We should be friends to our friends

Today, a group called “Safe Schools Healthy Students” came to Jack Jouett Middle School, where I am a student teacher. Their mission, to stop bullying, has always been critical, but it now grows increasingly urgent due to the mind boggling speed with which the young have mastered new technologies such as Facebook, texting, twitter, e-mail, and other means of mass communication, some of which are unknown to many of their parents and most other authority figures. We know we have to patrol the bathrooms, the halls, and the lunch-lines for bullying—we can even monitor Facebook, text messages, and e-mail, but the bullies have already moved on to other haunts. Only a few weeks ago, a bully might have used Facebook to exclude and ostracize another student by pointing out that he didn’t own the cool new shoes, perhaps because his family was poor and on food stamps. Today, that same bully would probably make the comment to his Xbox live teammates using voice-chat during a game of Call of Duty: Black Ops. That’s a popular game, but even if the means were more obscure, the bully’s cronies, and then his passive supporters, and then the mere rumor mongers, would get the message out – it seems they always do – that someone is different. After the initial talk about cyber-bullying, we took our students back to class to perform a carefully monitored role-play session demonstrating the different forms of bullying, but we had barely begun when the students halted the role-play activity and told us, instead, of the times when they, personally, had been hurt by cyber-bullying. Some of the stories were troubling. More troubling was the suffering that could be seen on their faces and in their body language. Many could not tell their stories while looking into another person's eyes, fixing their own, instead, upon the floor or the ceiling. There was trembling of hands, and a few strange pauses that might have been well suppressed sobs. There was no crying, though my sense was that these students dared not cry in front of each other due to the very problem we were discussing. In two cases, students described ongoing issues serious enough to require immediate adult intervention; that’s not two students in the school, mind you, but two students in a room of fifteen.

But wait, you might say, technology makes life easier for these kids too. Bullying has been around forever, and even the sort involving telephones and computers has existed for decades. True and true. But I knew, after listening to these kids, that what they are dealing with is something different—something worse—than what we ever had to. Try to imagine the most hurtful, embarrassing thing that was ever said or done to you, or the worst, most embarrassing blunder ever made by you, in your pre-teen years. Perhaps it was some gaff or rejection at a gathering on a Friday night. Now imagine that you discovered, on Saturday morning, that the event was recorded, post online, and viewed by 300 people, including friends, acquaintances, and total strangers. Most wrote "LOL" or some other expression of glee, but certain individuals went further, adding their own personal mockery – most if it, hurtful; some of it, quite creative. Imagine now that the most creative and hurtful of these comments received special recognition, including dozens of thumbs-up signs. The hurt would be magnified exponentially.

But now imagine that on Sunday morning, incredibly, the views number in the thousands; the incident has gone viral and is being shared and enjoyed by friends of friends of friends all over the world. The above has actually happened to a great many young people now. Most have chosen to live with the pain, though the loss of social status to the young is truly devastating. Most find the strength to carry on, or start anew, but, inevitably, some have chosen death.

It seems to me that we are heading, at a pace both rapid and rapidly accelerating, towards the emergence of a far more versatile and redundant communications ability, in which the specific means will be irrelevant since they will be nearly infinite, universally available, omnipresent, uncontrollable, and, at the very least, extremely difficult to monitor. To the students at Jack Jouett, that day is, or at least seems to be, here already, for they feel confident in their ability to replace, almost without delay or interruption, any technology denied them. As technology further outstrips traditional means of control, the power of the individual to reach out and hurt others is amplified. Humanity’s intercommunication is increasing so rapidly that we are growing closer to its crescendo, (called the singularity by certain philosophers) yet bullying and hate travel faster and farther than ever before, doing more damage to more innocents.

I rarely use words such as "lets all try to..." It seems condescending and egotistical for any one man to make a request of humanity itself. I don't mind suggesting to my friends, when I feel it is appropriate, that they might adopt new ways of looking at things, but I am loathe to do so when the suggestion sounds like a new-age cliché. So I guess I've been saving this one up for a while. (Here it comes...)

Lets all try to use our new technologies to be nice to each other. We have greater power now—but have we accepted greater responsibility? As I watched the presentation, I wondered how many of my friends were actually in need of a friend at that very moment: someone to listen to them, or someone to encourage them. Millions of people, throughout history, have probably wondered the same thing—but they could only speculate, whereas I could probably find out just by clicking a few buttons. This struck me not as a call for any specific action, but rather, for awareness - the active sort of awareness that comes from actually caring, and also as a reminder of a powerful truth: what we do, and what we say, and how we treat other people matters. Technology won’t give us the power to be friends with everyone, but it might, if we use it wisely, allow us to truly be friends to those who truly are our friends.