The Adventures of Formspring... and Cyberbullying.

This week we briefly covered the topic of cyber bullying during presentations. Cyber bullying is a complete breach of privacy, which unfortunately has become a common fear for American teenagers and adolescents. Due to the fact there will always be newer technology emerging that makes different kinds of communication quicker and easier, children will always use their involvement with such mediums as social networking sites to say things they would never ordinarily say to people's faces. Cyber bullying is extremely cruel, it can either happen between two people or it can occur between a large group of people due to the fact these sites make every aspect of life public. This adds to the humiliation that these victims feel. Formspring makes this bullying ten times easier, formspring is a website attached to someone's facebook that allows anonymous questions to be asked to the owner or the facebook.
The anonymous aspect is what gets this site into trouble, people can post disgusting questions and posts to hurt a classmate and get way with it. Formspring has also been known to experience quite a bit of hacking using IP addresses. This allows people to further disguise their identity when attacking others online. Formspring is a very dangerous tool to give to students or children in middleschool because it can misused and have serious emotional damage on its victims. Formspring reminds me a lot of the campus anonymous web directory, Juicy Campus, which was very popular in 2007.
Juicy campus allowed people to anonymously post anything or any stories on this site for people to comment. Of course the medium started out to be a fun way for college students to share crazy times, it quickly flourished into a site covered in awful anonymous posts bashing college girls and humiliating them over the internet. The site had to be closed down due to recent suicides because of its existence. This is a huge concern due to the over zealous amount of suicides recently due to bullying. The first time I saw a formspring last year, people from my old high school were posting humiliating questions to this girl and openly mocking her on her own website. I remember being amazed at how calmly she answered these questions. I discussed it with her the next time I saw her and immediately asked why she would start this site and put herself out in the open with such mean people on the internet. She commented that some posts were mean but some brightened her day. I do not know why anyone would leave this site up for people to analyze and criticize her as a person. I also think it is a very vain site to have.
Formspring has the possibilities to leave a lot of damage on our young generation. Previous generations did not have the exposure to this technology like we do so we can not even guess the potential impact this anonymous site may have.