Emotional Disconnect
This article is one of the many that discuss the multitude of ways people on the internet like to invalidate bullying trauma. Each of these articles of ONLINE center around one major argument I have personally witnessed being used in order to discredit the very real struggles that people with trauma from bullying face on a daily basis.
no emotions.
The Internet allows people to do things without any consequences — or at least that’s what they try to make you believe. Even though we have been using the Internet on a regular, everyday basis for several decades at this point, we still fail to realize that what you put on the World Wide Web will have its implications on the real-life you as well. The screen grants us the possibility to feel protected and unseen in our actions, no matter the ways we exploit the system. This is one of the biggest issues we deal with in regards to online abuse and cyberbullying.
During my time, I have encountered numerous examples of people using this one particular argument in defense of online abuse; an argument that is so void of any emotional connection to one’s actions that it still baffles me to this day.
“I do whatever I want to do on the internet, and I don’t feel any emotions about it.”
There are many reasons as to why someone might feel this way, but without getting into the realm of discussing sensitive topics like mental illnesses in relation to internet strangers, I do want to put one hypothesis out there. In my eyes, this kind of rhetoric is born from the ancient idea that what happens on the internet, stays on the internet, because it is not real life. Back when I first entered the online world, it was extremely common for us to refer to our lives outside of the internet with the acronym IRL. We did not discuss this part of our existence with anyone, we only mentioned it when it was out of a necessity to separate the two entitites — your online persona and your actual self. However, things haven’t been this way in a very long time: when social media became a daily friend to our lives, the border between the Internet world and the real world crumbled. Based on my personal evaluations, it is not fair or realistic to treat the Internet with the same kind of dismissiveness in today’s social climate. So many of our everyday activities take place on the Internet now, things that are by all definitions elements of our IRL experiences. The screen is simply not the same kind of border between the two realities as it used to be at some point.
You can watch me work on the illustration present in this article and listen to me talk more about cyberbullying and online safety on my most recent YouTube video. Keep Amanda Todd’s legacy alive by clicking this link or watching the video in the embed below!
When we make the mistake of reinforcing these problematic ideas how cyberbullying isn’t real or it’s the victim’s fault for being bothered by the abuse they’re subjected to, we also end up reinforcing the cycle of violence. Sure, there are some people who are only able to do what they do online, people who don’t engage in violent behavior outside of the Internet, but we should not put our trust in this assumption. If we don’t help not only the victims but the abusers themselves, they will only continue on with their abuse and sooner or later, they will make the shift into the real world instead of hiding behind an online username. This is a risk that exists in every case of cyberbullying, one that has been documented to happen in cases of the victims committing suicides. The emotional disconnect between the Internet and the real world is a dangerous fallacy to fall in, and if we don’t call it out when it’s necessary, we will never improve as a society.
Obviously, there isn’t much we can do to make people like this realize that they should, actually, feel some type of way about their actions and their consequences. If you don’t care about other people, you don’t care about other people. But when looking at the bigger picture, in my eyes, the biggest problem is the overarching narrative that we have surrounding cyberbullying. The way we talk about it makes people not to want to take it seriously. If we chose to uncover all the dirty and disturbing details of online abuse, maybe the perspective would change. That’s what I am aiming for with this CHAPTER, at least.
Don’t let yourself be fooled by the screen you’re typing on. As cliched as it sounds, there is a real person reading your comments, at the end of the day, and by treating each other with basic human decency, we will achieve greater things than we would by choosing to be insufferable assholes instead.
Remembering Amanda,
ichigonya