Eyes Without A Face

There are a lot of stereotypes associated with teenagers in high school: the bullies who throw freshmen in trash cans, the cheerleaders who torment the socially stunted. When we think about it, the majority of these stereotypes are negative. We’re expected to be hormone-driven and unable to stand up to peer pressure. And while these stereotypes of high-school students are, in most cases, very much fact, I think that the way we communicate, positively or negatively, has changed drastically since as recently as the nineties.

MySpace was invented, and with it, insulting photo comments became routine and, worse than that, we gave pre-teens an outlet for their negative emotions. Now a days, teenagers and adult experience Facebook, a less subtle version of MySpace because it allows us to see every conversation between our peers. We have groups dedicated to the hatred of certain people, TV shows, religions. We may not see it as confrontation because we type a sentence on our cell phones, but us as teenagers need to realize that the hurtfullness of a word doesn’t come from the way it’s said, but the fact that it was said at all. Cyber-bullying is a controversial topic because in cyberspace, it is sometimes hard to determine what is bullying: i.e., there’s no way to link a verbal attack to a physical one, and some more subtle online attacks are hard to interpret as bullying.

I know we have many epidemics in our world right now, but I honestly believe that cyber-stalking is a HUGE epidemic. No, the internet is not always private, regardless of who you add as your friend, and who you deny. But we can take proactive steps to deter these perverts who stalk innocent teenagers. I witnessed this one man cyber-stalk one of my friends, something that she thought was harmless and not worth reporting. It became a joke between us and our friends: “Guess what he said today?” This man would literally comment all of her photos, “like” every status update, and AIM her every minute of every day. While it didn’t affect my friend, there are young girls out there who worry every night about these creeps who have made cyber-stalking their obsession. Statistically, 1 in 20 adults will be stalked in their lifetime; and the sad truth is, when the stalker is hidden behind a computer screen, he might never be stopped.