I wish I could remember the name of the made-for-television movie that ended with the bullied teenage girl holding the microphone at an all-school assembly defending herself and effectively saying “shame on you” to all the bullies who had harassed her and the many other bullying victims at her school. In the movie, the act served to empower not only the protagonist but also all of the other victims. Today, real-life heroines and heroes who have been victimized by bullies don’t need a school assembly, nor do they need to develop public speaking skills. The victims now have an excellent platform online on which they can defend themselves with valor.
Yes, I am actually talking about Formspring. Youth advocates and the media have been keeping a close watch on Formspring. By allowing users to post anonymous questions and comments to someone’s active Formspring account, a lot of the bullying that once happened offline has moved online and Formspring has become a significant cyber-bullying hub. Across the print and online world, one finds no shortage of writers firing off warnings to parents about the dangers of Formspring and encouraging these parents to protect their tweens and teens from the toxic allure of this emerging social networking jaugernaut.
Formspring has received a significant amount of bad press because it enables cyber-bullying. But there is more going on than merely cyber-bullying. What normally gets missed in these assessments is how Formspring empowers the victims to fight back. This important part of the story is only recently coming to light.
Before I proceed, I am aware that I am at great risk of being misunderstood. So I need to clearly state my position on some key issues. First, all forms of bullying and harassment including cyber-bullying are wrong. Second, teens and tweens need to be educated on just how wrong these behaviors are and how much real damage these behaviors cause. Victims of bullying and harassment suffer greatly and the most vulnerable go as far as committing suicide. Third, laws and school policies are woefully behind in addressing the problems and challenges that emerge as a result of the changes brought on by rapidly emerging technologies such as social networking. There need to be clear punitive consequences for bullying and harassment so that the victimizers will face justice and would-be victimizers will be deterred. And lastly, I realize that some teens and tweens will be so challenged by the online bullying that the empowerment this platform offers cannot offset for them the additional harm it enables their tormentors to inflict.
With that said, I believe most teens are savvier than we give them credit. Reading a recent blog post by Danah Boyd who researches youth online, I learned that Formspring staff now know that “a number of vicious questions were posted by the Formspring account owners themselves.” Is this rare? I don’t think so. Formspring cannot measure this behavior precisely because they can only observe it when the account owners post the “anonymous” messages to their own account when logged in. Logged off, the anonymous messages are even anonymous to Formspring. But the numbers are large enough that Boyd rules out hacking as a reasonable explanation.
It did not take me too long to find my own anecdotal proof of this seemingly self-harassing behavior. On the Formspring page of Brenda, a freshman at Hermes High School, a long raging post degrading her for having “huge, ugly, sagging nipples” appeared. (My version is much, much cleaner than the actual.) However, the person who wrote the post failed to notice that she hadn’t clicked the box to make the raging post anonymous. It was Brenda who wrote the cruel post, answered it and then published it to her own Formspring page.
Why would Brenda or any teen do something like that? Boyd suggests three reasons: A cry for help, a way to look cool, and a way to invite complements. Certainly, there are probably some self-harassers who are publishing such posts as a cry for help. As well, I have certainly observed that any time a teen publishes a particularly derogatory post, favorable posts (most of them not anonymous) soon follow. And lastly, Boyd correctly points out that teens can look quite fly (fly is the new word for cool) simply being un-intimidated enough to publish even the cruelest words that arrive on Formspring.
But I see something deeper. The words Brenda published were carefully crafted. I think they were meant to sound like someone in particular. Perhaps Brenda was even quoting the exact words that had been directed at her in the girls’ locker room. Using the anonymity of Formspring, I think Brenda and others like her e-personate their real or assumed offline tormentors and thereby create a platform where they can defend themselves and effectively say “shame on you” to gossips and bullies who may never have done any actual cyber-bullying. And on Formspring it is there for everyone to see. Brenda might have had even one more item on her agenda. She might have wanted the post to draw boys’ attention to her chest so that they could draw their own conclusions. The point to take away is that Formspring gives account holders (especially savvy, creative teens) a huge amount of power to influence how they are viewed. Account holders can delete the posts they do not want published and answer the posts they do want published, even if they need to author the anonymous posts themselves.
For parents who want to protect their teens and tweens, requiring them to shut down their Formspring accounts may be the right decision or it may merely take away the best defense they have against the gossips and bullies. For most teens and tweens, I think it would be the latter. Merely having a Formspring account is a way for victims like Brenda to say to every bully and would-be bully “bring it on” and in my mind that is pretty darn fly.
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