Marshall Brain's Blog

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Internet lets teen bullies inflict suffering from afar

From the article:

The episode reflects one of many ways that the technology lubricating the social lives of teenagers is amplifying standard adolescent cruelty. No longer confined to school grounds or daytime hours, "cyberbullies" are pursuing their quarries into their own bedrooms. Tools like e-mail messages and Web logs enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks.

If you are a teenager, or if you are a parent raising teenagers, this is one more thing to worry about.

Here is my question. Why does "standard adolescent cruelty" exist? Anybody who has been to an American high school knows that it exists. There are bullies, and then there is the herd mentality that bludgeons anyone who does not "fit in". Lord help you if you are "nerdy" or "ugly" or "different" as a teenager. You will be harassed relentlessly, both physically and with words. This behavior seems to be wired in to a large percentage of human teenage brains. The behavior seems to be equally distributed between males and females.

What purpose does this behavior serve? It is as useless as racism. It is a purely negative force.

If you are religious and believe that God created humans in God's image, why did God wire this in?

If you believe humans come from an evolutionary chain, what evolutionary value does this behavior serve?

Why didn't God or evolution instead wire in "cooperation" and "acceptance"? It is interesting that all intelligent adults see the stupidity of behaviors like bullying and racism, reject them, and then move to a higher plane in their thinking. Why isn't that intelligence/wisdom wired in, instead of the purely destructive behavior of "standard adolescent cruelty"?