones who have become so bitter in their own lives that they go online and take out their frustration and anger by harassing or stalking someone so they can feel powerful. All of this comes from a severe lack of character.
For more reading on this I will link to a favorite essay of mine written by none other than the great American Theodore Roosevelt:

http://www.foundationsmag.com/tr-character.html