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Monica Lewinsky: now there’s a name I haven’t given serious thought to since I was about thirteen years old. Yet, according to the speech she gave TED (2015), Monica has lived with unwanted notoriety and disparaging shame since that time. Listening to her detail her lifelong experience was sobering, humbling, and, if I had to describe my initial reaction in one word: sad. Even as she began to plea for a call to action, I was still struck by how sad I felt for her and her family. As I pondered further the overall spectrum of the points she gave, my biggest takeaway from this video is that I now believe that nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, that is performed with technology is guaranteed to stay yours. From the obvious actions, like tweets and emails, to the less obvious, phone calls, google searches, online passwords. Anything that is done with a piece of technology can be made public in an instant by someone, somewhere. It was interesting that she claimed this scandal was the first story ever to use online formats to communicate the news. If this same story broke in today’s world of social media, I believe several different things would happen. First of all, most Americans would know about this situation almost instantly. As a society, we are more connected than ever before, with more digital access than ever before, and the frequency of which we spend online is more than ever before. Memes, music videos, parody skits, autotune tracks, TikTok challenges, and other social media fads would soon follow. The younger generation would help spread these types of materials everywhere.
On the flip side, I also believe that there would be a large portion of the population that would not take this story seriously. With the abundance of news outlets, there has also risen levels of doubt among our population when news stories are released. People have grown accustomed to not believing every headline they read at first glance. Some would initially call this scandal a “hoax” and even more people would use the “let’s wait and see” approach until more details were released and verified. We have the luxury of hearing breaking news in an instant, but that has sometimes caused misinformation to spread and overreactions to occur. This has caused a hesitancy to give credit to news stories and mistrust in the media.
As with Monica’s case, coping with the constant shame of cyberbullying and online harassment is extremely tough. Blocking users and strengthening filters are great ideas, but can oftentimes have little effect on cyberbullying. One might try to find encouragement and sympathy from those on the internet, the very source that permitted such negative attacks, but I believe the best way to handle these situations is to “unplug.” At least for a time, unplugging and removing oneself from social media allows space to reconnect with the real world and reduces the temptation to engage with online bullies and their posts.
Everyone has a story to tell and when stories are told and heard, it humanizes us all. Shane Koyczan shared some of his story and explained that there are countless others like him, who grew up in tough situations surrounded by voices that labeled him and tore at his identity (TED, 2013). If I had unlimited resources and sought to prevent cyberbullying while promoting kindness, I would make a way for students at all educational institutions to hear stories. Not only do personal stories humanize the teller, but it also stirs empathy and compassion. Monica Lewinsky stated, feeling empathy from another has a way of combating the negativity inside (TED, 2015). I believe that if students were to hear the tough stories about what people have been through, we would see a decrease in cyberbullying among that age. Here is a story that drastically changed my perspective even to this day. On a city bus, it was very early in the morning. There weren’t many people commuting at this time, but there were a few, including what looked like a dad and his two young kids. This little boy and his older sister were terrors; they were running up and down the aisle, yelling, causing mischief and obviously bothering the other quiet passengers on the bus. Needless to say, it was annoying, mainly because the dad just sat there, doing nothing. He did not intervene with his kids, it looked like he didn’t even notice them bumping into other people. Finally, one of the passengers spoke up and asked the dad to get control of his kids. The dad quickly apologized, admitting he hadn’t noticed the extent of the commotion and we onto explain: He and his family were traveling home from the hospital where they had been for the past 48 hours. His wife, the children's mother, had just unexpectedly passed away and he wanted his kids to be able to enjoy themselves for a bit, knowing what the road ahead would look like for all three of them.
Stories humanize people and force us to see situations beyond our point of view. Cyberbullying is a very real problem. As both Shane and Monica claim, oftentimes we wait to intervene until it is too late. Digital citizenship is more than just typing emails with proper grammar or citing some YouTube video correctly. It is realizing that the internet is composed of people, real people with real stories. With that in mind, I, again, commit myself to be the best digital citizen I can be.
References
TED. (2013, March 8). "To This Day" ... for the bullied and beautiful | Shane Koyczan [Video file]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa1iS1MqUy4
TED. (2015, March 20). The price of shame | Monica Lewinsky [Video file]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_8y0WLm78U
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