Cyber bullying...contents may harm

This weeks blog is close to my heart. I have two children who are 10 and 13 years old and have experienced both traditional and cyber bullying. Both forms are hurtful and belittling and I believe as long as there are different personalities in the world there will always be bullying, but it is our responsibility to try and control it.

Everyone knows what traditional bullying is and if you haven’t experienced it then you are lucky. It is when someone harasses, threatens or embarrasses another person. The only difference between traditional bullying and cyber bullying is that cyber bullying occurs online.

Because cyber bullying is on the internet it is harder avoid, it spreads faster and is very public. Often perpetrators can hide behind a false or even stolen identity so you don’t know who your real enemy is. You then question everyone and this can be emotionally destroying.

I live in an area surrounded by schools and I think the youth suicide rate has reached epidemic proportions. I cannot find any figures on these rates but the comparison between suicides I knew of when growing up (zero) compared to now (2-3 per year) is a significant increase.  I think the correlation between Internet use and these suicide figures is hard to ignore. Further studies and coping techniques are needed for the future, one study found..

Students who were cyber bullied reported feelings of sadness, anxiety, and fear, and an inability to concentrate, which affected their grades. Youth who were bullied online were more likely to have skipped school, to have detentions or suspensions, or to have carried a weapon to school.

Schools provide great programs such as Bullybusters that educate the children on bullying. Often the solution is to seek help from a teacher or parent. Yet are the parents equipped with all the answers? The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) says adults are;

responsible to protect children from all forms of physical and mental violence, injury or abuse.

 We are the pioneers of a new era of children and adolescents who are regular produsers of the Internet. They live in the cyberworld, which is a world that is more familiar to them than us. As the UN says it is our responsibility to protect our children so ultimately we need the tools to help our children. This can be very difficult to negotiate. Even cyber bullying victim celebrity Charlotte Dawson found it hard to find the right solution to dealing with cyberbullying. So the solution for our childrens’ future needs to be achievable and current.

 

REFERENCES

Beran and Li, 2005 T. Beran, Q. Li Cyber-harassment: A study of a new method for an old behavior. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 32 (3) (2005), pp. 265–277

Bullybusters. Kids Matter. Australia Government Department of Health. Viewed 9 February <http://www.kidsmatter.edu.au/primary/programs/bully-busters>

United Nations 2003-2005. Enable. Viewed 9 February  <http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/comp501.htm>                 

Are you a Produser ?

We are living in a user led age where marketers are now letting consumers develop their own flavours and websites are getting their followers to update their sites with their own content and opinions. These people are termed as Produsers which is a blend of two words – drumroll please...Producers and Users.

 Australian media scholar Axel Bruns of the Queensland University of Technology describes the definition of produsage as

“the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.”

In 2006 Time Magazine awarded their ‘Person of the Year’ accolade to ‘You’ by recognising the birth of a collaborative user-led community on the Internet – the Produsers. Internet users were no longer just ordinary people home alone with their computers. They were being recognised as citizens now empowered to engage and create media content.

As TIME observed car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux.

 Some examples that I have experienced are the obvious ones such as You Tube, Blogs, online games such as Halo and of course Wikipedia. I have also seen Help Desks and even Apple Geniuses Bars using user blogs that build from one another’s knowledge and experiences. Not one size fits all so the more updates there are on each other’s experience/problems the more breadth you have to find your solution.

However one problem that has arisen with Produsage and that is around the inaccuracies caused from too many fingers in the pie. Although Produsage.org reassures us that the more participants there are using and contributing the stronger and more accurate the quality will be. They are relying on a communal evaluation ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow")

Henry Jenkins was all for this collective intelligence. In his interview with Axel Bruns he refers to the notion of produsage allowing communities to have equality because it is producing and consuming at the same time. This way the consumers are not passive but more engaged with the content and therefore become actively involved with a vested interest.

This can also be observed in citizen journalism. Everyone has a camera on them at all times and when they see an opportunity they have the ability to become the producer, freely interacting, communicating and sharing their ideas. Others feed off these ideas and add their opinions whilst building a strong collaborative and true community. I think the future of Produsage is in our own hands.

As the Time article pointed out you can learn more about how people live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television. 

REFERENCES

Bruns, A 2005, Some Exploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage, Snurblog, viewed 15 January 2014, <http://snurb.info/index.php?q=node/329>.

Grossman, L December 2006. You-Yes, You – Are TIME’s Person of the Year. Time Magazine, viewed 15 January 2014, <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html>

Jenkins, H 2008, From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (Part One), Confessions of an Aka-Fan, viewed 19 January 2014, <http://henryjenkins.org/2008/05/interview_with_axel_bruns.html>.

In my dreams I would look like this...

If I’m being totally honest before this unit I had never heard the word Simulacra. It was a hard word to get my tongue around and all of the learning’s and quotes seemed very one sided from theorist Jean Baudrillard.

Jean Baudrillard is French sociologist, theorist and author of the book Simulacra and Simulation. He explains Simulacra as being a copy that depicts things that either had no reality to begin with (similar to the world in the Matrix movie) or something that no longer has an original (Disneyland). He has been quoted as saying

 “In todays world, reality has been replaced by sign systems that recodify and supplant the real. Simulation precedes and determines the real”

 To help understand the evolution of Simulation further Baudrillard explains the Hierachy of Simulation as these four stages;   

A simulacrum is strongly represented in this current day and age via online games or second life. I myself have never played a second life game or have an avatar but I suppose its because I am too busy with my first life. In the gaming world second life and avatars are used as an extension of reality, a world in which you can do things that can’t be done in this world.

Howard Rheingold is also very interested in the theories around virtual communities. In his book ‘The Virtual Community’ he describes entire communities of people online where they are performing all of their daily duties in cyberspace. People can not only socialise with friends but also go to work or study online whilst living another parallel life in this real world. 

Baudrillard believed that our lives were becoming so saturated with simulacra that all meaning was becoming meaningless, which he call “precession of simulacra”. I am not sure I believe entirely in his theory.  Simulacra and second life for some people is just an escape - a break from the everyday, which isn’t such as bad thing, there are worse things they could be doing. 

I think second life can be used to advance our world and we are just in the infancy. Recently I saw an article about a disabled man who was running a factory on the other side of the world aided by his avatar. So we must remember both the disadvantages of the social exclusions of second life and avatars but also the advantages and future prospects of the potential of simulacra. I will never look at the world with the same eyes after discovering the word Simulacra.

REFERENCES:

Rheingold H, N/A. The Virtual Community. Viewed 8 January 2014 <http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html>

The Research Geek, Oct 2010. The Social Media and Simulacrum of the self. Viewed 8 January 2014. <http://researchgeek.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/simulacrum-of-the-self/>

Waugh, R, April 2012. Avatar becomes reality, Viewed 8 January 2014 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2135067/Mind-controlled-robot-paraplegics-unveiled-Avatar-reality.html>