Article 1: Text Bullying

This is a summary from the article ‘Text Bullying’ extracted from http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/text-bullying.html and relates to an area of technology which interests me, which are mobile phones.

This article explores the fairly new world of text bullying much like Cyberpsychology. It explains how teens are coming up with more inventive ways to bully others and more importantly this article states ways to prevent being a victim of ‘text bullying’. This article shows how serious text bullying has become especially among teens and emphasises that parents can prevent it from happening. In this article ‘text bullying’ is defined and reveals shocking statistics about how common this devastating act takes place amongst ‘kids’ which makes me wonder, should parents allow their children own a mobile phone? These statistics indicate no…

This article explores factors, which show that text bullying can be more damaging than traditional bullying for both the victim and bully. For example ‘text bullies are often meaner because they don’t see their victims’ which can lead to depression, violence, suicide and other negative repercussions explained in this article.

From this article it is clear that bullies can face legal charges for text bullying but usually don’t get caught as the victim of text bullying do not tell loved ones due to the fear of parents taking their phone away from them thinking they’re preventing ‘text bullying’ but as a result are unfairly taking away their social connections, applying punishment to those who should be cared for. Instead of this, this article provides ways parents can combat text bullying the ‘right’ way. This article speaks up for the victims of text bullying and speaks up to the bullies explaining in the meantime, that victims should not blame themselves and raises the message that other people think good of the victim regardless of what the bully declares. 

The interesting thing about this article is that it relates to the field that I am interested in, psychology. Not only does it relate to my chosen path in life but also relates to ‘Cyberpsychology’ which is a module I am undertaken this year as part of my course in college. The fascinating thing about this type of bullying is that it’s fairly new. Years and years ago before mobile phones ever even existed there was traditional bullying but now as the world is changing and technologies have got better, new ways of communicating have arisen. The bizarre thing is that even though people would think this sort of breakthrough would bring nothing but positives are proved wrong as contrastingly and interestingly this brought negatives as well which is evident in this article. People have come up with ways to use this useful medium of communication as a tool to play with people’s minds. This interests me but at the same time sickens me. The frightening thing is there’s more to come. I chose to do a summary of this article because it is an area of technology that interests me. This is because this technology can be a positive medium of communication but from this article it shows that mobile phones can be a negative source of modern communication with many hazardous consequences if placed in the wrong hands.