Raúl Navarro - Cyberbullying Across the Globe

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Anastasio Ovejero

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Although the Gutenberg Galaxy is still present, it is obvious that we now live in another era known as the Galaxy Internet (Castells , p. 15), The Internet is the fabric of our lives. If information technology is the historical equivalent of what electricity represented in the industrial era, in our era we can compare the Internet with the electric grid and the electric motor given its capacity to distribute the power of information to all areas of human activity. Therefore, it is for the right and wrong. More specifically, Castells adds (p. 20), the elasticity of the Internet makes this means particularly suitable to stress our societys contradictory trends. The Internet is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a means we express ourselves inby a specific communication code that we must understand if we intend to change our reality. So, in a violent society, people will use the Internet to attack and bully others, while a caring and altruistic society will use it to help others. So, right and wrong does not lie in the Internet, but in the way we use it.

However, the Internet is here to stay. So, we must do whatever we can to increase its positive effects, and there are many, and to cut its negative effects and risks to a minimum, of which there are also many, above all in the field of social interaction with young people and adolescents. Largely, they will depend on the cultural and ideological background in which they live. Nowadays, the dominant cultural pattern is none other than neoliberal capitalism, that is, the neoliberal globalisation ideology (see Ovejero ). The features of this neoliberal ideology (selfishness, individualism, social Darwinism, fatalism, competition of everyone against everyone, internalization of the idea that benefit is all that matters), especially internalized by adolescents, are difficulting a suitable coexistence among people, even in the Internet, in at least two directions: it is quite likely that more and more people show less empathy to peers, which may promote cyberbullying; on the contrary, behaviors to defend and help victims may become less and less likely, which also may increase victims pain. In this way, it is not surprising that cases of cyberbullying have increased so much. In only 10 years, the world of electronic communications has dramatically changed as we now find many other forms of electronic communication (chat, text messages, etc.), which makes the problem even worse, given the frequent diffusion of episodes that harm some people on web pages such as YouTube or MySpace, where thousands of people act as constant witnesses of the jokes or humiliation that victims are targets of. In the most serious cases, participation in such episodes has led a victim to commit suicide, and news items have a huge social repercussion which, at the end of the day, allows growing interest in this phenomenon.

Over the past 1012 years, cyberbullying has appeared as a new form of violent conduct in the electronic communication context as the result of the vast communication possibilities that progress in electronics has enabled, especially among increasingly younger adolescents (Noret and Rivers ) discovered that a relationship exists in the first stage of adolescence between skills for using the Internet and cyberbullying conduct.

It is also a fact that adolescents increasingly employ social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook (Duggan and Smith ).