Blog #27: Reflect on today’s experience

Today we began discussing our new Annotated Bibliography essay assignment. We read an article about cyberbullying in class today. Everyone read a paragraph. Some people had trouble reading some of the words because there were some hard words in the article. Mostly the author was saying that writers should be careful because some people might use their words against them. The author had lots of examples including using cell phone texting, blogging, emailing, etc to hurt someone by a variety of ways including copying a private message and making it public, or pretending to be someone else.
This article was a response to the Megan Meir story where the kid’s mom pretended to be a 13 year old boy and pretended to be interested in going to the prom with Megan. This whole pretend issue came up because Megan had made some other 13 year old girl upset somehow and her mommy decided to get back at Megan for her little girl. Turns out, Megan had some depression issues and when Mommie’s pretend person dumped Megan, Megan committed suicide.
The most interesting issue here is that the state that Megan and Mommie were living in didn’t have any cyberbullying laws so California had to take the case and charge Mommie with 3 charges of fraud. Apparently Mommie built a MySpace page pretending to be someone (the boyfriend) who didn’t exist. As a result, Mommie was found guilty of fraud but not cyberbullying – only because there is no such crime as of yet.
This article was in response to the no cyberbullying law and the attempt of Democrats to create such a law. The author didn’t believe that cyberbullying should be an issue for the government. He believes it should be an issue of morality.
The author argued that there are only 2 ways to control people – either through morality or physical strength. It was his opinion that laws are just efforts of physical strength taking over and controlling people’s behavior.