My first encounter with the use of technology as a tool for bullying was the all popular crank call. In the days where caller ID didn't exist and it took a subpoena and 20 minutes of "keeping him on the line" to trace a call, crank calling was a wonderfully entertaining activity for us middle school boys to have fun with a kid in the classroom who we didn't like or to find a way to just hear one of the little girls in our class giggle at the "is your refrigerator running" jokes that pervaded the crank calls of those days. Initially, crank calls were just funny, not mean, and while often directed towards some unwitting classmate who we might not have liked the best, it was rarely geared towards being hurtful.

The next crossroad where technology and bullying briefly met, was in media. Newspaper reporters for generations before had made a living breaking news stories which nobody else had. It was incumbent upon reporters to uphold the trust of the public by being honest and reporting information accurately and without bias, but it was also necessary for them to sometimes be aggressive like detectives, digging deeper into issues like government corruption until the real truth emerged for them to report. In the 1920s a reporter uncovered a botched investigation by the Wineville California police department, where the local police tried to show that they recovered a missing boy by presenting a runaway to his grieving mother. While the mother fought back her natural intuition which told her that the replacement child was not her real son, the Wineville police posed for newspaper photos lauding them for their fine work. Meanwhile, the real missing child was being held by a child killer who, unpursued by police, was massacring young children on an isolated ranch in the desert. It was the press who finally helped the mother uncover the real story, but this required aggressive persistence by a reporter who had to fight city hall for the real story. As media has evolved, the advent of aggressive reporters has become prolific. Each one is trying to outdo the one before him or her, pushing everyone from government officials to bank executive to even judges themselves to answer to their public.

Television evolved further however when reality TV began taking hold. Now it was suddenly a form of entertainment to confront or embarrass someone. From Temptation Island, where scantily clad women try to draw men away from their fiancees, to American Idol where brutally honest judges tell people to their face that their dreams of being a singer are a complete joke. There is so much reality television on the airwaves today that the lines between entertainment, news, reporting and documentaries has been blurred.

Also concurrent with the advent of reality television is of course the ubiquitousness of both the internet and digital imaging. Virtually every handheld communication device contains a camera. Our phones, our computers, our iPODS all have cameras and they all upload images to the internet. Additionally, social networking has made the posting and sharing of these images a part of every day life. Some may remember a day when you went to visit a friend and you were unexpectedly forced to sit and watch six carousels of slides from their family vacation to Florida or Hawaii. All of this has been replaced by a virtually instant uploading of what is happening that very second. I couldn't believe it in fact, when the news came that one of my cousins had just given birth again and 4 hours later I still hadn't been bombarded with photos.

If we look at the convergence of technology and of culture, on the ever present tendency that children will have to bully each other, you see a ripe opportunity for a new type of bullying to emerge which pits the instantaneous, prolific, creative and effective communications tool that is the internet against a culture that asks for aggressive pursuit of information and the reality that everyone's "profile" must be public. Couple that with the ability to be completely anonymous (at least in our perception) on the internet, and the opportunity for going overboard is far greater than if we were just in hand to hand combat on the school yard. Furthermore, the power of online bullying and the fragility of a child's reputation in the eyes of her peers, makes traditional bullying more powerful. Children may be bullied at school as before, but children realize now that it can become a mob mentality, instead of viewing it as an isolated action by a child who is on the fringe. Children traditionally did not gang up against other children unless they had a common thread. In other words, a group of tough boys might have ganged up on a "weaker" boy, but it was not common for children who had an unrelated reason for joining in to do so. Part of this comes from the opportunity presented for power, when children can join in on bullying that was started by someone else. The targets also realize that bullying at school may end up online. This is a big fear for children today and parents need to realize it. Children know how to find things on the internet, so it is often only a matter of time before the opinion that they have heard at school, ends up on someone's MySpace page. Even after more than 20 years of the internet being part of our daily lives, we still have a very difficult time realize that things that we see on television and read on the internet are not necessarily true. Something about seeing something imprinted through the media makes the sting of bullying much harder to forget or overlook.

But one more ingredient to this already dangerous mixture has added an insidious danger and it is that ingredient that I believe has really put the culture that our children are living in over the edge.

That ingredient is stress and the resulting frustration from stress.